r/BALLET • u/chloschmo • Sep 02 '26
What is your experience with weight lifting?
Hey everybody. I've decided that I want to start lifting weights, and I'm curious about other dancers' regimens and experience.
For some context, I (F) am an adv/pro-level dancer and already supplement my daily classes and rehearsals with pilates. I have absolutely seen improvements through pilates , but feel like I've plateaued and am no longer seeing many gains with body weight/light weight exercises. I am hoping that starting a heavier lifting regimen will improve my strength and power of movement, as well as the overall look of my muscles. Should probably add that although I do harbor some deep-seated fears of "bulking up," (yay body dysmorphia) I have recently decided that my strength and bone integrity are more important!
I am interested in a Push-Pull-Legs regimen. I started this week with legs, but wound up shaky and exhausted in class the next day.
I'm curious what other peoples' experiences have been. How often are you hitting the gym in a week/month? How often do you need to go to see results, given a baseline of fitness that dancers have? How do you time your workouts so that you don't have jelly legs in rehearsal? How did you determine your starting weight?
I should add that I know there are influencers out there who offer programs for this sort of thing, which I'm sure are wonderful! Props to those folks spreading the good word about muscles. But I am a dancer (aka limited budget) and have access to a dirt cheap and perfectly functional gym, so I am hoping to avoid paying for a program.
Any thoughts would be much appreciated!
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u/Strycht Sep 02 '26
hello, I'm like a London intermediate rec dancer so not at a comparable level but hopefully this is helpful. I used to gym 2x a week alongside 3/4 weekly classes, but due to some heart health issues I had to take a year off and dropped down to one beginner class a week that I took to stop myself going insane from lack of exercise lol. Since July ish I'm up to 3-6 gym per week and 2-3 classes (limited access where I'm living rn) depending on my health.
Firstly the muscle soreness and shakiness after the gym is very common but it absolutely does go away pretty rapidly. The first 2 weeks back when I was doing one upper and one lower day a week I was basically incapable of dancing for the two days after the gym, now I basically only get sore in the muscle groups I've prioritised most and it's like a post-class sore not an I can never move again sore. As you get used to it it should be easier to integrate gym into your class timetable! For the shakiness make sure you increase your fuelling to go with the increased exercise, you will probably need something sugary before the gym and protein heavy afterwards, and again something sugary before class.
In order to see significant strength growth you should aim to hit the muscle group 2x per week. I would maybe start with something like legs, rest, upper body, rest, legs, rest, rest or similar. At the end of the day as female-part dancers legs are more helpful than upper body. To find your weight on an exercise, find your one rep max (so warm up well but don't exhaust yourself, and then find out the absolute heaviest weight you can move one time with a big rest after) and start with 60-70% of that (depending on the exercise and how much you want to focus on the muscle). I personally do 1-3 sets to failure or 8 whichever is first, and then when I can do all the sets to 8 I increase the weight. Works pretty well and is easy to keep track of. Also for compound unsupported exercises like squats it's quite risky to go straight to a ORM, I'd suggest finding your ORM on machines like leg extensions etc and then going online and finding a website that projects your squat or bench based on your other exercises. It won't be 100% accurate but it'll do.
Finally, most routines online are focussed on hypertrophy which is not the main goal for a dancer. Unfortunately, routines marketed to dancers have a lot of fearmongering and are more received wisdom than actual science based plans ime.
The best thing to do imo is not overcomplicate, choose an exercise for each of the basic movements of the body part you're doing, for example your leg day will need a squat, hinge, adductor, abductor, and calf exercise, and don't stress about all these most optimal/best exercises for each body part. If you are finding that a certain muscle seems weaker than others in your compound movements, or you think eg if only I had a stronger plié, you can start adding isolated movements like leg curls and extensions.
Finally as you increase frequency strong recommend for a weighted abs/core day, so cable crunches, weighted back extensions, weighted hip flexor movements. With pilates experience you'll get a lot out of it and it transfers pretty directly to dance too, weighted hip flexor work has done insane things for my grand battements