How Ballet can help a Football player Improve his skills - Thesis Example

There is certainly a commonality between the coordination of ballet dancers as they swap position, move in and out, to the front and to the back of the stage, and the coordination of football players as they coordinate defense and offense, position themselves vis-a-vis the opposing team, etc. Further, both activities share immensely similar physical skills. Both require poise, balance, grace, rhythm, coordination, timing, and lower body strength. Further, male ballet roles involve lifting a partner while themselves often being one leg or on tiptoes, a skill that is directly fungible to tackling.

Swann agrees: “[Ballet and dance] helped a great deal with body control, balance, a sense of rhythm, and timing” (Time, 1999). In fact, ballet might be more beneficial to football players than to dancers. Anyone who has seen a large, muscular person struggling to do a pull-up knows that, pound for pound, it is actually easier to raise a smaller body than a larger body up the way a ballet dancer does. For someone weighing two hundred to three hundred pounds to be able to put all of that weight onto tiptoes is an incredible feat.

Indeed, the usage of many disciplines like ballet, dance, yoga, mixed martial arts, karate and Tai Chi has become entirely commonplace among football for the last twenty years (Pollack, 2005). It is a little bit of a cliché among sports-writers to write a story on this topic, in fact (Pollack, 2005). However, there is a surprising dearth of actual comparative evidence for these claims, as sensible and plausible as they might be. Pollack notes that, while football players have embraced yoga, dance and karate/MMA, so has everyone else.

These are common in the broader culture. How much better are they than comparable bodybuilding techniques like weightlifting, running exercises and football drills? My proposal for a study to test the efficacy of ballet versus other types of football training is to study two teams