Ballet Feet at Any Age: Practical Tips for Adult Beginners

By Chelsea Weidmann, ballet educator with 29 years of teaching experience and author of Artistry Inside Ballet Technique

Nine times out of ten, adult beginners pick up concepts more quickly than children. The extra time you’ve spent in your body, plus your motivation and your abstract, analytical thinking, really add up. But none of those bonuses seem to help when it comes to ballet feet..

Ballet Feet for Adult Beginners: Why It’s Harder

A few things are working against you:

• Years in shoes that limit foot mobility. High heels, pointy-toed shoes, flip-flops, stiff-soled sneakers... They’re so cute but so not great for foot health.

• Feeling squeamish about feet. Lots of people think their feet are “gross,” and plenty of adult dancers would rather a teacher not touch their feet, even when they’re fine with corrective touch on their legs or arms. If that’s you, you’re in good company.

• Getting on the floor. Getting up and down gets harder for many adults, often sooner than you’d expect, and reaching your feet takes more flexibility than some beginners have. That makes a lot of classic foot stretches and strengthening exercises less appealing.

Foot-Friendly Ways to Build Ballet Feet

Building strength and flexibility in adult feet is definitely not a lost cause. Your analytical thinking is a real advantage here, because you can ask how your feet work in each exercise and why. For example:

Pliés: Plié is more about the hips, knees, and ankles, but if you relax your toes during plié you’ll go down farther. Imagining the longitudinal arch of your foot getting even longer, from heel to past the toes, also helps, and it encourages mobility in the muscles of the arch. Not a ton of mobility, but it’s a great starting place.

Tendus: Tendu means “stretched,” so imagine your foot is a label on an Amazon package that you’re trying to peel off. Start with the heel, carefully move to the ball of the foot, and finally it’s just the tips of the toes on the ground. You know how satisfying it is when that label comes off in one piece? A gorgeous tendu feels just as satisfying.

Dégagés: I’m not a fan of slow dégagés. Doing them faster than tendus prepares you better for jumps, so the label-peeling image stops working. Instead, imagine sweeping something disdainful off the floor, or better, lots of little somethings, like crumbs on a counter. Just as you use most of your hand to start gathering crumbs and then switch to your fingertips as they reach the edge, you start with your whole foot and finish with just your toes.

This is where your abstract thinking can be really fun. It doesn’t have to be crumbs. You can sweep away unread emails or your coworker’s strong opinions about hairless cats.

You get the idea. Go through each barre exercise and ask how and why your foot is working in it, and you can make real progress toward the ballet feet you thought were out of reach.

What’s your favorite way to think about foot articulation? Share it in the comments!

Bring that thinking to your whole dance

Adult beginners come with a real superpower: you like to understand how things work. Artistry is no different. The Ballet Artistry Deck gives you six prompts for each of nine elements of artistry, so you can explore expression from your very first class.

Get the Deck