A quote from the link provided earlier

"Strength training, not weightlifting

For kids, light resistance and controlled movements are best — with a special emphasis on proper technique and safety. Your child can do many strength training exercises with his or her own body weight or inexpensive resistance tubing. Free weights and machine weights are other options.

Don't confuse strength training with weightlifting, bodybuilding or powerlifting. These activities are largely driven by competition, with participants vying to lift heavier weights or build bigger muscles than those of other athletes. This can put too much strain on young muscles, tendons and areas of cartilage that haven't yet turned to bone (growth plates) — especially when proper technique is sacrificed in favor of lifting larger amounts of weight."

So yea, lifting light weights is fine, no one is talking about a full on weight training routine, aka heavy bench press, heavy squats, heavy deadlift, etc. Lifting light dumbbells isn't weight training, similar to the difference between jogging and sprinting. The goal isn't larger amounts of weight, it's strengthening a range of motion in a safe way.

From what I said previously "
Two work them:

Horizontal push: bench press, dumbbell bench press, pushups
Horizontal pull: row variations, you can use a ballet barre to do this also.

Vertical push: overhead press, inverted pushups
Vertical pull: pullups or lat pulldown"

Options given for weighted and non-weighted exercises.

No one is advocating kids cleaning and jerking 100lbs, that's stupid. Lifting light weights, body weight exercises, resistance bands, AKA strength training is what we're talking about. Tons more stress is put on joints and bones by running and changing direction than by lifting 10 lbs overhead.

And you think all that is necessary for an 11-year-old girl to have good ballet arms? Because that's what this post is about in case you've forgotten.

If ballet dancers needed to weightlift in order to successful have nice looking arms in dance, don't you think every major dance school and company would have their female ballet dancers weight lifting/doing strengthening with weights? I've only ever seen males do this is preparation for pas de deux and it had nothing to do with his arms looking good when they moved.

Planks, modified push ups, tricep dips on a chair; those are exercises that you can do at home for free that will strengthen her entire body (especially her core) that are simple enough for an 11 year old to do if she is interested in doing them.

I don't know why she needs to do strength movements at all. She seems to be exhibiting the same problems the anyone new to ballet (young or old) would have without previous experience. The tired problem is probably from not being used to using her arms in such a manner and holding her carriage for an hour or more at a time. The sloppy movements either come from an unfamiliarity with port de bras and/or a tempo that is too fast (for her level).

If she were in a beginner class instead of intermediate/advanced these problems would lessen or go away completely.

Her ballet teachers have said she needed to strengthen her arms and gave no direction in how exactly she was to do that. Not knowing exactly what the extremely busy teacher wants led to my post because in gymnastics and diving which I am trained in I have found it all to easy to build bulky muscle in the arms of female students who are not on steroids with traditional strength training techniques. I am aware that bulk is bad for female ballerinas. I have found no real help on this thread or on this sight and will be closing my account due to harassment by panic on multiple threads.

FYI - having "strong arms" is about proper placement and technique - not about strength and musculature.

Maybe the instructor was simply sharing his/her observation with you about your daughter's arms? The best way to have strong ballet arms is to do lots of ballet. If the teacher has observed that the student needs stronger arms then s/he will direct the content of the class to assist in achieving the goal. I don't think anything extra needs to be done.

I have found no real help on this thread or on this sight and will be closing my account due to harassment by panic on multiple threads.

You have actually gotten good advice on this thread, and Panic isn't harassing you. You started this thread with one sentence and no other information so if you wanted more detailed advice it would have been helpful to include all the circumstances in your very first post. When you start a topic there are people that are going to agree, or disagree and some posts might miss the mark. So ignore the ones that aren't helpful...it's as simple as that.

I do teach ballet primarily to beginners 10 and up, and I'm a personal trainer. There is no reason an 11 year old should be lifting weights in my opinion. You can damage growth plates if the weight is too heavy. I do help run a fitness bootcamp for kids (which for age 11 is a lot of games) and have attended strength and conditioning training for my son who is a baseball player.

A ballet dancer isn't going to want to lift weights because you don't want harsh definition. A yoga studio by my house actually has a kid's class and I know a few dancers at our studio that attend. The biggest problem with beginning level kids in ballet is that they aren't engaging their back to help hold up their arms. I have incorporated resistance training in my technique classes with elastic fitness bands or tubing which help to strengthen, and tone. I use them for my senior citizens in place of weights for exercises, such as bicep curls and shoulder presses.

