Teaching what we know and what we are passionate about makes for great courses.

The first offering of Pivot Dancer’s new course; “Clinical taping skills with dance-specific adaptations” was a success. Clinical taping has traditionally been taught as athletic taping with the purpose of use for supporting a return to sport post-injury. Taping is used in emergency care on the side of a sporting event, return to play and for managing chronic issues that need a little TLC.  Interestingly, there isn’t anything in the traditional sports curriculum for using tape specifically for dancers.

We know that dancers use tape and we know that no one is teaching them how to effectively use tape so, we developed a course to bridge the gap. I am a Registered International Sport Physiotherapist and I work with dancers. I spent a decade on Canadian Olympic medical teams and I examine new Sport Physiotherapists in the Sport Physio Canada system.

I am very passionate about high performance and delivering expert care to the athletes I work with. I am also extremely passionate about dance science and think there is a lot of knowledge from the sports science world that should be shared in dance.  The trick is effectively adapting and packaging the materials in meaningful ways for dancers. 

This is where the magic happens; I took evidence-based practice in sport and clinical expertise in dance to create a clinical skills course that offered dance science clinicians an opportunity to learn sports science skills in a meaningful way for them.  The attendees were able to learn and apply the principles and practices of traditional sports taping and then apply those same principles to the adaptations effective for dancers.  It was fantastic!

I will definitely offer this course again and will develop other clinical courses for dance science to bridge gaps with knowledge for sport and share learned experiences.

Dinah Hampson BA, BScPT, RISPT, FCAMPT