Ouch!

I know, I know it sucks to feel soreness or pain, especially if you do dance or some other physical activity. I’ve been fortunate to not have any serious dance-related injuries. But sore knees and ankles have been a regular complaint of mine over the past couple of years. I guess it’s not a surprise considering the numbers of hours I spend dancing in a week, and that’s increased over the years too, which explains why there is pain more often. That, along with growing and more recently, with online dancing at home on a hard floor during all our Melbourne lockdowns.

A tip I can give is, don’t push through pain and let it rest sometimes. I am really bad at following this advice, but it is really important to look after your body. It is not worth dancing through pain and putting yourself at risk of getting injured. It’s better to rest it for a bit and heal, and then be able to move as freely as you want after that. I’m lucky that I have wonderful teachers that support me in listening to my body.

When you’re not feeling pain, things you can do to try and help lessen soreness is to do rolling and foot exercises. It can be pretty boring to do these so sometimes I do these while watching a movie or browsing my phone. Rolling helps to massage your muscles and foot exercises help to increase strength.

My dance physio told me something very interesting about our brains. When we feel pain, it is because our brain is sending a ‘pain signal’ through our body to tell it to hurt so that we ease off whatever we are doing and don’t injure ourselves. So that just proves that you shouldn’t ignore pain. Listen to what your brain and body is telling you.