Top 5 Concepts for Performer Injury Prevention

1) Prepare to Succeed

Acrobat or Actor, Clown or Contortionist, Dancer or Diver – your body is your tool, your asset, and it’s the only one you have.  It’s important to both improve and protect it to succeed long-term.

As a Performing Arts Physiotherapist, I like Performers to think about the way they use their bodies as an “activity triangle.”  The three sides of the triangle are Technique, Performance, & Conditioning.

To help avoid injuries, it is important that this triangle is in balance.  If all your training is technical, you are at risk of not having the strength, flexibility, power, or endurance to prevent injury.  If your staging, choreography, or on-stage performance is dominating your week, then you may be compromising technique or skill development.

When you balance your strength and conditioning; technique training and skill acquisition; and on-stage demands, you are more likely to stay injury-free.

Of these three elements, Conditioning (specifically exercises focused on addressing previous injuries) is the most frequently neglected part of this triangle.

2) Balance Your Body

Many people think about muscles being either ‘too tight’ or ‘too weak.’  A better way to understand how the body works is to consider muscle balance.

Muscles work together as agonists (shortening to contract), antagonists (lengthening to return a joint to its resting position), or synergists (muscles working in concert with other muscles to control movement at a joint).  Muscles act around individual joints, across multiple joints, and in links of connected myofascial chains to produce effective human movement.

It is important that there is a balance of resting muscle tone, muscle strength, joint & muscle flexibility, and motor control around joints to move efficiently.  Imbalances can occur in a number of ways:

• issues with technique
• habitual movement patterns
• repetitive overuse activities
• rapid increases in performance or training load
• after periods of de-conditioning
• due to pain-changing movement patterns
• restrictions in joint motion
• because of previous injury

Improving muscle imbalances often requires an initial awareness better of movement patterns—then focusing on incorporating corrective exercises to strengthen, lengthen, or improve control of movement.

Incorporate muscle balance and injury prevention-focused exercises into your warm-ups and regular injury prevention conditioning to help lower your risk of injury today!

3) Periodise Your Workload

The human body is fantastic at responding to the demands of regular and increasing workloads.  However, it takes time to build technique, strength, flexibility, and control—sometimes it takes weeks, and sometimes it takes years.

A great way to make sure you stay injury-free whilst you are learning new skills and increasing your performance workload is to Periodise Your Workload.

First:
Have a close look at your next three to six months of performances, and consider the training and staging demands required to make these happen.

Second:
Break your calendar into manageable periods: ideally four- to six-week blocks of time.  In each block, incorporate three phases: an Overload phase, a Maintenance phase, and a short Taper (reduced workload phase).  If you can maintain your workloads steadily at 80% to 130% of your average (100%) weekly workload in these three phases, then studies have shown you can accomplish a sweet spot of training and effectively lower injury risk.

Third:
Measure and track your workloads over these blocks of time.  Plan and be specific in your training, conditioning, and performance, accomplishing each of the overload, maintenance, and taper phases.   Make use of wearable devices where possible (e,g. smartwatches, smartphones, and sleep trackers).  Recognise the effect of non-performance activities (like holidays, hobbies, or parties); and work smart to hit that sweet spot of 80% to 130% activity loads to reduce your injury risk.

4 ) Don’t Skip the Warm-up

A proper warm-up can reduce injury risk by between 30% & 70%!
Good warm-ups increase blood flow to your body parts; start your ‘metabolic body’; load your muscles & joints gradually; prepare movement patterns & techniques; and improve mindfulness.

So what is an effective warm-up?
Your own best warm-up depends on what training or performance you are preparing for.  But all good warm-ups include:

• gradually increasing your heart rate to the level required in performance
• exercising through your full ranges of movement
• incorporate elements of strength, power, control, and technique that are specific to your performance
• aim to correct muscle imbalances individual to you
• add injury prevention exercises that are relevant to your performance or previous injury history

Good preparation for performance also includes the early organisation of your tape, makeup, wardrobe, equipment & props—allowing you to focus your mind and body toward the role you’re playing.

5) Rest is Best

So you’ve prepared your training & performance calendar, done your strength and conditioning, worked hard at injury prevention, and risen to the occasion at those gala performances…. what now? It’s time to recover!

Recovery is a vital part of training.  It is during recovery that our bodies make the physical adaptions that we have trained for… and it is during rest that our brains are able to transform new movement patterns (like new techniques or choreography) into long-term memories.

To recover properly, you’ll need to:

• rehydrate to replenish the fluids that you’ve lost
• fuel your body with nutritious foods full of micronutrients, antioxidants, protein, and energy for the next show
• rest your mind and your body

The number one way to rest your mind and body is to SLEEP!

Sleep is a full topic all of its own ….

Sleep is the number one most powerful tool to help you recover and build your body & mind for your next best performance.  Sleep is vital for injury recovery, strength adaption, cardiovascular replenishment, mental health, and overall well-being.  Make 8+ hours of sleep per night a non-negotiable part of your high-performance plan.

This article was originally published on TheatreArtLife.com. Written by TheatreArtLife contributor Matthew Pilla. 

Anna Robb

All around the world there are people working in arts and entertainment. They are not in the industry for the money, the fame or the work/life balance. They are there through a sheer driving force; The need to create. From this community, TheatreArtLife was born.
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