Improve your pirouettes and turns with targeted strength and stability exercises. Performing perfect pirouettes and turns is a challenging feat. Perfectly executed turns require a combination of technique, skill, strength, balance and power.
Technique is absolutely fundamental to executing proper turns and pirouettes. This involves proper body alignment, turning technique, spotting, and control and coordination of the arms, legs, core and head. Balance is necessary to maintain control of your body throughout the turn and to keep you upright and over your center of gravity.
Many dancers spend hours and hours practicing the skill and technique for turns but still struggle to improve. So what are they missing? Why do some dancers seem to just be ‘good turners’ and can always nail that double, triple, or even quadruple turn?
If you are struggling to improve your pirouettes and turns, then the exercises in this video are for you! Strength and power are perhaps the most overlooked elements in pirouette training. You need to have super strong and stable ankles and strength in the supporting leg to hold you upright. You need strength and control to maintain a stable core to keep your torso from shifting and pulling you out of your center. You also need power in your legs to push off and be able to find your center in the split-second start of the turn. To execute a perfect turn, you don’t have time to wobble around and slowly take your hand off the barre. If you don’t get the push off and balance correct straight away, you don’t stand a chance of landing multiple rotations!
Training strength and power isn’t just about being able to do 100 crunches on the floor or be able to balance still as a statue – you need strength and control through rotational movements. In other words, you muscles need to to be able to maintain the strength and control as you are actually turning. Sounds obvious, right? But do you actually train your strength while rotating?
In this video, I go through 4 of my favorite exercises to help banish wobbly turns and pirouettes. These exercises will help improve your strength, power and balance in ways that will actually transfer to real-life turning. Practice these exercises alongside your skill and technique training, and you will find your turns and pirouettes start to improve way faster than just practicing your turns over and over again!
These exercises don’t replace your pirouette technique practice – technique is essential, but they will train the correct muscles, in functional patterns. There are, of course, lots of other great pirouette training exercises, but these 4 I have found to be effective for most dancers and are easy to fit in busy training schedules.
Any questions, let me know! Also, don’t forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel for more great training tips. If you’d like a full length dance-specific strength and technique building workout, you can find a full floor barre class here.
