Why Your Students Pass the Pencil Test But Still Struggle En Pointe

If you've ever had a student who can pass the pencil test seated but struggles to get over their platform, you already know: flexibility isn't the whole story.

The issue is usually strength at the end-range---not range of motion itself.

If a student can achieve the range of motion to be on their platform when they're sitting down—in their pencil test, their Theraband work, and their manual foot stretching—the range exists. What's missing is the intrinsic foot strength and ankle stability to access that range under load. The foot needs to learn to articulate while supporting body weight, and that's a different skill entirely.

If you're subscribed to my newsletter, you already got two interventions for this problem earlier this month. Here are two more:

Intervention 1: Foot Doming

Before your students can use their full range of motion while supporting their body weight, the intrinsic foot muscles need to be firing. If they're not, the foot just dumps into the range passively rather than controlling through it. This means it's difficult for dancers to get up on their platform without using the barre for support and/or they struggle to roll down through their shoe.

Foot doming (sometimes called "short foot exercise") builds that intrinsic strength. The goal is to lift the arch without curling the toes—creating a "dome" shape by pulling the base of the big toe toward the heel.

Here's how to teach it:

• Have students sit or stand with their feet flat on the floor.

• Cue them to pull the ball of the big toe toward the heel, keeping the toes long and flat (not scrunched). The arch should lift.

• Hold briefly, then relax.

• Repeat 8-16 times.

The focus is on the arch lifting, not the toes gripping. This is harder than it sounds—most students will want to curl their toes. It takes practice to isolate the intrinsic muscles.

Once students can do this reliably, have them try it standing on one foot, then have them imagine doing the movement as they stand en pointe.

Intervention 2: Jumps with Landing Focus

Most teachers cue jumps for the takeoff—push through the floor, point your feet in the air, get height. But the landing is where students lose their foot articulation, and it's a powerful place to build strength.

Here's an exercise I love for this:

Jump on the "and," land on count 1. Jump and land 2. Jump and land 3, 4.

That third jump has a slower landing—two counts instead of one. Students have to actively slow down their descent, which forces them to articulate through the foot on the way down.

This works better than simply slowing down the tempo for the whole exercise. The contrast between quick landings and slow landings makes students pay attention to what their feet are doing. And the eccentric work on that slow landing builds the neural pathways for using full range dynamically.

The Bigger Picture

Theraband exercises aren't bad. Pencil tests are valuable. But they're only part of pointe preparation. Students also need to build end-range strength. The challenge is that dancers are less likely to do these on their own, because they don't showcase flexibility the way Theraband work does.

That means it's on you to build it into class.

These four interventions—the two from my newsletter plus the two here—give you a starting point. If you want the complete framework for pointe readiness, my Pointe Curriculum lays out clear progressions and benchmarks so you know what to teach when.

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Related reading: Why Your Ballet Feet Exercises Aren't Working (And How to Improve Them)