If your daughter is interested in resistance training I'd find a sports facility that specializes in kid's sports training so she's learning to do the proper technique. My gut feeling is if she has good ballet teachers she'll develop the strength in her arms and learn the proper muscles to hold them during exercises and her arms will hurt less without any extra strength specific exercises.

As a ballet teacher, I admit that I use the term " Strengthen your arms" when I really mean " No droopy chicken arms!".

Is it possible that the teacher is talking about the arms having the *look* of strong arms? Not muscular but lifted and held correctly?

Has your daughter asked her teacher for advice? I have had numerous students come to me for advice on how to become more flexible. I was horrified that they were stretching for 1+hours a day and stretching without warming up because they saw it on some stupid article on the website. I think your daughter should go talk to her teacher for advice on what the teacher recommends.

lift light weights and lots of reps and then occationally lift heavy (every two weeks) to push your limit up

hope this helps
tightanic

The American Academy of Pediatrics "Appropriate strength-training programs have no apparent adverse effect on linear growth, growth plates, or the cardiovascular system." It's fine if you don't like a certain type of training, but the growth plate myth has been around forever and is unsubstantiated. pediatrics.aappublications.org . . .

kenwoodman wrote:

The American Academy of Pediatrics "Appropriate strength-training programs have no apparent adverse effect on linear growth, growth plates, or the cardiovascular system." It's fine if you don't like a certain type of training, but the growth plate myth has been around forever and is unsubstantiated. pediatrics.aappublications.org . . .

NO ONE said ANYTHING about stunted growth. That was all in your head. No one dislikes weight training. Also all in your head. We said weight training wasn't necessary for an 11-year-old girl to have good ballet arms.

Just because it isn't detrimental doesn't mean it is necessary, especially not necessary to get good ballet arms. I had great ballet arms when I was 11, and I wasn't lifting weights. Mostly because good ballet arms come from the back anyway, not arm strength.

The growth plate is the last part of bones to harden which makes it more vulnerable to fractures which CAN cause problems like unequal bone length especially if youth are not properly supervised when lifting weights or lifting too heavy which is VERY common with young boys. An adolescent that lifts heavy weights is susceptible to straining muscles, as well as fraying their cartilage. Therefore, it is essential that children avoid lifting heavy weights at too young of an age.

According to American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine (AOSSM) 85% of growth plate injuries heal with no complications. The most frequent complication of a growth plate fracture is premature arrest of bone growth. The affected bone grows less than it would have without the injury, and the resulting limb could be shorter than the opposite, uninjured limb. If only part of the growth plate is injured, growth may be lopsided and the limb may become crooked.

Growth plate injuries at the knee have the greatest risk of complications. Nerve and blood vessel damage occurs most frequently there. Injuries to the knee have a much higher incidence of premature growth arrest and crooked growth.

Please don't insult me and say that growth plate injuries are a myth. The crux of your argument is "APPROPRIATE" strength training has no adverse affects. My point was an 11 year old shouldn't be lifting heavy weights because that isn't appropriate. Yes resistance bands, and strength training especially with body weight is fine. YOU CAN damage growth plates with heavy weight for an 11 year old which is why no certified professional or doctor would ever ever ever say it is okay to start a heavy regimen of weight training at this age because they aren't ready for it and many trainers don't have enough background on child development to understand what is safe and isn't.

ALL of this is moot anyway because the whole point of the argument is that you don't need any of that to help her arms in ballet which Panic has also said but is falling upon deaf ears. Ken do you teach 11 year old girls ballet? If not then you don't have any clue what will help the original poster.

Oh, I completely agree that this whole thread is essentially pointless.

kenwoodman wrote:

Oh, I completely agree that this whole thread is essentially pointless.

No, YOUR input has been completely pointless.

imadanseur wrote:



Ken do you teach 11 year old girls ballet? If not then you don't have any clue what will help the original poster.

So we'll take that as a no then shall we?

kenwoodman wrote:

Oh, I completely agree that this whole thread is essentially pointless.

Unless, of course, you're an eleven year old girl who is trying to improve your arms in which case there are some snippets of very good information here.

If on the other hand you're a a 30 year old man looking for some biceps help you're then all you need to do is read this.

kenwoodman wrote:


Lift weights, you'll only get bulky if you take steroids, lift 15+ hours a week and eat 4000+ calories a day. If getting big manly muscles was easy, I'd have them by now.

or this

kenwoodman wrote:

Start her on a basic strength program with higher (12-15) reps. Even the Mayo Clinic say this is fine. mayoclinic.com . . .

