IMAGINE DOING THIS WORKOUT BAREFOOT: Descend into a squat, grab a 130-pound weight, explode upward as you raise it overhead, scamper on your tiptoes for 10 yards, and then slowly lower the weight to a count of eight. Repeat 15 times in 5 minutes. Between lifts, do split jumps and pushups. Sound diabolical, like a page from a Navy SEAL training manual? That's ballet. Modern dancers do this for hours a day every day.
"Dancing demands phenomenal power, extreme flexibility and balance, and high-end aerobic fitness," says Lyle J. Micheli, M.D, a clinical professor of orthopedic surgery at Harvard medical school. It's CrossFit in tights, with ballerinas for barbells.
Take, for example, Glenn Allen Sims, a 36-year-old star of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in New York City. He's 5'10" and 180 pounds of muscle. But even more impressive, he has gone 15 years without a major injury. He's also an instructor in Horton Technique, named after Lester Horton, an innovative choreographer who turned fitness into art and art into fitness. (For weekly fitness tips and tricks delivered straight to your inbox, sign up for the Men's Health Exercise of the Week newsletter.)
Horton developed a series of body-weight exercises that stress balance, endurance, isometric strength, and explosive power. It also emphasizes flexibility and dynamic stretching: "Length is strength," Sims says. Put another way, you're only as strong as your weakest link, and Sims uses Horton's drills to fortify those links.
Sims invited me and four dancers from Ailey's second company to a 2-hour Horton training session. Some of the moves were way beyond my ability, but the ones described on the next page are worth mastering . . . if you have the balls to train like a dancer.
Strengthen your stabilizers
When men train their legs, they typically focus on specific muscles, like the quads and calf muscles, using basic up-down movements. But most sports use lateral movements, which are both powered and controlled by muscles we rarely think about or bother to train: those on the inner thighs and outer hips.
Those lateral movements—especially when they involve sudden changes of speed or direction—can lead to ACL injuries, which are relatively rare among dancers, despite their leaps and pivots. So start with ground-based exercises to strengthen those muscles. It'll be harder than any stretching you've ever done.
THE DRILL
1. Lie on your back with your arms by your sides. Brace your core and raise one leg 2 inches. Keeping it straight, slowly sweep it out as far as you can to the side. Hold for 8 seconds, slowly return to the starting position, and switch legs. That's 1 rep. Do 8, varying your leg height with each rep.
2. Lie on your side. Sweep your top leg forward as far as you can, hold for 8 seconds, and then go as far backward as you can and hold for 8 seconds. Switch sides and repeat. That's 1 rep. Do 8, raising the leg to a different height each time.
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Soup up your squat
I feel like I've stumbled into the wrong cartoon—G.I. Joe trying to hang with Gumby. Now we're on our feet for what Sims calls primitive squats. With arms out in front and feet shoulder-width apart, we push our hips back and sink into the deepest squat possible, then rise to the starting position while Sims counts to eight. The slow pace and extended range of motion make this much more challenging than I'd expected.
THE DRILL
Do 10 reps of each of these three squats, with no rest in between. Squat to an eight count (4 seconds down, 4 seconds up).
1. Feet shoulder-width apart
2. Feet together
3. Feet beyond shoulder width, toes pointing out
No problem? Shift onto your tiptoes and repeat the circuit.
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