Screening for Functional Capacity in Dancers Designing Standardized, Dance-Specific Injury Prevention Screening Tools

Abstract

Well-designed screening tools that measure functional capacity in dancers can yield powerful objective data for the dance educator and clinician. Integrating concepts from the broader disciplines of epidemiology, outcomes, and ergonomics, dance science professionals can develop specific tests to establish normative values for their group in order to set injury-prevention, training adaptation, and skill-acquisition goals with individual dancers. Suggestions for standardization procedures to enhance comparisons within and between dance populations are presented along with examples of traditional and dance-specific screening tests.