I was aware of professional bodybuilders using ballet as a way to help with their stage posing showdowns. I was also slightly familiar with others athletes like track & field performers and some gymnasts using ballet but not footballers.
Apparently ballet assists with strength, flexibility, in addition to endurance for non-ballet practitioners and performers.
Enter 6’1, 190 plus pound, West VA Mountaineers wide receiver Ricky Rogers. DANCE MAJOR!
Makes perfect sense. ballet like martial arts requires intense concentration and discipline and conditions your body with great flexibility and endurance.
Keeps you light on your feet and dancers are shredded.
I may be having another one of my false repressed memories (no Uncle Jake, no!) but I remember an Odd Couple episode or some other sitcom where a football player was taking ballet to help him on the field.
Now I gotta look it up.
I love this.Dancers and martial artistis have specialized strengths not developed in any other discipline.Either skill will condition your body in ways that never leave you,even after years of lost practice.
Twinkle toes…..
One step away from pirouetting into a touchdown.
that kinda cool, that he man enough to say hey i like dance and it don't take anything away from my masculinity to be into Ballet, and in the end the Ballet is helping him with his "manly" sport of football giving him better conditions your body with great flexibility. so its making him a better player.
Wow! Fascinating!!
Several members of my high school football and basketball team were also dance major, these guys were classically trained ballet dancers and as you noted there are net positive benefits of achieving ultimate core strength and crazy ridiculous flexibility. It was also a plus to see these gents in white tights dancing russian ballet. LOL. My performing arts high school days were the best.
Aww..
This is super cool, plus he's cute.
Its always great to watch masc guys trying to do ballet. The irony is that even though its considered 'gay', ballet actually has a lot more straight men than hip hop, because internationally, it doesn't have the same stigma it has in the states.
Love this! Many of the guys on the site may not have been old enough to see Lynn Swann play. However, he was a pioneer in recognizing that dance could give an athlete incredible body control:
Question: Lynn, did you ever watch a replay of some of your great Super Bowl plays and said, “I should have been a ballerina.”?
A few members of the crowd begin to chuckle, and Swann asks them, “Why are you laughing?” He then goes on to say that he took dance for about fourteen years. “A lot of tap, a lot of jazz, and a little bit of the ballet” says Swann. “I think everybody brings their skill set to the table whatever it might be… I always felt that body control was a great asset.”
The crowd is then shown a picture of one of Swann’s most famous catches (sometimes referred to as The Levitating Leap) from Super Bowl Ten. “The body control… the body control became very important. I could not have made that catch (on that screen) if I hadn’t taken dance, and didn’t have that kind of body control.”
To see a video of the catch Lynn Swann was referring to in the interview click HERE:
“I could not have made that catch… if I hadn’t taken dance, and didn’t have that kind of body control.” Lynn Swann ~ Super Bowl 10 MVP ~ Pro Football Hall of Fame
DOPE AF