There’s literally nothing more distracting to me than a floppy foot in the air, but fixing it for all of my students isn’t as simple as you might think. Executing aerial with beautiful and controlled feet is a combination of neuromuscular control, flexibility and strength training. When these things come together, you’ll have the mental capacity in the air to think about your feet.
We all want beautifully pointed feet, but most people don’t have ones that are naturally flexible. You’ve been there when a classmate effortlessly points them beautifully and says, “You mean like this?” If you’re anything like me, that’s when you shoot darts at them with your eyes from across the studio. On the other hand, it may be even worse when it turns out my friend who’s a corporate guy has an amazing natural ballet point and doesn’t even know he’s sitting on a gold mine. That’s just a waste!
The only way someone who doesn’t have natural dancer’s feet achieves a nice point is to train ankle and foot flexibility over a long period of time. This process is easier if you start young, but it’s possible for anyone to gain some improvement with a consistent training regimen. I don’t have natural dance feet, but I have been training them since I was five years old. For those who didn’t have that neuromuscular training from a young age, you have the unenviable job of making those connections as adults. In order to get you started on your journey, you’ll need to assess where your problems are and from there you can start improving your foot point. Anything is possible, but it’s like learning a new language or instrument from scratch.
What Is A Good Foot Point?
Correct alignment ranges from neutral, which is a straight line between the knee, ankle and third toe, to the foot arching outwards towards the pinky. Then, to create the line we want, we must extend through the all the joints and point the entire foot and ankle. Imagine an invisible line of energy shooting through and past your body. This is one reason that dancers’ lines look super lengthened.
Ballerinas are known for their unnaturally high arches, which is achieved through heavy training as children on top of naturally flexible feet. The look of it is amazing, but don’t put pressure on yourself as an adult to achieve it. We can only work with what we have and sometimes a big gain is just improving your toe curl.
The opposite of a ballet point is what we call a sickle. It’s when the foot curves the opposite way with the toes arching inwards. Sometimes in aerial, we have no choice but to do it because that’s what the technique calls for, but we must be mindful so we don’t do it unintentionally. If you’re sickling without intending to, you probably have a combination of weak and tight outer shin muscles, a lack of flexibility in the ankle and/or you’re simply not being mindful of it. It’s not pretty and can be painful in a foot lock when the taut fabric yanks the ankle out of alignment. When in the air, try to be in correct alignment unless a skill calls for a sickle.
Assess Your Feet
The foot has a total of 33 joints so there’s a lot of opportunity to articulate through the feet as we move. Ballet training teaches us to separate at the joints and this is a big key to improving your point in the air. When you go from a flex to a point, first extend the ankle joint and shorten the Achilles tendon as much as possible. The more your heel slides under your ankle the better. Continue by pushing your metatarsals downwards (your mid-foot) and finally curl your toes to complete the line. To flex from there, reverse the process step by step. Everyone may mentally register the peak position of a point, which is the foot at full extension, but a lot of what is attractive about the feet is the presentation of the joints moving to get to the peak position.
Which joints of yours have more mobility? Perhaps your ankle can barely move but your toes move quite well. If your feet are flat or some degree of flat, pointing can be super frustrating. Maybe you have high arches and your ankle joint moves easily, but your toes refuse to curl. I’ve got a couple students who wear heels at work every day. Not surprisingly, they have high arches and shorted Achilles tendons because their shoes have “trained” their feet by stretching the metatarsals and shortening the back of the ankle over time. That might sound great, but these same women have no toe curl because their feet are used to being flexed at that joint, they have a tough time flexing the ankle and most of them have tight hamstrings and muscle imbalances all the way up the leg.
I’m not advocating heel wearing as a training tool because there are better ways to stretch the top of the feet, but I mention it to bring attention to what “training” actually is. Training the body is just doing something repetitively until it obeys. As you do the exercises in the video, take notice of what’s easy and what’s not to assess your feet. If you find out that your toes won’t curl for example, then you know what you need to focus on.
Controlling Your Feet In The Air
My students struggle with controlling what their feet do in the air because they’re busy thinking about a million other things, such as not falling, not getting lost in the wrap, assessing how much fuel they have, second guessing themselves, breathing, not throwing up, etc. You name it, the thought has crossed someone’s mind up there. The feeling of being overwhelmed is real.
How do professionals focus on performing when the pressure is on? Are we thinking of a million things in the air plus pointing our feet? The answer is no, but it’s not from a lack of mindfulness. Our brains don’t go into panic mode because the years of training kick in. The hundreds and thousands of times a professional’s body has practiced something will do its job so that we can focus on emoting and connecting with the audience. Movement training makes your brain to body connection strong so you can command your muscles to do your bidding. Flexibility training gives you range of motion through the joints so that you can make the desired shapes. Aerial is a mental and physical game and we need to train both equally.