To be frank, I wouldn't put too much worth into what most ballet instructors say about weight training or cross training, they've been behind the curve of sports training by at least 20-30 years. Most of their dislike of it comes from really old beliefs (sometimes more than 100 years old or older) about how if you do anything but dance you'll get huge and immobile. Furthermore, Marcia Dale Weary of CPYB (arguably the best ballet school in the nation) says that kids nowadays are in worse shape (due to general inactivity outside of the studio) and it makes them harder to train, so extra exercise (AKA cross training) would be a good thing.

As for fixing technique, this isn't the board, I assume that people are doing things correctly and answered the question assuming as much. If there had been any indication that it was a child as opposed to the poster that needed the training I would have said essentially what I just did with the Mayo Clinic link attached.

For general upper body strength there are really two planes of motion you need to train, horizontal push/pull and vertical push/pull, other stuff is great, but these are the basic two.

Two work them:

Horizontal push: bench press, dumbbell bench press, pushups
Horizontal pull: row variations, you can use a ballet barre to do this also.

Vertical push: overhead press, inverted pushups
Vertical pull: pullups or lat pulldown

I would say avoid machines for all of these exercises except if you need to use the lat pulldown and cable row, simply because using dumbbells works more stabilizer muscles which are key when dancing. In a conditioning for dance class that I teach I mix TRX work and weights, the TRX is great because there is a bunch of stabilization work which directly helps improve port de bras. The reverse fly youtube.com . . . is probably my favorite port de bras builder exercise.

Since port de bras is the issue, arm strength probably isn't the main thing to address. Usually the weakness is in the upper back and shoulders.

A typical routine for a kids upper body development could look like this

2 sets of 12-15 reps of

Dumbbell overhead press, lat pulldowns (until pullups are possible), dumbbell bench press or pushups, dumbbell (cable is fine) row or hanging row (can use TRX here too, or for most of the exercises except overhead press), and finish with reverse flyes. Obviously warm up before hand and cool down/stretch after. Twice a week would be fine, this shouldn't take more than 30 minutes.

Another great option is rock climbing, ballet dancers are usually pretty good at it due to long limbs and flexibility. It's a great workout plus it's fun and rewarding.

Just found this well.blogs.nytimes.com . . .

A quote "Youths do not add as much or sometimes any obvious muscle mass as a result of strength training, which is one of the reasons many people thought they did not grow stronger. Their strength gains seem generally to involve “neurological” changes, Dr. Faigenbaum said. Their nervous systems and muscles start interacting more efficiently."

Your child will not get bulky from weight training, full stop, that's a fact. If anyone says something else to you, they are lying.

We would all still like to see your information from Mayo Clinic on weight lifting for 11 year old girls though, please and thank you.

^ Not trying to get into the middle of an old argument... but he did actually post the info that he from the Mayo Clinic, I will repost for everyone in case they missed it. www.mayoclinic.com . . .
I will point out however that I am not entirely sure how well that works in favor of having kids strength training. I still maintain that it is completely unnecessary to consider when talking about ballet arms of an 11 year old. On that link it does say "Strength training, not weightlifting" in bold print.

The link that kenwoodman had posted only took me through to their main page, thank you for posting that.

Try going to page one and clicking the original post. It just worked for me, and other people.

Note sarcasm on the steroids comment, no one is seriously recommending that dancers take steroids and eat huge amounts of calories.

Link copied from my other post. www.mayoclinic.com . . .

I've taught pas to plenty of tween/teen girls, so I'm not clueless about what will help them.

It's fine that you disagree with me, but I don't understand you coming into conversation after conversation to disagree with me, and usually not even in a polite way. All I was trying to do is give a different point of view than what is normally brought, and provide links to helpful information that says that sometimes just because something is different or hasn't been done, that it isn't necessarily bad, and can be beneficial. Nice jab about the 30 year old mans biceps when I never mentioned any bicep isolation, it's nice to be read with an open mind.

My link clearly works, please and thank you.

Doesn't that color around your name mean you're a moderator? If you have any issue with me, from now on I'd appreciate a PM instead of veiled insults and assumptions.

The other link didn't work for me, that would be the one on the first page of this discussion, where I had also been posting.

