PS: I am officially tired now. I think my legs might just, like, fall off after conditioning class tonight.
Category Archives: fitness
&*@# Detraining
So there is a phenomenon that is called detraining.
It’s what happens when first you train your body—whether through the conscientious application of strength and aerobic workouts or as a byproduct of being the kind of wacko who spends all his time in ballet class—and then find yourself forced to sit on your duff for a while.
In case you’re wondering, the better part of 7 weeks (roughly a month of illness followed by about three weeks on break) will do ya just fine.
So, as of yesterday, my schedule is back in full swing now (well, except for the fact that we’re having a snow day today). Wednesday began with Killer Class (not as killerific as usual, but even a mild Killer Class is still pretty killtastic). Next came two hours of attempting to teach some pretty athletic choreography to some Dance Team kids, then a quick break to stuff a burrito in my face. I got to the aerials studio early, so I spent roughly 30 minutes of dancing because there was music and I couldn’t sit still. Then came Trapeze 3 (during which I admitted to myself and to everyone else that I am hella weak right now), chased with a nice shot of Acro 2 (during which I attempted to both base and fly everything).
Today, perhaps unsurprisingly, significant portions of my body feel rather like they might be full of the kind of fine grit one sees on sandpaper. I suppose I should be grateful that it hasn’t reached the “My Body Is A Bag of Ground Glass” point on the DOMS scale, though (also, I’m pretty sure it’s not going to, so hallelujah to that).
Anyway, this sucks (#FirstWorldProblems, I know), and I’m feeling whiny (because we dancers are super tough until we aren’t), so you get to read about it.
That said, it’s good to be back, so to speak.
~
In other news, Killer Class got a new boy. He’s quite good and actually very nice, so of course I immediately did not think to ask him if he, for example, has a name.
Now he is cursed to be New Boy forever, which could be problematic, because yesterday we automatically turned into Team Ballet Boys and if we continue to be Team Ballet Boys, we should probably know each-others’ names at least.
All told, I have few complaints about yesterday’s Killer Class. It wasn’t a great class for me, but the way in which it wasn’t great was very much the way one expects when one hasn’t been in class in ages and ages and ages. I felt weak, but it wasn’t like I had forgotten how to dance. I just wasn’t strong enough to do things as well as I usually do.
Turns went well, though. We used them both in our adage and, of couse, for terra-a-terre. My doubles not only have not abandoned me, but are much better now that I’m not A) flinging the baby or B) leaving my hips behind(1).
- My new rule for turns and partnering: during turns and lifts, I pretend that my torso is basically a block of wood from the bottom half of the ribs down; that way I don’t bend in places where I shouldn’t. It’s a mental visualization thing that keeps me from detaching at the navel(2).
- I mean, not literally detaching at the navel. That would be, erm, messy.
Now I just need to stop anticipating the spot. I’ve realized that one of my problems, turns-wise, is that I don’t leave my head behind until it needs to turn and then whip it around, I do this crazy thing where I’m somehow starting off that way, but then whipping my head around early so it’s actually ahead (no pun intended :{) of the rest of the turn. WTF, head?
Anyway, terre-a-terre was basically, “Turns, followed by turns, followed by even more turns.” (Though, in fact, it began with B+, step right, developpé avant, developpé avant. There was also a piqué arabesque in there somewhere.) So that was nice.
New Boy and I started out as two thirds of the first group, then ran back around to repeat the first side. No one followed us back around, so we wound up at the back of the line on the second side, and then the class sorted itself into Team Professionals (Dancers & Doctors), Team Tall Girls en Pointe, and Team Ballet Boys.
Also, I remembered both my Garmin Vivofit and my heart rate monitor strap yesterday. The hilarious outcome of this breakthrough in planning was that I noticed, to my great puzzlement, that my heart rate was significantly higher during adagio than during either terre-a-terre or jumps.
Then I realized that ultimately boiled down to one thing:
you guys, it really helps to breathe.
Break (Almost) Week; Reflections on Renversés and Choreography as a Process
Saturday, I spent four hours teaching, several more hours scraping paint, and two hours composing choreography before we went to a party that was actually very fun. Sunday, after acro and Acro Brunch, I spent an hour running choreography, then another hour teaching, and then untold æons (with, so really an hour and change, maybe two) standing on a ladder and painting the house while my hands froze in a chill wind in spite of my gloves(1).
