The best exercise to improve ballet dancer’s lines that are often ignored!
On my ballet dancers days, I remember spending a massive amount of hours, daily, just focusing on my footwork. I was really lucky to naturally have a great arch, however, flexible feet requires stronger muscle to sustain the greater range of movement, therefore, my exercise routine included many exercises to increase calves and intrinsic feet’s muscles strength. One of the biggest problems I encountered though, was that I had the tendency to put so much strength when pointing my feet, that eventually, I was generating a bad line sickling my foot: leading my toes towards the inside and my heels towards the outside.
If the reader of this little article has a basic knowledge of muscle anatomy and kinesiology, they should already have identified the nature of my problem, and a simple and easy way to sort it out! The way I did it was just to think constantly about my feet line, and eventually, after months of practice, I managed to have constant great lines. However, in this article, I am going to reveal how to get rid of this problem with half of the effort I had to put through.
Before we start though I am going to talk a bit about the lower leg (or anatomically speaking, just leg) different muscles. As you all know, calves muscles (Gastrocnemius, Soleus and Plantaris) have a big role in pointing your ankles (ankle plantarflexion), however, that is not enough for a ballet dancer who is looking for the complete extension of their foot. To stretch our toes (anatomically speaking, flexing our toes) our body benefits from two deep muscle of the leg: the flexor digitorum and flexor hallucis. These two entities with absurd names are directly responsible for pointing our toes, they in fact are involved in two different movements: toes flection and ankle inversion.
As we can see there is a second movement that we actually did not ask for it: ankle inversion. Ankle inversion is the movement that leads to bringing our toes towards the inside and our heel towards the outside, generating the “banana” or “sickle” foot on our tendus.
Unfortunately, we can not stop the muscle to perform this movement as it is a consequence of the location of their origins and insertions. What we can do though is to strengthen the muscles that perform ankle eversion, the opposite movement to the ankle inversion, therefore, the movement which brings our toes towards the outside and our heel towards the inside, giving to our tendu and jete’ a splendid line: the peroneus muscles.
The peroneus muscles (also known as fibularis in American English) are the peroneus longus, brevis and Tertius (although not everybody has this last one). They are positioned on the external part of your tibia and are majorly involved in the foot eversion and partially in ankle dorsiflexion.
The magical exercise to achieve this splendid leg line is simply strengthening exercise for the peroneus group muscles, and the easiest way to strengthen this group muscle is through using an elastic band and a chair.
Loop the elastic band between the leg of the chair and your foot, hence, widen up your knees so that the band will pull towards the centre. Making sure that knees and ankle are on the same line, perform an ankle eversion movement, therefore pull against the strength of the band. Execute this movement slowly and hold a few seconds in the position to then come back to rest. Repeat this exercise 16 times per three sets. You should feel a burning sensation on the outside of your lower leg. If the exercise is too easy you can progress to a stronger band. Strengthening the muscle of your tibia will make it easier to achieve that great line and splendid tendus.
References:
- Torbay and South Devon NHS trust (2020) Strengthening exercises for Peroneal muscles. Available from: https://www.torbayandsouthdevon.nhs.uk/uploads/25300.pdf
- Jones, O. (2018) Muscles in the Lateral Compartment of the Leg. Available from: https://teachmeanatomy.info/lower-limb/muscles/leg/lateral-compartment.
- Jones, O. (2019) Muscles in the Posterior Compartment of the Leg. Available from: https://teachmeanatomy.info/lower-limb/muscles/leg/posterior-compartment.
