Sleep is an essential tool for wellness and performance, and in the same way that you can use good nutrition to fuel your dancing, you can use it to enhance the quality of your sleep.

Dancers shouldn’t feel stressed or worried about eating cheese. Before you opt out of cheesy goodness, consider this: Association does not equal causation, and the research correlating cheese with heart disease was surely not conducted on active dancers.

Dancers know they need to eat well to fuel their performance. However, pervasive messages from diet culture, combined with dancers’ perfectionistic tendencies, often lead them to label certain foods as “bad.” In addition to damaging your overall relationship with food, dietitians say this habit could lead you to miss out on some real nutritional benefits. […]

You probably wouldn’t follow the cross-training regimen of a football player, or do the same stretches as a soccer star. So are sports supplements aimed at other athletes even useful for high-level dancers? To find out which ones could boost your performance—and which could actually tank your hard work—we spoke with two dancers-turned-dietitians. Protein Powder […]

Stephan Azulay has been helping out in the kitchen ever since he was a kid. “My dad’s a flamenco dancer, and part of the flamenco culture is food,” he says. When he began dancing professionally with Joffrey Ballet Concert Group and then Nevada Ballet Theatre, Azulay looked to restaurants for side gigs—everything from washing dishes […]

The benefits of eating raw fruits and veggies are clear. The nutrients! The fiber! But can an all-raw diet be too much of a good thing? If you’re tempted to try the Instagram trend yourself, proceed with caution. “The evidence in favor of a raw diet is often anecdotal rather than researched,” says Chicago-based registered […]

Seeking control over the uncontrollable is a common coping mechanism we all use when we’re stressed. For dancers, that can manifest as a tendency to overanalyze meals and obsessively monitor daily calorie burn: When weight and body-image anxieties lurk alongside the unfortunate encouragement of those behaviors within our culture, it’s easy to say, “Hey, let […]

As a student, Maria Caruso was told that her body might be better suited to modern dance than ballet. “But I didn’t want to give up my pointe shoes,” she says. “So then I was told to get a breast reduction. To change the way my body looks. And I just didn’t understand that. Why […]