Forget Stretching and Strengthening: What Adult Ballet Students Really Need for Achieving Maximum Turnout

While you can work on all kind of different skills to get better at ballet, there is really only one that truly matters:

Once your turnout is working, in a secure, comfortable, and sustainable way, everything else ballet will fall into place more naturally.

At which point you may say “But I do! I stretch, and strengthen it every day.”

That’s great, especially if it’s working for you! Then you actually don’t need to read on, unless you still want to. But if you feel that strength and flexibility exercises are not really doing much to improve your turnout, I invite you to read on.

In fact, stretching and strengthening your turnout might actually be blocking it. Or worse, all your turnout training efforts might discourage you, and make you think that you just don’t have very much natural turnout. That you’re too old, and just can’t build it anymore. Maybe you’ve been (self-!)diagnosed with some sort of weird hip joint geometry that presumably won’t ever allow for much turnout.

Forget all that.

My Turnout Obsession Story

At first, when I started ballet, I didn’t think much of turnout. I thought that it is just part of the art form, and to me it was simply a shape you had to make: Put your heels together and your toes out. I thought the more I would do it, i.e. the more classes, years, of ballet, the better it would get. But it didn’t, not really. I also noticed that there was a lot of contradictory opinions and recommendations out there. Teachers would say “turn out from the hip”. The International Association of Dance Medicine & Science would say “60% of turnout is from your hips, the rest is from knees and ankles”. Some people would recommend certain stretches. Others would urge you to stay away from these stretches. And when it came to which muscles should actually be activated in turnout, there were tons of different takes on that, from old school “squeeze your butt” to “relax everything except the deep external rotators” and everything in between.

For a long time, I swam on the pletora of information, until about a year ago, I started becoming obsessed with clearing the jungle. As so often, it was connected to my own story and experience: During a phase of intense rehearsals and lots of pointe work, I started having issues with my SI-joint, and despite lots of training, stretching and strengthening, I actually didn’t make the progress that I was used to. I started losing range, I felt tight and tense, and to be honest - it wasn’t very much fun to be in my body. I started getting the sense that my turnout was a bit the root of it all. Not because of turning out per se, but how I specifically created my turnout.

So going into the summer break last year, one of my teachers made a radical suggestion: Take the whole summer off.

At first I was a bit shocked, but after I while I got his point. And while I didn’t take the whole summer of, I did stop taking anything ballet-related for a full six weeks, the longest time since I started ballet. Turned out (haha) it was the best decision I could have made.

Not only because my body had a chance to rest and heal.

But because that break freed me up to look more deeply into what was going on in my body, with turnout, and everything related to it. I got the chance to explore and shed light without the presssures of daily class and rehearsal. From a place of curiosity, playfulness, and daily experimenting.

And as I was “fooling around”, and calming down, I started feeling an increasing sense of clarity. I remembered that I had this whole area of neuroplasticity in my toolbox. I also went back to re-read Moshé Feldenkrais’ work around functional integration.

As I was going to the gym every day and continued my explorations, I suddenly realized that we had it all backwards:

It wasn’t a lack of strength. The problem was also not turnout range.

It was all about the brain.

Turn Out From Your Brain

If the brain wasn’t properly activating the right muscles in the right sequence and at the right time for your turnout, then all stretching and strengthening would just reinforce the wrong things. In the best case, it would lead to nothing; in the annoying case, it would actually block you from using your full turnout; in the worst case, you would injure your hip joint, or lower back, or knee, or all of the above.

So there it was: I understood that developing turnout had to start with changing the brain.

This type of brain-changing work is very different from stretching and strength work. The biggest difference: You are not trying to hit the tissues. You are trying to hit the signals from the brain to the tissues.

It’s essentially what we also call building the proper movement pattern, improving movement quality or motor control.

I couldn’t find such training approach to turnout anywhere, so I started designing my own set of exercises. Some looked similar to “regular” exercises, but their execution was completely different. From all my obsession with neuroplasticity, I developed a set of principles for how to trigger the right changes in the brain as effectively as possible.

The Practical Side of the Brain-Turnout-Connection

From neuroplasticity research we know that one big factor for lasting (“plastic”) changes in the brain is the so-called principle of “massed practice”, i.e. a very high number of repetitions within a short time. Therefore, some of the hallmarks of movement pattern exercises are:

Very small loads: The idea is that throughout the high number of repetitions, the muscle tissue should not fatigue at all.
Start from your current ability: The brain needs to feel a contrast between where you are and where you want to go.
Small amplitudes: Think of it as very small trials around your current ability: Your “testing” thousands new directions, until one of them clicks.
State of relaxation: You need to optimize your brain physiology for learning by reducing stress neurotransmitters (blocking learning) and activating your reward centers.

I came back from the summer, and went back to take classes again. While my body felt so much better, I could still issues with my SI joint come up. I played it by the ear, I backed off from taking my regular schedule of classes and did only what I could. But all the way through, I continued building my turnout pattern.

The Results

Until suddenly something clicked, and then something else, and then even more. Sometimes, it would be an audible click somewhere in my body. Sometimes I would wake up and go to class to feel something new activate around my turnout.

And I continue to experience changes. Even just recently, after another “click”, I was able to turn out my hip joint in a straddle position, something I was never able to do before (which had always limited by middle split progress, because my thigh bone couldn’t get out of the pelvis’ way).

NEW range (above) compared to OLD range (below). You can see it best at the foot position, but more importantly at the thigh (circled).

As a first outcome of my research and experimentation, I have just recently published a pattern-building system for turnout. So if you would like to dive more into this and get more support from me, take a look. You can also look at my Instagram - especially over the months of December 2019 and January 2020, I have shared many posts for turnout pattern-building and biomechanics. And if you have any questions around movement patterns and building them, don’t hesitate to reach out to me!

But if there is one thing I want you to take away from this: It’s not you, or your lack of strength, or a lack of natural turnout. You have the potential to develop your turnout, no matter how old you are and when you started ballet. Creating movement patterns is the first step in this, before any muscle growth, increase in strength, and flexibility. You will be surprised by the difference it can make when your turnout falls into place instead of having to wrestle it in there. Take a chance!

Is the concept of movement patterns new to you? Does it make sense? What are your beliefs and practices around building and maintaining turnout?