A portrait of ballet dancer William Bracewell.
© Rick Guest
Dance

How high performance sports science revolutionised ballet

Find out how a generation of dancers at The Royal Ballet are using innovative sports science to fortify their bodies and minds, and thrust their art form into the future.
Written by Mark Bailey
13 min readPublished on
The poise and beauty of ballet masks a gritty world of bruised bodies, inflamed muscles, pain and pressure.
When Gemma Pitchley-Gale isn't pirouetting in pink pointe shoes at the Royal Opera House – the London home of the world-famous Royal Ballet – she can usually be found power-lifting cast-iron barbells in the gym. The petite dancer once dead-lifted 97.5kg – more than double her 47kg body weight.
"People think we just flounce about in the studio all day, are skinny and weak, and don’t eat anything,” she says. “When they find out how strong we are now, they say, ‘What? Wow!’”
When I land from a big jump, I have the equivalent of 500kg of force going through my legs
Matthew Ball
Her colleague, Claire Calvert, who's undertaken demanding roles like the Sugar Plum Fairy in The Nutcracker, has achieved a squat personal of 100kg, which makes her stronger, pound for pound, than legendary 116kg South African rugby prop Tendai ‘The Beast’ Mtawarira.
The male dancers in their company also possess astonishing power. William Bracewell can lift his 73kg body weight for 45 consecutive calf-raises. During a routine gym workout, Alexander Campbell lifts a cumulative load of 3,655kg – roughly the weight of a full Ford Transit van. And Matthew Ball can endure the equivalent of four times his body weight when holding a stationary single-leg squat. “I showed my parents a video of me lifting weights and even they said, ‘Should you be doing that?’” says 26-year-old Ball. “But when I land from a big jump, I have the equivalent of 500kg of force going through my legs, so I need to train for that."
Gemma Pitchley-Gale once dead-lifted 97.5kg – more than double her 47kg body weight.

Gemma Pitchley-Gale

© Rick Guest

There's always pressure, because people pay to see the best shows
Alexander Campbell
Today’s dancers are powering up in the gym for good reason: ballet is a beautiful but brutal world of aching muscles and crushing fatigue. To master the sublime footwork of iconic ballets such as Swan Lake, Cinderella or this season’s crowd-pleaser, Romeo and Juliet, these performers undergo up to six hours of intricate rehearsals every day, and deliver as many as four live shows each week.
The Royal Ballet’s dancers – of whom there are around 100, and whose feet are marked with blisters, bunions, black nails, cuts and bruises – burn through an average of 12,000 shoes each year. With a mean of 6.8 injuries per year, ranging from foot sprains to muscle tears, dancers suffer an injury attrition rate comparable to that of American football players. Behind the scenes, tired dancers with slender limbs and sharp cheek bones slink into the airy rehearsal studios – the women in tutus and leg warmers, the men in tight shorts and loose-fitting vests. “The initial morning feeling is stiff, painful and crunchy, basically,” says Pitchley-Gale.
Following a 75-minute warm-up class, the hard work begins. “We can sometimes rehearse from 12pm to 6.30pm with hardly any breaks," says Calvert. “Technically, that isn’t allowed – we usually get an hour’s lunch – but sometimes it’s just how rehearsals work out.”
Then come the dazzling but draining shows in front of 2,250 spectators. “There's always pressure, because people pay to see the best shows," explains Campbell. “I might not get home until one in the morning, and we’re back in the studio at 9.30am."
Despite this gruelling regime, nobody analysed the unique demands on dancers’ bodies until, in 2013, the Royal Ballet opened the Mason Healthcare Suite – a tech-filled facility staffed by 17 experts in sports science, physiotherapy, nutrition, massage, rehabilitation and psychology – in a bid to reduce injuries, fight fatigue and improve performances.
A dancer knows that every step must be immaculate in order to create the expected delicacy and detail of the artistic spectacle
Greg Retter
“I was shocked when I saw the dancers’ workload,” admits Greg Retter, the clinical director of Ballet Healthcare who previously worked as rehabilitation manager for Team GB’s athletes. “Dancers go at it 100 percent, in every rehearsal, several times a day. Athletes periodise training for competitions, but dancers perform continuously from September to June, often rehearsing six ballets at once. That churn is unrelenting.
This brutal routine is necessary because dancers must produce an extraordinary precision of movement with consistency. Whereas a footballer can skew a shot wide of the target, a dancer knows that every step must be immaculate in order to create the expected delicacy and detail of the artistic spectacle on stage. “The way they cognitively process the kinaesthetic awareness [muscle memory] for complex movement patterns is unlike any athlete I've seen,” says Retter. “But ask them to change the movement and, within a few repeats, it is ingrained.”
A black-and-white photograph of a ballet dancer working out in the gym.

