Video: What Can You Do to Improve Your Ballet Pointe Quickly?

What Can You Do to Improve Your Ballet Pointe Quickly?

Improving your ballet pointe quickly will involve the use of a few particular strength exercises. Find out what you can do to improve your ballet pointe quickly with help from an experienced classical ballet instructor in this free video clip.

Video Transcript

Hi, I'm Lori Lahnemann, director of The Philadelphia Dance Academy and The Philadelphia Youth Ballet, and today we are going to talk about how to quickly improve your pointe work. One way is to use a Thera-Band in bare feet to do some strengthening exercises that also help mobility in the ankle and secondly we're going to show some basic releves that you can do at the bar or if you don't have a bar at home you can do them just holding on to the counter or the bed post, something just to help with balance. So first you're going to take the Thera-Band and place it around your foot so there's about an inch hanging above the toe so that when you fully point your whole foot is covered. You'll press against the Thera-Band so that your ankle is long and you are isolating the toes then you'll lengthen the toes away from you and make sure you are pulling with straight arms to increase resistance. Then, maintain that resistance and release just the toes keeping the ankle long. What you don't want to do is release the toes and ankles at the same time. So you want to work those small muscles in between the tarsal and you can repeat this demi pointe exercise just using the toes back and forth until there's fatigue. You can also isolate just the ankle by circling the ankle in each direction so going through a full range of full pointe, a cycled position which typically we want to avoid in ballet but in this exercise we don't and then we go through full flexion and then what we would call a wing position all the way to the other side returning to a fully pointed foot and you will do this in both directions. Another thing you can do are simple releves. When doing releves you want to make sure you keep alignment between the knee, ankle and toes and the rib cage over the pelvis. You can do these in parallel, first position, second position and as you become stronger on a single leg. Once again I'm Lori Lahnemann, from The Philadelphia Dance Academy with a few tips on how to improve your pointe work.

What Can You Do to Improve Your Ballet Pointe Quickly?

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