Youth Performing Arts, Dance Training, Injury Prevention

“Why Can’t I Do That?” What Your Dancer’s Body Is Actually Telling You

This came out of a conversation I had recently with Karina Klepach on the Thriving Dancers Podcast. She told me a story about her daughter's feet. No arch, ever. They'd tried massage, stretching, every trick. One teacher's explanation was that it was just genetics and there was nothing to be done about it.

That answer never sat right with her. And she was right not to accept it.

Here's what most people miss when a dancer's body won't do what she's asking it to do: a muscle doesn't decide to be tight. It's relaying a signal from the brain. So the real question is never "why is this tight." It's "why is the body sending that signal in the first place."

The question underneath the question

When I evaluate a dancer, I'm not just checking if a muscle is short or long. I'm asking why there's too much tension in one place and not enough control in another. What didn't move, that should have moved, to get this dancer where she's trying to go.

That question matters because the answer is rarely where the pain is. A knee that hurts might be compensating for a hip. A hip that won't rotate might be compensating for a foot. Chasing the sore spot without asking what it's covering for is how dancers end up stuck in the same conversation for years.

Anatomy isn't always the villain, and it isn't always fixable by trying harder

Some of what looks like a limitation is actually just how a dancer is built. The angle of a hip socket. The rotation of a shin bone. These aren't flaws. They're variation, and they mean certain positions will always cost one dancer more than they cost the girl next to her.

A hip socket set at a certain angle. A shin bone with more rotation than average. These aren't corrections waiting to happen. They're simply how that dancer is built, and they mean certain positions will always cost her more than they cost the girl next to her.

That's the distinction worth teaching your dancer, and it's the same distinction I was drawing on with that professional dancer. Some things about her body are simply hers to work with. Others, like a fifteen-to-twenty-degree gap nobody ever asked about, are patterns that formed because something got missed, and they can still change.

What to actually do with this

If your dancer keeps saying "I still can't do this" after real effort and real time, that's not defiance and it's not always anatomy either. It's information. Bring it to her teacher as a genuine question, not a complaint: "It's been a couple months and this still isn't clicking. What do you think the missing piece is?"

Most teachers want that conversation. They're managing a room of twenty or more dancers, all moving through the same drills. They're not always positioned to catch what one dancer's body is quietly asking for. That's not malice. That's the shape of the job. A specific question, asked with curiosity instead of frustration, tends to open doors that pushing harder never will.

The trust underneath all of it

The dancers who do best long term aren't the ones with the fewest anatomical quirks. They're the ones who learn to work with the body they actually have instead of the one they wish they had. That takes a kind of trust. Trust that the body isn't broken, it's communicating. Trust that a "no" from a joint or a muscle is data, not a dead end.

That trust is worth protecting in a young dancer, long before she ever has to decide whether to keep dancing at all.

This is just one thread from a much longer conversation. If you want the whole thing, Karina and I talked about a lot more on theThriving Dancers Podcast, including what actually makes a dancer thrive and what dance moms can focus on to support that.

Jena Hansen-Honeycutt, DAT, LAT, ATC is a dance medicine athletic trainer and clinical educator and founder of The Skilled Collection. She works with dancers, cheerleaders, figure skaters, and hypermobile athletes, and the clinicians who care for them.

© 2026 ThriveWell Consulting LLC. This post is for educational purposes and is not a substitute for medical advice.