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How to Build Muscle
Build Your Body with Ballet
Christopher Cuomo, ABC News 20/20 anchor and extreme-fitness investigator for Men's Health, goes toe-to-toe with Alvin Ailey's dancers to learn how they develop world-class jumping power, insanely strong cores, and outrageous flexibility
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Men, Would You Try This?
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1
Strengthen Your Stabilizers
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2
Soup Up Your Squat
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3
Challenge Your Core
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4
Dial in Your Balance
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5
Enhance Your Hops
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6
Get a Lift
Men, Would You Try This?
Image: Thinkstock
Imagine doing this workout barefoot:
Descend into a squat, grab a 130-pound weight, explode upward as you raise it overhead, scamper on your tiptoes for 10 yards, and then slowly lower the weight to a count of eight. Repeat 15 times in 5 minutes. Between lifts, do split jumps and pushups. Sound diabolical, like a page from a Navy SEAL training manual? That's ballet. Modern dancers do this for hours a day every day.
"Dancing demands phenomenal power, extreme flexibility and balance, and high-end aerobic fitness," says Lyle J. Micheli, M.D, a clinical professor of orthopedic surgery at Harvard medical school. It's CrossFit in tights, with ballerinas for barbells. (Video: What's CrossFit?)
Take, for example, Glenn Allen Sims, a 36-year-old star of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in New York City. He's 5'10" and 180 pounds of muscle. But even more impressive, he has gone 15 years without a major injury. He's also an instructor in Horton Technique, named after Lester Horton, an innovative choreographer who turned fitness into art and art into fitness. (For weekly fitness tips and tricks delivered straight to your inbox, sign up for the Men's Health Exercise of the Week newsletter.)
Horton developed a series of body-weight exercises that stress balance, endurance, isometric strength, and explosive power. It also emphasizes flexibility and dynamic stretching: "Length is strength," Sims says. Put another way, you're only as strong as your weakest link, and Sims uses Horton's drills to fortify those links.
Sims invited me and four dancers from Ailey's second company to a 2-hour Horton training session. Some of the moves were way beyond my ability, but the ones described on the next pages are worth mastering . . . if you have the balls to train like a dancer.
Search: How strong are you?
Descend into a squat, grab a 130-pound weight, explode upward as you raise it overhead, scamper on your tiptoes for 10 yards, and then slowly lower the weight to a count of eight. Repeat 15 times in 5 minutes. Between lifts, do split jumps and pushups. Sound diabolical, like a page from a Navy SEAL training manual? That's ballet. Modern dancers do this for hours a day every day.
"Dancing demands phenomenal power, extreme flexibility and balance, and high-end aerobic fitness," says Lyle J. Micheli, M.D, a clinical professor of orthopedic surgery at Harvard medical school. It's CrossFit in tights, with ballerinas for barbells. (Video: What's CrossFit?)
Take, for example, Glenn Allen Sims, a 36-year-old star of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in New York City. He's 5'10" and 180 pounds of muscle. But even more impressive, he has gone 15 years without a major injury. He's also an instructor in Horton Technique, named after Lester Horton, an innovative choreographer who turned fitness into art and art into fitness. (For weekly fitness tips and tricks delivered straight to your inbox, sign up for the Men's Health Exercise of the Week newsletter.)
Horton developed a series of body-weight exercises that stress balance, endurance, isometric strength, and explosive power. It also emphasizes flexibility and dynamic stretching: "Length is strength," Sims says. Put another way, you're only as strong as your weakest link, and Sims uses Horton's drills to fortify those links.
Sims invited me and four dancers from Ailey's second company to a 2-hour Horton training session. Some of the moves were way beyond my ability, but the ones described on the next pages are worth mastering . . . if you have the balls to train like a dancer.
Search: How strong are you?
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