What to Do When Your Ballet Students Still Sickle

You've corrected it a hundred times. You've demonstrated the correct shape. You've even pulled out the anatomy chart. And yet—there they are, sickling again.

Here's the thing: most beginning and elementary dancers sickle because the medial (inside) ankle ligaments are naturally stronger. It's just part of being human. Our anatomy doesn't care about ballet aesthetics.

But part of being a ballet dancer is learning to create the shape the art form demands. This means that ballet students must learn to engage the muscles on the outside of the lower leg. And the key word there is learning—which means we need to actually teach it, not just correct it.

Why Verbal Corrections Aren't Enough

When you say "don't sickle," students often have no idea what to do differently. They might overcorrect into a winged position. They might relax their whole foot. Or they might fix it for three seconds and then drift right back.

The problem isn't that they're not listening. The problem is that they can't feel that they are sickling.

This is where somatic awareness comes in—the ability to sense what your body is doing from the inside, without relying on mirrors or external feedback. But that internal sensing isn't possible until dancers are about 12 years old. So what do we do for our beginning and elementary students who are building critical ballet habits—including foot shapes? These dancers need external feedback that both gives them immediate feedback they can understand and also helps them build the connection between what their foot is doing and what it feels like.

A Simple Exercise That Builds Awareness

One of my favorite tools for teaching correct foot alignment is a tennis ball (a lacross ball works too, and so do balled up socks).

Here's how it works:

Have students stand in parallel, facing the barre. Place the ball between their ankles, just above the ankle bones. Their feet should be separated just enough for the ball to be held lightly in place—not squeezed, just resting there.

Then, slowly relevé and abaissé, keeping the ball in place.

If a dancer sickles, the ball falls out. Immediately. No ambiguity.

What I love about this exercise is that it gives students tactile feedback—they feel the ball against their inner ankle bones, and they feel it disappear when their alignment shifts. You're not asking them to understand an abstract concept. You're giving them a concrete sensation to maintain.

This is one of several exercises in my free guide, Feeling Your Feet—if you want more tools like this for building foot awareness in your students, you can grab it and join my newsletter.

Adding Visual Feedback

If you do this exercise facing the mirror, you layer visual feedback on top of the tactile feedback. Students can see the ball fall at the same moment they feel it leave their ankles.

This combination—tactile plus visual—starts building the neural pathways that will eventually become true somatic awareness. Over time, students begin to recognize the internal sensation of correct alignment, even without the ball.

That's the goal: external teaching tools that become internal knowing.

A Note on Developmental Readiness

True somatic awareness—the ability to sense and self-correct from the inside—isn't neurologically possible until around age 12. Before that, students are still developing the brain pathways needed for sophisticated internal sensing.

This doesn't mean younger students can't benefit from exercises like the tennis ball. They absolutely can. But their learning will rely more heavily on external feedback (the ball, the mirror, your corrections) than on internal sensing. That's developmentally appropriate.

For your intermediate students (ages 12+), exercises like this become even more powerful because they're finally ready to internalize what they're feeling. The ball becomes a tool for building genuine body awareness, not just a trick for getting the right shape.

Sickling corrections don't have to be a daily battle. When you give students the right tools—external feedback that builds internal knowing—the learning happens faster and sticks longer.

Somatic awareness is one of nine artistry elements I teach in my Ballet Artistry Course. If you want the complete framework for developing expressive, self-aware dancers, that's where to start.