Strength training is crucial for elite ballet

© Rick Guest

This level of exactitude is what makes ballet so tough to perform – and beautiful to watch. "Ballet is an aesthetic art, so you know this part of your arm should look exactly like this, and that this finger should be here,” explains Calvert. “It makes ballet unique. Human bodies adapt to activities, but nobody is made for ballet. We do things in turnout [when a dancer rotates their legs at the hip, pointing their knees and toes outwards] that nobody is born to do."
To learn more, Retter’s team began to analyse everything from dancers’ landing forces to their muscle activation patterns. They used the same force-plate technology employed by the European Space Agency to train astronauts, in addition to muscle-measuring electromyography (EMG) units, oxygen masks and heart-rate monitors. The team also funded a PhD student at St Mary’s University, in London, to quantify dancers’ performances using accelerometers.
Ballet is an old art form that's been formalised, but it's also something that's undeniably athletic
Matthew Ball
Through the cold lens of sports science, ballet was revealed to be a riot of lactate-torched limbs, racing heart rates and oxygen-starved muscles. Male dancers endure forces of up to 6,000 newtons on landing – a fifth higher than the explosive punch of heavyweight boxer Anthony Joshua. Female dancers can face 4,000 newtons – greater than the impact of a rugby tackle. Even the stress of performing in front of a live audience can cause dancers’ pain-inducing blood lactate to spike by eight percent.
This matrix of data sparked a revelation: for decades, while athletes, adventurers and soldiers had all embraced sports science, dancers had never benefitted from the right strength training, nutritional advice, recovery protocols or technological innovations to help them endure their unique physical workload. Pain and injury were inevitable. “When I graduated [from the Royal Ballet School in 2005] we just did a bit of Pilates and stretching,” says Pitchley-Gale. “There were two cross-trainers literally shoved in the corridor.”
Proactive dancers such as Pitchley-Gale sought help externally by working with a personal trainer, but others were anything but health-conscious. Soloist Eric Underwood admitted to drinking, smoking, and eating burgers, while the Ukrainian dancer Sergei Polunin indulged in drugs and all-night parties. The reality is that before any dancers could learn to embrace sports science, a change of perspective was needed.
Dancers are artists, not athletes, whose goal is to evoke emotional responses through the sublime movements of their bodies. As a result, they instinctively value unquantifiable concepts such as grace and elegance over cruder measurable statistics like leg strength or jump height. Ballet is also defiantly traditional: the dance form originated in the Italian Renaissance courts of the 15th century and many dances performed today date back to the 19th century, including The Sleeping Beauty (which debuted in 1890), The Nutcracker (1892) and SwanLake (1895).
A portrait of ballet dancer Gemma Pitchley-Gale.

Gemma Pitchley-Gale

© Rick Guest

Strength, fitness, psychological well-being and good nutrition are what free the dancers to perform their complex choreography
Greg Retter
Suspicious that science would poison the purity of their artistic expression and pollute the heritage of their art, dancers have had little interest in new technology and ideas. Tradition was inspiring dancers but also holding them back.
"There's this belief that ballet is all about the art – and it absolutely is,” says Retter. “But strength, fitness, psychological well-being and good nutrition are what free the dancers to perform their complex choreography and convey that emotion on stage. We can now say to dancers, ‘These are your building blocks for an amazing performance.’”
The Royal Ballet’s own pioneering research has also coincided with a wider revolution in dance science. In 2012, various UK dance institutions and universities came together to launch the National Institute of Dance Medicine and Science (NIDMS), an organisation that would promote research in the field. Its findings have become impossible to ignore. One study has shown that a year of strength training cuts dancers’ injury frequency by 59 percent.
Another study shows that six weeks of conditioning even improved dancers’ aesthetic competence through better control of movement, spatial awareness, timing and rhythmical accuracy. Hungry for self-improvement and persuaded by the mounting evidence, many forward-thinking dancers have now opened up to innovation.
“Ballet is an old art form that's been formalised, but it's also something that's undeniably athletic, so we have something to learn from that,” explains Ball. The sight of slender dancers performing heavy squats, tossing battle ropes and swinging kettlebells in the on-site gym is the most striking component of this revolution. The strength training protects muscles against injury, helps dissipate landing forces, boosts bone health and enhances jump heights.
But to build strength without muscle bulk, which would detract from the dancers’ grace, the sports science staff use innovative techniques. Dancers stand on force plates that measure their explosive power and hoist barbells fitted with linear encoders that record the speed of their lifts. By doing low repetitions with heavyweights and focusing on explosive speed, the dancers can build raw strength by improving the efficiency of the contractions in their muscles and the magnitude of electrical impulses coursing through them – without triggering growth of tight-splitting proportions.
The way they cognitively process muscle memory for complex movement patterns is unlike any athlete I've seen
Greg Retter
"I thought the gym would give me big legs, but we're training in an intelligent way, so that doesn’t happen,” says Calvert. “It just makes us stronger.” Bracewell was amazed at the impact: “I noticed a big change in my capacity to deal with rehearsals. I was less sore after dancing and my lower-back, ankle and knee problems have all been reduced.” He's even noticed the difference on stage. “It builds confidence. If you dead-lift a big weight four or five times and you know it’s lighter than the person you’re lifting, you think, ‘This feels easy now.’”
A figurehead of the next generation of dancers, Ball relishes the strength-training protocols. “Ballet is this stylised way of moving, all to do with beauty and line, so it’s not the natural biomechanical way,” he explains. “Adding strength gives your body the platform to handle that. I’m obsessed with jumping as high as possible, so I love doing heavy squats, pushing my max strength and measuring it.”
A portrait of ballet dancer William Bracewell.

