Why do dancers stretch?
As dancers, we tend to love to stretch. We want to be flexible so we can achieve those great dance moves and positions, and even dancers who are already flexible often work to stretch even further. We are taught to always stretch when we warm up for class or a performance. But are we acting in our own best interests? We like to think we know a lot about stretching, but it is not actually very well understood. There is very little research which tells us how it should best be done, and some recent research has even shown that stretching before activity may in fact make it more likely that you will injure yourself. So where does that leave us? Being flexible is certainly a part of being a great dancer, but we need to achieve it in the safest way possible. In this article we will look at the parts of stretching safely and well that we do understand, and then we will cover some specific stretches in more detail over the next few articles. What are we really stretching? When we stretch, we
