Pre-Show Core Warmup For Dancers | Wall Butterfly Crunches
Are you looking for a great pre-show core warmup for dancers? Learn how the HPA Wall Butterfly Crunches can help warm your core while realigning your body so that you can dance at your best.
Top Pre-Show Core Warmup For Dancers
This core warm-up exercise for dancers gets its standing ovation from its ability to warm up and prepare so many parts of your body to dance at once!
And the Tony award for Best Multitasking Warm-up For Dancers goes to…The Wall Butterfly Abdominal Crunches!
The Wall Butterfly Crunches
I call this exercises a top pre-show warm-up exercise for dancers, because it makes the most of every moment in your warm-up. It’s so many of my dancer’s favorite pre-show exercise because it: gets your heart pumping, helps stretch your inner thighs, and prepares so many parts of your body to dance at once—in a short amount of time!
Specifically, this exercise will:
- Help to open your hips for increased turnout
- Reverse the effects of dancing on a rake by realigning your spine on the floor
- Increase shoulder mobility and strength through specific activation and realignment
- Neutralize your hips for better extension and strength
- Stretch your inner thighs and tight hip flexors for increased flexibility
- Relax your overworked back muscles
- Engage and strengthen your core/center without tightening your hip flexors
- Mobilize and stretch your ankles
This is your half hour call…fifteen minute call…five minute call…and places! Places everyone! “Places already?! I’m not warmed up!”
If you’re anything like me, time flies from half hour to showtime and there never seems to be enough time to warm up and get ready, but don’t worry! This is a fast, killer ab exercise that will have you warmed up and ready to rock in no time.
By doing these abdominal crunches using the wall and floor, you will maximize your ability to get the quickest and most effective warm-up, while engaging the correct muscles.
What Sets This Core Exercise For Dancers Apart?
This position allows you to strengthen and warm your core while in perfect alignment, without tensing up, tightening, or gripping in unwanted places.
When most people think “butterfly stretch”, they think of sitting on the floor and manually forcing their knees towards the ground to stretch out the inner thighs and groin. Either that, or they collapse their shoulders and head forward and yank themselves towards the ground by holding onto their feet.
When muscles that aren’t supposed to be working begin to take over, pain and injury are what follows.
We don’t want that!
For example, the muscles that make up your primary hip flexors are the most powerful (and stubborn) muscles in your body! Psoas pain and tightness, anyone? If your hip flexors start to bully the smaller muscles around them, your body becomes a higher risk for injury and you are sacrificing strength and flexibility.
Doing abdominal crunches in this position allows you to access and strengthen your abdominals without your hip flexors and lower back getting involved—this is the key.
In order to reach the deepest core and spine stabilizers, you need to be able to access them from a position that prevents the body from compensating or cheating. This position forces you to do your crunches correctly.
TAKE BACK CONTROL OF YOUR RECOVERY
Ever feel like you your body is breaking down and you can't keep up?
Our Recover For Dancers resource gives you 3 fast and effective exercises to help you recovery quickly. Less time recovering means more time dancing!
Correct Joint Alignment For A Fast Pre-Show Warmup
The key to avoiding injury and dancing at your full potential is by obeying the body’s inherent need to have properly aligned joints.
Proper musculoskeletal alignment (bones, muscles, and nerves) is the key to your body’s ability to gain lasting strength, flexibility, and stamina.
On the other hand, out-of-alignment joints require your body to improvise (not the good kind) and compensate in a manner that requires the body to operate in ways that cause pain, damage, and restrictions.
Out-of-alignment joints cause us to dance in a way that ‘voids the warranty’ on our bodies being able to have a long and healthy career! Dance and being a dancer is never the problem, but rather, it’s your body being out of alignment that causes the trouble!
What Is Correct Joint Alignment For Dancers?
In order to dance without pain and avoid injury, all of your joints need to be at right angles. This is the way the human body was designed.
Here is my wooden friend to help give a visual example of what it looks like when the joints are properly aligned and making right angles. Each blue dot represents a joint (except the ear in the side photo). Notice how each intersecting purple line makes a right angle!
From the front: the feet are facing parallel, the knees are over the ankles, the hips are over the knees, and the shoulder are over the hips (some people have wider shoulders, so they may not fall directly over the hips).
From the side: the knee is right above the ankle, the hip is right above the knee, the shoulder is right over the hip, and the ear is directly over the shoulder.
Alignment of your joints (through the function of your musculoskeletal system which includes: muscles, nerves, and bones) is what allows your body to strengthen and stretch.
TAKE BACK CONTROL OF YOUR RECOVERY
Ever feel like you your body is breaking down and you can't keep up?
Our Recover For Dancers resource gives you 3 fast and effective exercises to help you recovery quickly. Less time recovering means more time dancing!
How To Perform The Wall Butterfly Crunches
Instructions To Perform The Wall Butterly Crunches
- Lie on your back with your hips up against the wall (as close as you can go with your tailbone still touching the ground).
- Place the bottom of your feet together against the wall and let your hips and knees drop out to the side (try to relax your inner thighs while making sure the bottoms of your feet stay touching together).
- Interlace your fingers together behind your head and look straight up at the ceiling, then slightly back.
- Gently pull your shoulder blades together and down your back so that your elbows are flat against the ground and shoulders are down and away from your ears.
- Crunch your upper body up off the floor about 3 inches and then return your upper body and elbows flat on the floor.
Remember to keep looking back, keep those elbows pulled back, and relax your inner thighs! Think of lifting your upper body ‘up’ and not ‘curling’ towards your knees.
Wall Butterfly Crunches Is A Top Pre-Show Core Warmup For Dancers
Alignment of your joints (through the function of your musculoskeletal system which includes: muscles, nerves, and bones) is what allows your body to strengthen, stretch, and prevent injury.
I hope you now can see how this pre-show core warmup does so much more than just get your abdominals warm!
This HPA Exercise is a favorite among my dancers in the HPA Program for it’s ability to warm up the body, open the hips, and relax the lower back and shoulders so that you can dance full-out with confidence that you’re warmed up and ready to go!
If you want to try another HPA exercise that will prepare your ankles and feet for a high and strong relevé, check out Top Relevé Exercise For Dancers | Higher and Stronger Relevés!
I can’t wait for you to try it!
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