- Note to self: wear winter cycling gloves next time. They’re wind-resistant.
As such, I opted to stay in this morning, do housework, and take evening class instead) even though I should really get back to doing Modern Mondays).
The piece I was working on Saturday evening and a Sunday is essentially a 5-minute long comedic story ballet set to the 2nd movement (adagio cantabile) of Beethoven’s Pathétique. I programmed in a few renversés, and I realized while I worked the piece that not so long ago I wouldn’t have even thought of them. They just wouldn’t have occurred to me.
BW and JP have really tuned up our renversés this semester, and as such they seem perfectly natural now. I put them in more or less by instinct where the music calls for them and the movement leads to them.
This is, in fact, true of a lot of movements in the classical vocabulary. Many things feel perfectly natural now that wouldn’t have a year ago.
I think I’ve discussed my tendency to get get to the studio and instantly forget every step I’ve ever learned, then devolve upon programming a bunch of piqué turns and ronds-de-jambe (sometimes while thinking, “How do I get to the jumps?! Ack!”). I also used to open every adagio piece with essentially the same sequence of développés and adagio turns that open Simon Crane.
Somewhere along the line, that seems to have changed.
This surprised me. Ballet is funny like that. It creeps up on you, and one day you discover that you are far more fluent in its language than you thought.
As a caveat, I must admit that I don’t know if it works this way for people who are genuinely new to dance. I think it might take a little longer in the situation, possibly. For me, the vocabulary was there but largely dormant; I could picture a dance, but when I tried to essentially run dance.exe to execute the dance, it was as if I couldn’t access the necessary files and code.
Taking class again for the better part of three years has apparently done a great deal of hard disk repair, kicking out the bad sectors and improving the connections between the good ones. The dynamic link libraries are once again accessible; the modules of code that create renversés and cabrioles are no longer in the land of File Not Found (double cabs continue to elude me: goal one for 2017, I guess; double tours are probably goal two).
When I go to create a piece that’s floating around in my head, I rarely lose the piece anymore. The vision and the finished dance usually match pretty well. I still mostly work phrase by phrase — visualizing, iterating, visualizing, iterating, then moving to the next phrase when the current one one seems solid, then eventually stringing them together into parts and finally stringing the parts together into a dance — but that may simply be my work style.
It also really helps to be able to remember the names of things. Makes writing them down much easier. The downside, though, is that I can now stay up till 1:30 AM listening to music and writing out choreography, knowing that in the morning it will still make sense. Or maybe that’s another upside, because it’s not like choreography didn’t keep me awake before. It just rarely turned out to be particularly intelligible in the cold light of day(2).
- Seriously, while working with BB, I have actually said things like: Why did I just write “effacé” there?! Éffacé what?! How? What does that mean? …Did I even mean éffacé? … Wait, I don’t think I meant éffacé.
So I’m pleased to say that this current piece, which I’ll be performing on 9th December if I can convince a couple of people to join me (there’s a second, far less technical dancing part and one brief non-dancing part), is not just a sequence of RDJs and random turns (it has arabesques, penchés, faillis, renversés, double turns, sautés arabesques, tours lent, and some other stuff, not to mention a grand allegro chase scene in the middle). Progress!
In other news, this week will largely be a break week, which means I’ll have time to catch up on household minutiae and start rehearsing “Work Song,” possibly, if everyone is available. After tonight, both dance team and ballet are off until next week. This will be a good week for reconditioning. You guys, I am weak. Between vacation and being sick, I have lost a lot of strength and stamina.
So it’s back to eating for performance (with, of course, occasional digressions into the realm of pure pleasure) and training for … Erm, also for performance.
And housework, because adulting never ends.
Edit: PS – Señor BeastMode would probably like me to remind you that:
Renversé is not a turn.
Friday Class: Moar Bolshoi; Less Balanchine
This morning’s class resulted in a deeply satisfying ballet conversation.
I received a specific note on my grand jeté — it basically went, “Everyone else: try for more up. Asher — you’ve got plenty of up, but there’s a little hitch at the top. Try to travel more.”
