While full of excitement and fun, competitions are also mentally and physically taxing. It’s easy to find yourself run down after months of rehearsing and performing for hours on end every week. How can both teachers and dancers keep normal fatigue from turning into burnout? By recognizing the telltale signs and making small but meaningful changes.

For many dancers, being part of a competitive team is just a short chapter in a long dance journey. But the personal bonds built at competitions and conventions can last a lifetime. These three pairs of dancers who forged their friendships on the comp circuit show that having a tried-and-true teammate in your corner can make a big difference in the professional dance world, too.

How can students leave it all on the floor without hurting themselves? Ensuring that both teachers and dancers approach these rigorous weekends with safety in mind can go a long way toward preventing frequent convention injuries.

Convention ballrooms are always exciting, but sometimes they can also be overwhelming, with hundreds of dancers jockeying for space—and attention—on the carpeted floor. Whether it’s your first time attending a convention or you’re a seasoned faculty member, everyone has a role to play to keep jam-packed classes feeling safe and uplifting. Here’s how teachers can manage crowded convention environments, and how students can navigate them.

Keeping competition routines in tip-top shape is always labor-intensive—but especially when the number is the work of a guest choreographer, who may have set it months ago and probably isn’t available to oversee the cleaning process. Here’s how to polish even the smallest details of a guest artist’s routine without altering the piece’s integrity.

Judging dance competitions demands a unique blend of skills, from articulating useful corrections on the fly to staying focused for hours at a time. With just a few minutes to see and score each routine, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by everything you may want to say—or, worse, to have nothing to say at all. Here’s how to stay organized, alert, and constructive during long judging days.

In many ways, life on the circuit has been preparing comp kids for professional auditions all along. Here’s how to best leverage your competition experience in an audition setting.

Winning the title of “Mr. or Miss [insert competition name here]” has long been considered the pinnacle of a competitive career. For decades, whether dancers actually identified with those gendered accolades—or the many other gender-based features of competition and convention weekends—was hardly ever questioned. Slowly, that’s beginning to change.