Looking Ahead to Melbourne

Dance for Health · IADMS, Dance for Parkinson's Australia & Dance for PD

A Global Lead-In Day for Dance for Health in Melbourne

The day before the conference begins, on 23 September, IADMS, Dance for Parkinson's Australia and Dance for PD jointly host a one-day community gathering at The Australian Ballet in Melbourne. The focus is on current developments in Dance for Health: inclusive facilitation across populations and life stages, falls prevention through dance, and evidence-informed teaching strategies that support rehabilitation, healthy ageing and social connection. Participants can then move seamlessly into the IADMS conference's first day, which carries its own Dance for Health track. An example of how research, practice and community-based facilitation are increasingly intertwined – beyond classical stage dance medicine.

LAG Tanz NRW

Dance Medicine as a Fixed Pillar in Teacher Training

With the new training year underway, the Landesarbeitsgemeinschaft Tanz NRW has published its "move on" programme for 2026/27. As in previous years, it rests on four fixed pillars: dance pedagogy, dance art, dance medicine, and organisation and legal basics. The coming programme year features two dedicated dance medicine sessions: physiotherapist and former professional dancer Deniz Cakir covers practical approaches to load management, recovery and warm-up design, while psychologist Paula Archangelo Cakir addresses stress regulation and mental health in the dance profession. For CENIT, this is a good example of how dance medicine knowledge can be structurally embedded in the training of dance educators – not only on stages and in companies, but across the breadth of dance teaching.

Retrospective cohort study · Journal of Dance Medicine & Science · Sept. 2026

Ten Years of Screening Data: What a Test-Battery Approach Means for Practice

A study by DeLuca Watson, Lasner and Hada, appearing in the September issue of the Journal of Dance Medicine & Science, analyses ten years of screening data from dance students in a US college programme. Six tests from the so-called DanceFIT Injury Prevention Screen were recorded: the Functional Movement Screen, Beighton Scale, Harvard Step Test, Y-Balance Test, and core stability and turnout tests. The findings provide robust normative data for the first time and show that dancers improve most between their first and second year of study. The authors propose raising the current Functional Movement Screen cut-off score for dancers and using screening results more deliberately to shape teaching. A timely, practice-oriented contribution to standardising prevention screening at the start of the season – one of the biggest open problems in dance medicine research (see this month's glossary term).

J Dance Med Sci 2026, 30(3), 293–307 · DOI 10.1177/1089313X251358325 · PMID 40801141 · Sept. 2026

Scoping review (PRISMA-ScR) · BMC Sports Science, Medicine and Rehabilitation · May 2026

Blood Flow Restriction Training: Promising, but Not Yet Validated for Dancers

A scoping review published in May 2026, conducted to the PRISMA-ScR standard, examines blood flow restriction (BFR) training – strength training under reduced blood flow at loads as low as 20 to 30 percent of one-repetition maximum – as an option for lower-limb injury rehabilitation and prevention. Because dancers sustain such injuries at disproportionately high rates and standard rehabilitation protocols rarely account for their specific constraints – concern over altered aesthetics from muscle hypertrophy, narrow recovery windows dictated by performance schedules, poor tolerance for heavy loading soon after surgery – BFR looks promising in principle. Yet of the 17 studies included, evidence concentrates almost entirely on rehabilitation after anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction; only two studies on chronic ankle instability enrolled dance athletes at all, and dancer-specific outcomes such as return-to-stage readiness are entirely absent. A clear signal of how much foundational dance medicine research is still missing before promising approaches from elite sport can be directly transferred.

BMC Sports Sci Med Rehabil 2026, 18, 308 · DOI 10.1186/s13102-026-01701-0 · PMID 42121243 · Mai 2026