As is my habit, I summed this up — out loud, of course, because I’m a kinaesthetic learner, so the doing part of saying something helps — in an aphorism I’d be likely to remember:
Oh! More Bolshoi; less Balanchine. I keep putting too much Balanchine* into it.
One of my classmates, who teaches in Georgetown and makes quite a long trek several times a week, happened to be standing next to me and heard me and said, “Well, you’ve got the Bolshoi body.”
And my insides went:
Shamelessly ganked from memegenerator.net, of course.
Fortunately, my brain was working and I had the good grace to say, “Oh, thank you! I’ve been working on it!”
She then commented specifically on my “powerhouse” legs, and I said, “Yeah, I always felt weird about them until I saw a picture of Nijinksy, and then I was like, ‘Oh, well … okay.'”
Her reply? “And Nureyev!” (followed by some more specific details that were lost in the haze of being compared to Nureyev, because seriously, how often does that happen in the life of any danseur ignoble?).
And my insides went:
Shamelessly stolen from the internet at large.
And then, apparently because I was in a good mood, I did the grand jetés beautifully on the repeat, and proceeded to do beautiful pas des chats Italiens (if you’re wondering what these look like, here’s a good video; maybe I should get Denis to record mine) and very serviceable grand assemblés en tournant after class, apparently just because I could?
This all came on the heels of a class that started out as a disaster (I just could. not. fall asleep last night, and then when I finally did [at 4 freaking 30 AM] I had this cinematically intense dream about being part of a resistance force attempting to throw off the shackles of a seriously oppressive, repressive totalitarian regime … basically, like the Death Eaters meet Sauron meet the Empire). Everything was going badly because I was feeling bad; accordingly, I felt worse and did worse.
Then, in the middle of barre, we all cracked up about something, and I realized that it wasn’t just me — we were all a mess; none of us could count or tendu or remember a combination to save our lives (even the phenomenal Ms. J was having trouble remembering her own combinations!).
Suddenly, the mood of the whole class lifted, and then we all did better, which basically says everything about how powerful our minds are.
By the time we got to rond-de-jambes, I actually garnered a “good!” (which is saying something, Ms. J is probably the single pickiest instructor on staff — which is, of course, why we love her. Also because she is really good at sorting out things like heads: apparently, today, I more rolling my eyes towards my hand than turning my head, heh).
I have done better adagio, better turns, and better terre-a-terre than I did today (and my petit allegro was summarily terrible), but it was still pretty good, and I managed to remember that ballet is all about moving the goal post — a year ago, I would’ve sacrificed a black goat at midnight to be able to do terre-a-terre like I did today. And I definitely wouldn’t have had beats — even lame ones — on just under four hours of sleep.
As far as I’m concerned, any day that includes good grand allegro, really good pas de chats Italiens, serviceable grand assemblés en tournant, and being compared to Nureyev (if only for my enormous thighs :P) is a damned fine day. I’ll take it.
This is probably something worth commenting on in the vein of body positivity.
I still struggle with my own body image sometimes. Not as much as I used to (which is to say: the struggle is no longer constant), but there’s a part of my brain that really believes that my body should basically be one of David Hallberg-ian dimensions.
Being compared to Nureyev cast things in a different light.
I still, somehow, think of my body as a big, square block. Now, there’s nothing wrong with being a big, square block — I actually happen to find the big, square block body type very attractive.
It’s just that my brain is weird and experiences this tension between two parts of itself: one part that’s still going, “WTF, we cannot stop being an ectomorphic stick figure, that does not compute!” and another part that’s going, “Yeah, but we’re a big square block, have you looked in the mirror lately?”
And then I see pictures like the ones from last night and realize that both those parts are cray, and then someone compares me to Nureyev and I think, “Huh. It would be totally cool to reach a point at which I’d be okay with being built like Nureyev; in fact, it would be crazy not to be okay with that.”
Likewise, part of me has historically been kind of weirded out by the fact that my upper body is really pretty far out on the ectomorph end of the scale, while my lower body is squarely, solidly (heh, see what I did there … o_o) in mesomorph territory. I could skip leg day for months on end and my legs would still be huge. It’s genetic; I got ’em from my Mom.
But Nureyev was built like that, too: slender above the navel, leonine below, all of it graceful.
