Stay away from Concrete

                You may already know this because I mentioned it in a previous post, but the Kennedy High School Varsity Dance Team practices on concrete. Some of you may say “so what.” Our try outs are in April and we get in the full swing of things by May, practicing and competing all the way through March. We are basically year round athletes with our studio dancing on top of it, and dance is not easy on your body.

                Dance is probably the worst sport for your entire body right after gymnastics because you are using your body in ways it wasn’t made for. You push your bodies to limits farther than most would even begin to imagine. We are also jumping and landing and rolling on the ground time after time after time to make it perfect.

                All dancers get bruises but concrete makes it worse. Concrete has no shock absorption, imagine jumping in the air and landing just on your knees on the sidewalk. It would obviously hurt, and give you a bruise. Now imagine having a bruise from that and then you keep having to roll on your knees or things like that. Once a girl on the team gets a bruise on her knee it usually doesn’t go away till the end of the season, and eventually a majority of the team has blue, black, and purple knees.

                One of the things we do most in our pom routine is jump. This is cool until it is on concrete day after day, because the concrete has about zero shock absorption. I think you can imagine how this is bad for your body. When we land hard from a jump it makes your vertebrae hit each other and your tail bone, which you might not really feel at first but after time it actually gives you permanent back issues. It crunches your vertebrae together which also results in you to become shorter, however not a very noticeable amount. Another thing about landing your jumps on concrete is it is very bad for your feet, recently I got a bone bruise on my heel which is very painful and probably won’t fully heal until I have time to stay off of my feet for a couple weeks, so basically not until the end of the season.

                The dance team dancing on concrete isn’t just causing temporary issues and pain, it is causing issues with their backs that will last a lifetime. Dancing with even just a little more shock absorption like a gym floor or Marley floor (which is preferred by dancers,) would help tremendously in the long run. Take as many opportunities to dance as you can because I promise you will not regret them, but try to stay away from dancing on concrete every single day.