subject: Is Ballet Training Right For Male Athletes? [print this page] Is Ballet Training Right For Male Athletes?
Take a look at a male dancer in full flight across a theater stage. There you will find a perfect combination of strength, suppleness and stamina all packaged together with perfect control, balance, spatial awareness and unsurpassable kinaesthetic intelligence. The male ballet dancer has the power to perform explosive jumps and leaps many times in succession. He also has the strength to lift his female partner above his head and throw her about with ease and grace.What more does any male athlete from any discipline need as the ideal foundation on which to build their sporting skills? Whatever your sport the basic body skills needed are the same. An athlete from any sport needs highly developed core stability in order to execute any movement of the body. Without core strength balance and control will suffer. A male ballet dancer has this in abundance.Watch a male ballet dancer working at the ballet barre and you will see that ballet is all about being strong from those deep inner core muscles which are the foundation muscles of the human skeleton. If these are not strong then any movements of the arms and legs will be uncontrolled and weak.Men's Ballet training is undoubtedly the hardest and most rigorous athletic training of all. The regime of a ballet dancer, both male ballet dancers and female, involved working every muscle in the human body building strength and power whilst developing exquisite fine motor control at the same time. Quite a feat! A ballet dancer must train to keep this level up for a performance lasting three hours sometimes. This requires physical and mental concentration, huge amounts of stamina and endurance second to none!In 2008 Professor Tim Watson and Dr Andrew Garret compared the fitness of ballet dancers from the English National Ballet with the British Olympic Swimming Team. They measured the athletes on a range of fitness tests including strength, endurance balance, flexibility and psychological state. The Ballet dancers came out top in seven out of ten of the tests and were 25% stronger than the swimmers.Many sports coaches have realized the undoubted benefits that ballet training offers and now incorporate it into their athletes program. Football teams, rugby teams and cricket teams have all been taking ballet classes recently.And there is also another advantage to taking ballet classes. The male athlete also gets to listen to wonderful music and express his more spiritual side which can't be a bad thing at all!