I get that the weirdness in my brain that led me to starve myself when I was already below 120 pounds (even when I was 14 and weighed 84 pounds at 5’4″) might never figure this out.
But I’m learning to let the other parts of my brain speak.
The parts that think Nureyev was beautiful, and would be totally okay with that kind of build.
The parts that understand that my greatest asset as a dancer — the ability to leap like a gazelle with a cheetah on its tail — owes in no small part to the unusual combination of sylph-like upper half with heroic lower half.
The parts that understand that it’s these legs that can garner enough air to make a plain pas de chat look like it hangs suspended for seconds at a time (even though that’s totally not what’s actually happening); that it’s these legs that let me do pas de chats Italiens like they’re no big deal (regarding which: they’re apparently kinda hard?).
I say all this not to brag, but to try to convince myself: maybe this body is, in fact, kind of awesome in its own way. Maybe I can learn to feel that.
Now I’m going to eat some food and consider attempting to nap before maybe dragging my husband out to watch a movie about animated fish.
*If you’re wondering about this analogy: Balanchine’s style is characterized by a really strong emphasis on the vertical, while the Bolshoi’s dancers tend to be more fluid, lyrical, and lateral. Not that the guys at the Bolshoi don’t launch themselves into space during big leaps; they totally do — there’s just more traveling going on at any given time than would be typical in Balanchine.
Because of this, I try to channel the New York City Ballet for turns; the Bolshoi/Mariinsky/Vaganova universe for leaps. For jumps like pas de chat, I just try to channel Ben, who is my favorite of LBS’ male dancers.
As for Sissones … for some reason, my Sissones are so bad right now. I don’t have time to channel anyone; I’m too busy trying not to die.
Saturday Class: Not Half Bad…
…Just half mediocre?
The were good moments today, but it wasn’t a shining example of my best work.
It was, however, an opportunity for comparison.
A year ago, I think, things that seem mediocre now would’ve seemed pretty excellent. I realized this whilst kvetching about the fact that I kept switching the entrechat trois with the entrechat cinque in a combination; whilst internally taking myself to task about some turns that were decent, but not great*; whilst being irritated about my tour lent being a touch wobbly on the first run through the adage.
*You guys: all of a sudden, my turns are SO FREAKING SLOW — what happened?! Not that slow turns are always bad; it’s just when you’ve got, like, two beats for a double and two beats later you’re leaving out the next step because your double was like about how you’d imagine a kiddie ride at an amusement park called Grandma’s Nap Land, or a slow-mo clip, or something. It’s like someone turned the friction on my shoes up to 11.
I was a wreck at grand allegro, though. For some reason, my brain didn’t bother to video most of the combination; it recorded the audio instructions instead.
The instructions were:
Préparé
Glissade
Grand jeté
Glissade
Grand jeté
Glissade
Grand jeté
Failli
Piqué arabesque**
Chassé
Tour jeté
Chasse
Tour jeté LAND IN A BALANCE!!!
Tombe
Pas de Bourré
Glissade
Saut de Chat
**This kicked off a change of direction, if it’s not clear.
Buuuuuuut! The initial glissades traveled, erm, kinda diagonally. Otherwise the whole thing turned into a disastrous zig-zag, like a Mini-Demolition Derby Bumper Ballet ride (which they totally DO NOT have at Grandma’s Nap Land; Grandma says that is WAY too dangerous).
Which I somehow failed to grasp.
Fortunately, we are having air traffic control issues (how often does one get to say that’s a good thing?), and I wound up in the second group, so at least I didn’t collide with anyone while angrily yelling at my body about still trying to launch its glissades to the side. I just looked like an idiot, so, you know. Par for the course, eh?
I also kept wanting there to be more tour jetés, but I always want more of those, soooooooo…
We all also got a general correction on our arms with regard to tour jeté: apparently, our legs were all, AGRIPPINA VAGANOVA! while our arms were like OMG WE ARE FIREWORKS!
This correction included the memorable phrase, “You can do fifth opening to second or you can do this: *demonstrates the arms everyone likes to do with grand jeté* but make sure I can tell which one you’re going for.*
So I then proceeded to think about my arms. I’m not entirely sure that helped, but we all know the rule about thinking in ballet, anyway.
Except, like, sub in "thinking" and "ballet."