Another common problem worth mentioning is foot cramping in the air. From my experience, this is caused by a lack of training, dehydration and muscular imbalances across the bottom of the feet. I used to struggle with foot cramping in dance class all of the time as a kid, but as long as I warmed up well and stayed hydrated, then it was no longer a problem. If you’re experiencing a cramp in air which prevents you from pointing, try to flex and point three times ending with the point and see if it takes the edge off. There’s also side effects from an adult pointing and flexing as hard as they can on silks all of a sudden after a lifetime of never doing it. It’s like intensely working out any other body part for the first time when you’re just not used to it. When you feel pain, take all of the steps you would for any sore and achy muscles such as rest, stretch, massage and keep on training.
Are Your Feet Healthy To Begin With?
If your foot muscles are imbalanced and painfully tight, they must be loosened before building greater flexibility and strength. How do you know if you are too tight to begin strengthening? Grab a lacrosse ball and step on it. Investigate the bottom of your foot and take note of your pain levels in different spots. If this exercise is excruciating, then you’ll know that you need to loosen the muscles. Use the ball to loosen up or massage your feet.
Stretch Your Point
Plantar flexion is when the top of the foot is extended and pointed. Stretch the top of your feet on the floor daily making sure to stretch up towards the ankle all the way down to the toes so that they will have the ROM to curl. Flexibility must come before strength and if your flexibility will not allow your body to create a shape, then muscling it won’t help. If this seems overwhelming to do on your own, try dropping in to an adult ballet class.
- Foot Stretch: With one knee on your mat, place a yoga block between your heel and glute (butt cheek) on the same side and take a seat on the block. With the other foot, align the ankle straight and tuck your toes under. Your ankle should be neutral and pointed. Use your hands to gently press your ankle forward to stretch the top of your foot for forty five seconds to a minute. The block is there to give you some height and leverage to push forward.
Command & Do
Being able to point your toes in the air starts with telling your feet to do so. We command our bodies to do our bidding everyday of our lives, the difference is, you’re normally not thinking of it. It becomes automatic just like speaking your first language or utilizing the motor control it takes to brush your teeth and get dressed in the morning. You’re able to do these things because you learned in a progressive manner as a child.
As we already established, if your body is not yet trained to point your feet, it’s not going to naturally happen without intention and effort. More specifically, stretch the top of the foot and curl the toes. You must think of it, concentrate then execute. Think about pointing then do it while you’re in the air. I’m sure we can all agree that your feet aren’t going to point if you ignore them. Neuromuscular control is having command of your body by successfully telling it what to do and it’s impossible to have this control if you’re not concentrating.
It’s Not The First Thing
Let’s be real. You are already concentrating on about a million things when you’re in the air. Pointing the feet isn’t the first thing you think about if you’re a beginner adult working on something new. It probably comes behind holding your weight, executing the wrap, remembering safety rules and other things like breathing and not panicking. Consequently, you need to be sure of all of it first. Training your foot point in any skill will happen as you practice it repeatedly instead of the first time you learn it. This is one of the many reasons why repetition is the key to success in your practice as a whole. Without it, you’ll never get to the point where you can work on your toe point in the air.
Skill Specific
Watch your videos and examine when you seem to have more of an issue pointing your feet. Is it more common on particular skills or are you all over the place? Does it occur more in your transitions, when you’re waiting to drop or perhaps it’s just when you’re fatigued?
If your uncontrolled feet rear their ugly head on specific tricks, but seem fine in others, then maybe it’s something about that particular skill. Perhaps there’s something about that one trick that makes you nervous or forgetful of your feet. For example, in Angel Dive Roll aka Fallen Angel, we secure the Salto with egg beaters around the legs. It’s very common to see students flex their feet in anticipation of the egg beaters falling off. Or in hip key, students forget all about their feet because they’re distracted with getting the fabric high on their thighs and getting their pelvis to curl. Experiment by practicing the skill with an active flex for it’s entirety (unless the flex makes it unsafe.) Is it equally as hard to flex the entire time as it is to point? This will help you decipher if it’s the point that your body doesn’t want to retain or if it’s resistant to any neuromuscular command.
Perhaps you suffer more from overwhelm muscle disobedience. The solution to this problem is repetition. If you practice the skill over and over, it will eventually shrink the long list of things that you’re thinking about. It will slowly creep into your muscle memory leaving space for you to concentrate on other things like pointing your feet!
If you struggle with pointing your feet in the air, try not to feel bad about it. With the exception of a small percentage of the population, it doesn’t come naturally to most people. If you train your foot and ankle flexibility consistently on the ground, then you’ll have the neuromuscular control of your feet when you’re in the air. Maybe you feel like your teachers sound like a broken record when they keep nagging you about this, but we have a good reason. One way to get the brain to body connection to fire is to be constantly reminded to make the connection. Long story short, I say it until I don’t have to anymore. Over time, I don’t have to keep reminding the same students over and over again because their bodies have started to obey their brains. If your teacher is always yelling at you to point your feet, they’re actually just nagging your neuromuscular connection to fire.