Ballet Stretches to Give Students: What to Send Home This Summer

Every spring, ballet teachers face the same question: what do I send home with students so they don't lose everything over the summer?

The instinct is usually to send a lot. A long conditioning routine, a flexibility sequence, strength exercises, practice combinations. The thinking is that more is better — more practice, more progress, less backsliding when they return in the fall.

The reality is almost always the opposite.

Why Most At-Home Stretching Routines Fail

The routines that actually get done over a school break share three qualities:

• they're short,

• they're simple,

• and they don't require equipment or a lot of space.

Anything longer than 15 minutes, anything that needs a barre or a specific floor surface, anything that feels like homework — it won't happen consistently. And consistency is the entire point.

A student who does five 30-second stretches every day for ten weeks will return to your studio in September meaningfully more flexible than a student who attempted a 45-minute routine three times and gave up. This isn't a motivation problem. It's a design problem. The long routine wasn't built for real life.

The other thing most at-home routines get wrong is alignment. Without a teacher present, students revert to whatever feels comfortable — which is often not the same as what's correct. A stretch done with poor alignment for ten weeks can create compensation patterns that take months to undo. Whatever you send home needs to be specific enough that students can self-monitor their form.

What to Focus On

For most students, flexibility maintenance is the right summer goal — not flexibility gains.

Gains happen in the studio under your supervision. Home practice is about not losing ground.

The areas worth targeting for ballet specifically are ankle flexibility, hip flexors, glutes, and hamstrings. These are the areas that tighten fastest with reduced activity and have the most direct impact on technique when students return.

One detail worth knowing: the body often gains flexibility more efficiently in parallel than in turnout. Ballet class almost always works turned out, which means students spend very little time stretching the structures that need it most. Sending home parallel stretches isn't counterintuitive — it's strategic.

These stretches are meant to be done when students are already warmed up (after a walk, after playing tag with the dog, things like that). The idea that stretching is a good way to warm up is persistent enough that many students and parents still assume otherwise.

What to Actually Send Home

Rather than building your own list of ballet stretches to give students from scratch, I've put together a free Summer Stretching Guide with five stretches targeting the areas above — written clearly enough that students can follow it independently, with alignment cues specific enough that they can self-monitor.

It includes the calf stretch with tape measure, hip flexor stretch, glute stretches with three progression options, box splits, and half-split. Each stretch includes form cues, a 30-second hold, and notes on modifications. There's also a summer stretch challenge log so students can track their consistency — which, as we just established, is the whole game.

If You Want the Same Approach in the Studio

The same philosophy that makes this guide work — specific progressions, clear alignment cues, built for real students in real classes — is what I apply to my lesson plan bundles. The Intermediate Division Unit 1 bundle covers Levels 4 through 6 with the same level of detail, so you're not starting from scratch every time you plan a class either.