How To Improve Your Turnout Range!

I get so many questions on how to improve dancers’ turnout, that I thought that a post on the topic was well overdue.

The thing to remember is that your turnout is dictated by a few different things. How much you have and how much you use are often two different things! Also how much you have is determined by a combination of the bony shape of your pelvis, the ligaments that hold your hips together, and the flexibility of the muscles that lie around the hip.

Now, it is pretty hard to change the bony structure of your hips, and after a certain age the hip ligaments also get a little stiff, but the one thing that we can always influence is how tight the muscles around the hips are.

If your turnout muscles are a bit tight, they can actually limit your turnout range. Here is a trick I use to reduce the tension in the back of the hips, by using a tennis ball to release off the trigger points in the muscles, and it helps open out your turnout beautifully.

Lie on your back with your knees bent and gently roll the tennis ball along the outer edge of your tail bone, and into your buttocks, until you feel a tight point.
Hold it there, focusing on breathing to let go of the muscle tension, and hold for about 4 breaths, or until the pain starts to drop down.
Then move off to another point, and do about four of these.
Make sure that your focus is on consciously releasing the tension in your muscles, rather than holding tension in the Gluteals.
Make sure that you stretch out your turnout muscles afterwards, with a stretch such as the Piriformis Stretch, shown in the Turnout Video.

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