Healthy Nutrition For Your Growing Dancer

A dance parent recently asked me if I have any idea what would healthy nutrition be for a teen aged girl who takes a few ballet classes a week.

For a growing ballet dancer, I recommend that junk food be kept to a minimum, and fresh organic foods are eaten as much as possible. Why organic? The hormone disruptors in food laden with pesticides cannot help any child grow up to be healthy. Hormones affect bone growth, muscle strength, and your child's view of the future.

The general guidelines of lean (grass fed or wild caught)proteins, lots of green vegetables (raw with a tasty dip can become a favorite with kids) and salads made with healthy oils, would be good for anyone, especially athletic people.

Learn about HEALTHY FAST FOOD.

Read about NATURAL MUSCLE BUILDING AND WHEY PROTEIN.

Understand BRAIN HEALTH AND OMEGA 3 OILS.

Use a NATURAL ENERGY DRINK without all those food chemicals.

Green vegetables supply calcium and other minerals for proper growth. Healthy oils such as flax seed oil, walnut oil and coconut oil make wonderful salad dressings. These oils contribute to brain function. If your teenager is moody, get them oils with omega 3 fatty acids in them. Unfortunately, the regular bleached super market oils are not the ones that help them grow.

Snacks that help a young dancer would be celery, nuts and seeds. The oils and trace minerals in these foods will get them more mileage than a pizza. O.K., have pizza once a week, but it is not good snack food.

Your dancing daughter or son will have a real struggle with the stress of competition in ballet and the physical demands if they eat the typical modern diet. I hope you'll read the articles listed above for more detail. But this is for you too, the concerned dance parent. It should be your diet too. It is anti-aging, and your dancer will have you around longer!

Personal Charisma And A Professional Ballet Career

A mother worries about her dancing daughter; the director of the ballet school her daughter attends has said that her strength is her personality and the fact that people like to watch her dance. Will it make up for the fact she is not the most technical dancer? And that she has a good-enough but not ideal ballet body?

If everyone is doing the same steps and shouldn't they all presumably look the same? Is personal charisma something that any child can learn or develop?

When your dancing daughter or son has a wonderful quality to their work that is unique to them, they truly have a gift. Anyone with the right physique can learn ballet, but when eyes are drawn to a dancer it puts her/him apart from many of the other dancers. Many dancers spend years in the corp de ballet because they are excellent dancers, but their gift, ironically, is blending in. They just don't have an extra spark or magnetism that draws people's attention to them.

It is wonderful when a child is accepted into a professional ballet career training program when they don't have the perfect ballet body but their personal charisma is so obvious to those holding the auditions.

I always hope these gifted performers never eye the perfect ballet bodies that do show up in professional ballet schools and feels lesser-than in some way.

Less charismatic dancers who later in their training take some acting lessons will blossom in a way that their teachers may not have expected them to. And some become more noticeable just because they grow up and develop confidence.

One way to increase your child's confidence is to get them THE BALLET BIBLE.

(And remember to get The Parents Manual for f*ree!)