(Okay, so that rule isn’t 100% literally literal, obvs. It’s more like, Think with your body, not with your brain.)
So that was my day. That, a bike ride, and open fly. Which isn’t where you inadvertently expose yourself, but where you get to play around in aerial apparati until your arms won’t go anymore.
Oh, and I was totally that guy today: I demonstrated to Denis how I could do awesome pull-ups on the lyra while complaining that about how I was still convinced that I couldn’t do regular pull-ups.
Then he sent me over to the pull-up bar, where I totally did a freaking pull-up.
So that happened, too, I guess. No humble-bragging intended; I just kind of felt like an idiot (which goes with looking like one in ballet class, so…).
Ballet, Meet Cirque
Acro-Balancing tonight. It was fun, although quite challenging at times.
I discovered that being all legs makes mounting more challenging, but balancing easier when you’re the flyer. It makes being the base kinda weird sometimes — thigh stands are okay, but short arms and long legs makes a steep mount in foot bird or candlestick.
Ballet also makes a lot of it easier — if you have a good arabesque, you know how to use the muscles in your back for the foot bird.
This was just before Denis got wobbly on me. He thinks it's gorgeous; I, of course, notice that my feet could be more pointed, my legs aren't even, my neck is tense, my...
I also discovered that I can still do a tripod headstand forever and ever and do cool stuff with my legs during. I’ll have to see if I can get my handstands back. They are awesome for for stability and balance, and I think that would be handy (no pun intended, I swear) for partnering.
To Build A Birdhouse: Why “MyPlate” and All The Lifestyle Guides In the World Aren’t Enough
(Or, well, some of the reasons, anyway.)
I’ve been reading some really good articles about re-framing our cultural conversation around body size and, for once, reading the comments*, and I’ve discovered that, when it comes to talking about things like diet an exercise, many of us lose sight of one really critical idea:
Knowing about a thing isn’t the same
as knowing how to do that thing.
*You guys, deciding not to even look at the G-d-forsaken comments except in special cases has been one of the best decisions I ever made.
I repeat:
Knowing about a thing isn’t the same as knowing how to do that thing.
…And it really isn’t the same as knowing how to do that thing in a way that works for us, that feels good (which is far, far more important than we like to acknowledge), and that lets us keep doing it indefinitely.
If it was, a lot more of us would look exactly the way we want to look (within the limitations imposed by our genetic makeup, anyway — some of us build bigger muscles easily, some of us have long and elegant muscular insertion points, etc.).
Foam Roller, I Choose You!
So I just spent like an hour with my new best friend, the foam roller.
In the past, I’ve mostly just rolled my calves. Tonight I rolled errrrrrrrthang, then stretched, did shoulder stands and “air splits,” and then rolled errrrrrrrthang again. Even my back. Even my sides. Especially those weird hypertrophic glutei medii that are endemic to male ballet peeps. I even managed to roll my pyriformes (which really, really needed it). Okay, I didn’t think of how to roll my upper arms until just now, so I’ll have to do those in the morning. And my neck is out of scope for this roller, I think.
OMG, you guys, why haven’t I been doing this all along? Every part of my body feels better (and my foam roller only cost me $5!). Parts of me that I didn’t even know were sore feel better. It is like having a whole new body.
C’est tout. À bientôt, mes amis!
First World Ballet Problems
Yesterday, I struggled to get my développé to 90 degrees, let alone above. The muscles whose job it is to carry the legs just said, “90 is all you’re getting today, and you’re only getting it at the cost of immense effort.”
I blamed my lack of condition, of course — which was fair, but missed a critical element: the cross-training problem.
” Cross-training” means training until you’re feeling cranky and irritable, then kvetching at your poor innocent husband for no good reason.
Wait, that’s not right.
“Cross-training” means, in short, mixing it up to keep things balanced — tossing in a little cycling if you’re a dancer, or a little dance if you’re a cyclist.
The operative phrase, here, being “a little.” Or, well, “just enough.”
Last week, I banged out several hours on the bike, including a bunch of zippy climbing sprints, and basically none in the studio.
Should it come as any surprise, then, that I’ve managed to lose a bunch of the ground I had gained in correcting the muscle-balance problem attendant in being someone who, for several years, spent around twenty hours a week riding a bike and did essentially no cross-training?