William Bracewell can lift his 73kg body for 45 consecutive calf-raises

© Rick Guest

At The Royal Ballet, technology is now routinely employed in the service of art. The EMG tests have taught dancers to strengthen foot-stabilising muscles such as the medial gastrocnemius – located at the back of the calf – while the force-plate tests provide feedback on how to soften landings. Thanks to the heart-rate tests, dancers now perform bespoke fitness drills that precisely mirror the demands of upcoming roles.
“It gives you the confidence to know you can make it through the show, so you don’t hold back,” says Campbell. Other new gadgets available include Gyrotonic machines, a system of cables which build flexibility through fluid, dance-specific movements; Game Ready cold-therapy legwraps, and inflatable RP-X RecoveryBoots, which squeeze out lactic acid after rehearsals. “They give you this lovely feeling of fresh blood flowing through your legs,” says Pitchley-Gale. All activities are monitored on Smartabase, a data-analysis platform used by the Dallas Cowboys NFL team.
Today’s dancers are even benefitting from psychology. With the help of occupational psychologist Britt Tajet-Foxell, the performers practise how to beat anxiety by superimposing positive images over negative thoughts: Pitchley-Gale learnt to stop thinking of her injured ankle as a broken twig and replace the thought with uplifting images of running water and a blue sky.
“I broke my foot badly and had some anxiety about landing, but Britt helped me with repetitions of positive imagery of my past performances,” says Pitchley-Gale. They also learn to neutralise stress by compartmentalising different parts of their life – like ballet, family and finances – into imaginary rooms and systematically ‘cleaning out’ each one. Because of the hectic rehearsal schedule, even eating properly became a major challenge for dancers. “We might only get 15 minutes’ break and then we’re jumping again, so you can’t exactly eat a jacket potato or you’ll feel awful," says Calvert.
Our job is not to change ballet, but to support the dancers performing it
Greg Retter
Calvert remembers a flustered nutritionist visiting the company in the days before the healthcare suite was established: “When he heard about our routine, he just said, ‘If I were you, I would carry a bag of snacks around with me and just eat a big meal on Sunday.’ He just didn’t know what to suggest.”
These days the dancers follow specific diets devised by The Royal Ballet’s nutritionist, Jacqueline Birtwisle, who's worked with the Leicester Tigers rugby team and British Rowing. For energy, dancers consume easily digestible food such as porridge, scrambled eggs, risotto, houmous, salad, Greek yoghurt and baked beans. They eat Omega-3-rich SMASH (salmon, mackerel, anchovies, sardines and herring) to aid muscle recovery, and cook with olive – not sunflower – oil to fight inflammation. After late-night shows, when it can be hard to digest heavy meals, they drink muscle-repairing nut butter and milkshakes. As they spend so much time indoors, they also take Vitamin D, which has been shown to increase dancers’ isometric strength – the kind enhanced by ‘static’ exercises such as the Plank.
A portrait of ballet dancer, Matthew Ball.

Matthew Ball is a principal dancer with the Royal Ballet

© Rick Guest

Not all dancers can be persuaded to adopt the new ideas, and some are still suspicious of the scientific approach. “The conflict is still there, but it’s not as polarised as it was,” admits Retter.“ First, because we have dancers coming through the Royal Ballet School who now learn how physical capacity can help them. And second, because we now have these ‘champions’ at the top who understand this doesn’t detract from their artistic expression, but enhances it.”
We have to move well, look pretty, smile and create an emotional response, even though we're dying at the end
Claire Calvert
This season, 80 percent of dancers submitted themselves for voluntary tests in the healthcare suite – the highest take-up ever. Science will never replace the unique talent required to create artistic beauty on stage. But science has a powerful supporting role to play.
“When you run a race, you just run,” says Calvert. “But we have to move well, look pretty, smile and create an emotional response, even though we're dying at the end. Doing squats doesn’t help me to do 32 fouettés [fast, whipped turns], because I still have to practise the steps. But with that new base of strength and confidence, I feel more present in the performance, which means I can focus better on the story or the character.”
This sentiment is arguably the keystone of the high-performance ballet revolution. Dancers have to execute precise and strictly controlled choreography, yet somehow express themselves individually within the framework of that performance. “When you feel confident, that’s when the natural joy in your performances can come out,” says Calvert. By blending ballet’s traditional values of discipline and dedication with fresh insights from science, dancers are creating the perfect balance, both on and off stage. “This transition is definitely happening,” says Pitchley-Gale. “And it’s happening right now.”