I wasn't aware that any insults had been thrown, veiled or otherwise, I tend to be quite straight forward in that department. More of a call a spade a spade rather than a long handled digging implement sort of person.

Thank you for reposting that which hooray4jj had already reposted just above your post and to which I had thanked her for.

This was the bit that leaped out at me off the page.

"For kids, light resistance and controlled movements are best — with a special emphasis on proper technique and safety."

And this is really what we're all trying to say, light resistance is the most a child of this age really needs, a flex band and some breast stroke preps with the instructor making sure she's utilising her core properly.

And as for sarcasm, it really doesn't work so well on message boards. Your first post might well have been in jest but it is positively dangerous put in the context of this thread which is an 11 year old girl who needs to strengthen for her ballet arms.

Light resistance can be from many things, bands, weights, bodyweight, etc. No where was heavy exercise recommended for an 11 year old. Safety is a given for any training routine.

The context in which my comment was given was when no one had mentioned that this was for an 11 year old ballet student, her age was mentioned long after my comment. "Just bear in mind this is a child we're speaking about, not an adult as the the OP had us think to start off with. This advice when applied to an 11 year old is a bit scary"

So you knew that the context wasn't clear long before your last post. So why are you being critical of my comment again? It's sarcasm, maybe it got misconstrued, but it clearly wasn't aimed at an 11 year old, you knew that.

I'm curious what "Unless, of course, you're an eleven year old girl who is trying to improve your arms in which case there are some snippets of very good information here.If on the other hand you're a a 30 year old man looking for some biceps help you're then all you need to do is read this" is about if you're anti-sarcasm in posts, it's in fact terrible advice for 30 year old males wanting bigger arms, but in line with all the links I had provided, and in line with the quote you posted on light resistance.

You know as well as I that this thread got strange because it had two different topics going at the same time due to the original poster's lack of information on who needed arm strengthening. You made assumptions about me "So we'll take that as a no", had sarcastic statements "30 year old male..." and then tell me that you're very straight forward. If in general you are, great, but it hasn't showed in this thread.

kenwoodman wrote:

Oh, I completely agree that this whole thread is essentially pointless.

This did not answer imadanseur's question quoted here

Ken do you teach 11 year old girls ballet?

Hence my question to you to clarify. And the answer is no, you don't teach young children ballet.

There are many times on DDN where topics fragment or change track, this one was going to because of the OP's lack of information, however some of us had seen her other posts and were able to guess what she was really talking about.

Just as a side note, if you come onto a dance forum and say this

kenwoodman wrote:

To be frank, I wouldn't put too much worth into what most ballet instructors say about weight training or cross training, they've been behind the curve of sports training by at least 20-30 years. Most of their dislike of it comes from really old beliefs (sometimes more than 100 years old or older) about how if you do anything but dance you'll get huge and immobile.

Then you're going to get a bit of flack.

We're not all little white haired old ladies mentally living in the days of Diaghilev, some of us have moved into the 21st century now.

I find it funny that none of your posts did anything but critique what other people had to say, other than thanking someone about a link I posted. I reread everything you posted, then read the entire thread without reading your posts and the amount of information hadn't changed. You didn't come in here to add to the conversation, you came in here to be critical of people who don't agree with you. I'm all for a discussion about a topic, that's great, but you didn't add anything.

I'm fine hearing opinion, reading articles backing that opinion, hearing your view as a dancer and your experience, but none of that was shared. Just critique, critique, critique. That doesn't do anyone any good.

My point is, you're a mod, you should know better. You came in here and were nothing but negative.

People are coming into critique your post because you are commenting on a thread that is asking for ways to strengthen arms for ballet. If you don't teach kids ballet (especially 11 year old girls), then in my opinion you aren't qualified to be answering the question regardless if you know about strength training.

You also came on the thread to tell me that my statement about damaging the growth plate was ridiculous and a myth, when in fact I posted evidence to refute that and in my original post it said

There is no reason an 11 year old should be lifting weights in my opinion. You can damage growth plates if the weight is too heavy.

For some reason you come in and refute that with evidence on strength training when I was CLEARLY referring to weight lifting.

As for moderators on ddn...we are members first and foremost. We were all members before we were moderators and the owner of the site encourages us to continue posting as members. There has not been one terms of service violation committed here. You opened the can of worms with offering info on strength training therefore it is probably going to be discussed in the thread and your advice critiqued.