Exercising Mindfully

One of my favorite authors, Eric Franklin wrote "Exercise is an ongoing dialogue between mind and body." Ever since I read his book "Conditioning For Dance", I've used that line many, many times in dance classes and in my Pilates classes. Most of the time, people view these things separately (I used to, but now I know better) and they don't get the most out of their workout.


It's important to be mindful when exercising because if you're conditioning for a specific sport (or dance), and you strengthen muscles in misalignment, you're strengthening the misalignment. As a dance teacher, most of the frustration from my students comes from working on pirouettes. They're hard. I'm not even going to lie. It took me almost six years to be able to do a triple pirouette. It's the most frustrating thing ever. While watching my students perform their turns, I'll tell them to calm down and tell them that trying to get more momentum is useless because they're out of proper alignment and they're only making it harder on themselves because of the movement pattern they were using. Strengthening the muscles in the coordination that you need them is more important to proper dance technique than most dancers realize.


Where the mind truly is a powerful thing is the power of positive thinking and imagery. If you were going to be performing (let's keep up with the pirouette reference) a pirouette and you were thinking that it's going to be hard and you can't do it. Guess what? You won't. If you calm down, imagine yourself performing it, feel yourself performing it, and you will. Blindly doing dance steps isn't going to make anybody a good dancer. Feeling where the movement comes from and where it should be coming from makes you a better dancer.