Dance Rehabilitation
As a dancer, you demand a lot of your body.
You're in good company with our therapists
We have over 20 years of experience helping dancers do what they love doing: dance. Several of our physical therapists are former dancers and specialize in dance rehabilitation. Our therapists work with Oregon Ballet Theatre, Body Vox, NW Dance Project, the Portland Ballet, and Broadway touring productions. We can help dancers across many disciplines including ballet, modern, belly, ballroom, Irish, Flamenco, cheer, gymnastics, and even aerial arts.
Our practice begins with you
Dance rehabilitation physical therapy begins with an integrative biomechanical analysis of your body to determine the cause of your injury. We will assess your overall level of conditioning and focus our treatment on healing the specific weak or injured body part. We provide a specific dance space with full length mirrors, ballet barre, and marley floor to analyze your technique. Video analysis may be incorporated into your plan of care to help isolate and correct movement pattern disorders.
4 out of 5 dancers experience injuries due to overuse during their career.
How we treat
We believe that successful treatment is the result of consistency in care. Our model is designed to foster this concept and is, frankly, unique in Portland. Typically, you will work with the same physical therapist throughout your rehabilitation. This partnership will help you achieve your goals, ensuring your progress is closely monitored and quickly address any issues or concerns to keep your recovery on track.
Physical therapy and retraining can help you return to dance.
Knee and Hip
The knee and hip require a significant amount of stabilization and strength to help absorb the shock during repetitive jumping and turning. Evaluating flexibility and strength of these joints will help you with end-range positions such as arabesque or developpé, where both the standing leg and the gesture leg are working.
Functional Turn Out
Research has found that a majority of professional dancers have recurrent injuries due to forcing their turnout, with 36% of these injuries starting before age 18. We can assist you with improving your technique and reducing over-utilization of your back, core, hip, and lower leg.
Health and Healing Come Together
Your activities and your passion are at the core of our focus on treatment. Our therapists have expertise and experience in dance, so we understand where you're coming from and where you want to go.
Foot and Ankle
The foot and ankle are the most frequently injured body parts for a dancer. This is often due to repetitive motions leading to overuse injuries, reduced strength or flexibility of the muscles, poor joint mobility in the foot (either too much or too little joint motion), or tendon inflammation. You can reduce your risk of further injury through complete strengthening and balance activities which we will specifically design for your body and style of dance.
Spine
Research has shown that dance-related back pain is frequently due to an imbalance of strength and flexibility of the core and back muscles. Dancers require extreme range of motion in the back in order to accomplish basic movements such as an arabesque. This increase in mobility in the spine can predispose you to injury. With biomechanical assessment of your choreography, we can suggest modifications or corrections to your form. This will allow you to experience improved healthy motion without excessive range of motion in the spine.
Onsite Care and Analysis
Research shows that onsite care for the dancer can reduce injuries and medical costs. As part of our services we offer treatment for dancers during performance week which is important for reducing injury. In addition, we are available to analyze choreography and provide injury prevention education to individuals, classes, or full companies.
Ready to Get Started?
A quick phone call to our clinic is all that is necessary to get you started on your road to recovery and better health.
- Mon – Fri: 6:00 am – 7:00 pm
- Sat - Sun: closed
