bad turnout

[Guest emttech]

i was wondering how can a make my turn out beter and how can i hold it longer

 

it sucks

that and one leg i longer then the other

you can really tell when i am in 5th

 

i didnt know where to post so you can move if you want

[Guest abcfordance]

Have you been told by a doctor or physio that one leg is longer than the other? If so were you told to wear a lift in your street shoes? If you were, then you should be wearing a lift in your ballet slippers too. You can get some great gel ones at the drugstore and just have to play around with how much height you need (since they compress) and what will fit in your shoe.

 

Without adding the lift to the shoe you will be compensating for shorter leg. Some very common adjustments ballet dancers make are:

 

Sitting in the hip

Not putting the heel down on the short leg

Adding pelvic rotation to pull one side back to make room

Hyperextending in the knee

Adjusting the upper body to "square the hips" caused by a lower body imbalance

Turning out one leg more than another

Softening one knee to allow it to close fully

 

Turnout is the act of rotating both legs away from each other at the hip socket, using very deep muscles (6 of them) in the hip area. If you have any of the compensation patterns listed above, this will affect your turnout. If you are not able to engage the muscles on both sides of your body evenly for turnout, you will not produce the results you are looking for.

[Victoria Leigh]

emttech, if you are an adult ballet student, then this is the right place to post your questions. However, you have been a member since January, so I would hope that you might have spent a bit of time reading some of the topics on Ballet Talk. There are hundreds of them about rotation and how to improve it. Just a little search using either turn out or rotation will bring up pages and pages of information. There are also topics in the Archives about this.

 

As for the shorter leg, that has been very nicely addressed above, by abcfordance. Thank you, abc.

 

emttech, I would really appreciate if you would read through your posts before hitting the Reply button. We all make a typo once in a while, but your post is barely legible. There is an Edit button at the top of your post, so that you can make corrections after you have posted it too.