Article written by Will Beck – Physiotherapist at Performance Medicine Melbourne
Dancers are no strangers to injury. Spend long enough training intensely or performing, and
sooner or later the demands placed on the body can begin to catch up with you. For most
dancers, injury means reducing their training load, focusing heavily on rehabilitation and being
forced to take time away from work or study – all of which can take a physical and mental toll.
After weeks, months and sometimes years of focused conditioning to recover from a complex
injury, how can you be sure that you are ready to return to the stage?
That question is not easy to answer. Every dancer is unique: they have different strengths and weaknesses, train in different styles and are taught by different people. Most importantly, no two injuries are ever truly the same. As such, it is almost impossible to predict exactly how the body will respond to its first return to full choreography. From the outside, jumps can look explosive, control can appear effortless and full flexibility may have returned. Beneath the surface, however, there may still be subtle compensations that could increase the risk of further injury.
Force plates can help fill in some of these gaps. In essence, they are little more than highly sensitive scales. They do not replace clinical judgement or decide when a dancer is ready to perform. Instead, they provide objective information about how force is produced, how evenly it is distributed and how effectively it is absorbed when a dancer makes contact with the floor. For dancers and clinicians, this information can be invaluable when determining whether a normal-looking movement is being performed normally – and whether a dancer who feels ready to return is truly ready.
How high can you jump?
Jump height is one of the clearest and most accessible ways to measure a dancer’s rehabilitation progress. As dancers rebuild their strength and conditioning, they may become more capable of producing force and, as a result, jumping higher. Given the prevalence of explosive movements in dance, jump height can be a useful measure of someone’s readiness to return. However, it is really only the final note in a piece of music. It tells us the outcome of the movement, but not how that outcome was produced.
Behind every jump, there are numerous measurements to analyse. Depending on the style, choreography and demands a dancer is returning to, some may be more important than others. How quickly force can be produced may be particularly relevant for someone performing rapid petit allegro or quick tap sequences. By contrast, the total force produced across the take-off may be more relevant during grand allegro, grand jetés or explosive travelling jumps.
Even two dancers returning to the same style of dance may have very different physical requirements. After all, no two dancers are the same. Although they may work in the same discipline, dancers are trained at different academies, taught by different teachers and exposed to different choreography. At a physiological level, they also vary in body size, strength, flexibility and athletic capacity. These differences can influence their performance, their rehabilitation and the way their bodies respond to the demands of dance.
How can Force Plates be applied?
Australian-born Royal Ballet principal dancer Steven McRae ruptured his Achilles tendon onstage in 2019. Over the following two years, he completed a rigorous rehabilitation programme before returning to the stage in Romeo and Juliet in 2021. Despite successfully returning to the demands of performance and his intense training schedule, he sustained an anterior cruciate ligament injury during another performance two years later.
These two significant injuries demonstrate how demanding a professional dance career can be, even for an experienced performer supported by an extensive rehabilitation team. Speaking to The Guardian, McRae described his recovery as an opportunity to experience the crossover between art, sport, science and medicine.
It is within this crossover that force plates can find their place. They provide an accessible way for dancers and clinicians to monitor strength, power and physical recovery following injury. They are not a replacement for rehabilitation, thorough assessment, or an experienced healthcare team. Nor can they prevent every future injury alone. However, they can help guide rehabilitation, inform individualised training programmes and provide another source of information when considering a dancer’s readiness to return.
For force-plate testing to be meaningful, the dancer and clinician must work together to understand the demands of the choreography and identify the measurements most relevant to the individual. The goal is not simply to produce better numbers in a clinic, but to ensure that improvements in testing translate into a safer, more confident and more sustainable return to performance.
If you are interested in understanding more about your body symmetry, how you can use it more efficiently or are returning from an injury, discuss force plates with your physiotherapist. Performance Medicine offers force plate assessments for dancers in their Melbourne clinic, book an appointment today.
Ausdance VIC members receive 10% off their assessment. Simply include your Ausdance VIC member number when booking to redeem the discount.