I am lucky, in a sense, in that my body adapts very readily to exercise — but I tend to forget that, as in everything else, if I want the balanced muscles necessary for ballet, I need to make sure I’m not essentially overspending in one area while underspending in another (an aside, here: it says a great deal that autocorrupt — ahem, that is, predictive text — recognizes overspending as an existing word, but not underspending).
While a trained cyclist does make some use of the muscles that flex the thighs, it’s paltry in comparison to the use made of those that push down (I’ve touched on this before). Especially for someone like me — one who straddles the line between light rouleur and climber, and thus relishes his ability to crank out brutal speed on short- to medium-climbs — it’s all too easy to lose sight of how quickly that can add up to a disaster at the barre.
When I wrote yesterday’s post, I had forgotten that a couple of Saturdays back I was enjoying easy extensions well above 90 degrees even though my right hip was still weirdly tight. A couple of classes before that, I wrote about the fact that getting the leg higher made a promenade en dedans in écarté derriere (or was it avant? I’ll have to check that later) much easier — and when I said higher, I meant “hey, my toes are basically at shoulder-height right now!”
So basically, I’ve now created a situation in which I’ll need to overcome a muscle balance problem again, one which I’d sorted before.
In short, this means dancing more and riding less (and more gently; probably no more 20+MPH sprints on the rolling climbs for a while) — in short, shifting the balance back so I’m actually allowing cycling (which I do as a matter of course, although I love it) to act as cross-training for ballet (which may be the one thing I love more than cycling).
I’m not sure yet how to achieve this balance — or, well, the exact details elude me.
The “pushing down” muscles in the legs already get a greater workout in daily life (one word: stairs!) than the “pulling up” muscles (or the “pushing up” ones that lift from beneath the buttocks and thigh in ballet), so I need to take that into account.
Regardless, this is entirely a First World Ballet Problem. I recognize that it’s the result of something in my body actually working well (maybe too well), and I’m grateful for that (not that I feel grateful right now, but I’m rationally aware that this is a Good Thing). I also recognize that “développé at 90 degrees” is a goal that many adult dancers find elusive, and I shouldn’t complain too much.
Yet again, I’m reminded that ballet is a great analogy for life (tl;dr: It hurts, and there’s always someone yelling at you — wait, no, that’s not the analogy I wanted ;)). You have to work to keep everything balanced (and not just when your instructor hairy-eyeballs you and growls, “You know you can balance in passé relevé without the barre.”).
So, um, yeah. There we go.
I plan to write about this a bit more, as there are tons of articles out there that day,” Cross-training is good for you!” but not too many aimed at explaining how to figure out how much cross your training actually needs. I should probably Ask Denis about it and just post an interview. Maybe even a video.
Speaking of which, I have not forgotten that I owe all you guys a ballet video about balancé. I’m trying to figure out where to film it.
So that should be coming along soon, too.
Danseur Ignoble: Returning the Last Books
Yesterday, I went to Margie’s class, where we had 3 new dancers (one complete newbie, another with a dance-team background, and a third with extensive ballet experience who hadn’t danced in a long time. Margiesuggested that I do Tawnee’s class, but my calf is still regaining strength, so I opted for a “rehab” day.
l think intermediate-class-plus-bike-commuting probably calls for light exercise (maybe a walk?) on the following day to reduce soreness. l should, come to think of it, treat myself like I’d treat a horse on the mend – follow an over-fences or dressage day with light walk-trot hacking, probably on trails, possibly in-hand (that means leading, rather than riding, the horse). I probably wouldn’t turn me out in a field with my buddies yet on days off – too much risk of horseplay (they call it that for a reason) and re-injury.
So while I need the workout l get in Brienne’s class, I should be smarter about days off, so I won’t be sore as long. l should also probably wear a compression sleeve.
After class I purchased the last of Denis’ anniversary gifts (the only one that cost more than $7) and returned ny last lUS library books – my first visit to campus as a graduate, but also final undergrad business. That felt weird.
Margie and Taunee keep gently nudging me towards Tawnee’s class, so it looks like
Essentials Forevar! plan night, in fact, not happen. I do think my calf could use another week or two, though.
That’s it for now. It’s raining at last.
danseur ignoble 