Training for Dance: Strength, Mobility, and Presence with Jason Harrison

Training Load Monitoring & Planning: Using ACWR with Siobhan Milner MSc, CSCS – Total Performance with Siobhan Milner

Are you a dancer who is struggling with either strength training, conditioning, and/or mobility? Are you shying away from strength training because you think it could be counterproductive to your dance? (Spoiler: it isn’t!)

In today’s episode, I am speaking with Jason Harrison, who owns Present Tense Fitness, is a Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist (CSCS), certified personal trainer, and is a member of the International Association for Dance Medicine & Science. He draws on his experience and qualifications to develop systems for his clients, whether they are members of the general public or professional dancers, to nurture both their bodies and minds, and help create resilience against injury.

When it comes to strength training and metabolic conditioning, there are so many misconceptions and we confront quite a few. We also discuss the gap between passive flexibility and active mobility, the mental side of dance training, plus how having an empathetic coach can keep you safe from an injury that will cost you both time and money.

We are covering a variety of topics but are focusing on dancers in this episode, but if you are not a dancer, no worries, there is still plenty for you to glean from today’s conversation. Enjoy!

What was your biggest takeaway from today’s episode? Let me know over on IG!

About Jason Harrison:

Jason Harrison is a Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist (CSCS) who has trained clients in New York, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and in his native Dayton, Ohio. He also is a Certified Personal Trainer through the National Strength and Conditioning Association, as well as a United States Weightlifting Level One coach. Jason is a member of the International Association for Dance Medicine & Science (IADMS) whose training interests include developing systematic approaches for enhancing dancer performance and injury prevention strategies rooted in strength and conditioning best practices.

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Connect with Jason on his website

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Transcript for Training for Dance: Strength, Mobility, and Presence with Jason Harrison

Siobhan Milner

Hi everyone. I’m Siobhan Milner and this is Total Performance, a podcast dedicated to all things athletic performance and injury prevention. Join me and my guests as we explore the many aspects that come together to build our total performance picture. Let’s get into it.

My guest on today’s podcast episode is Jason Harrison. Jason Harrison owns Present Tense Fitness in Dayton, Ohio, where he works not only with general population clients but also specifically with many professional contemporary and ballet dancers. I had a ton of questions to ask him about strength, conditioning, and mobility for dancers and today’s episode. I also had a lot of questions for him regarding myths that we encounter in strength and conditioning, and especially some of these myths surrounding mobility, flexibility, and how many people in the general public but especially dancers can think that strength and conditioning work can actually be counterproductive, when in fact, spoiler alert, we know it’s often the opposite.

Jason is a Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist who has trained clients in New York, Los Angeles, Washington, DC, and his native Dayton, Ohio. He’s also a certified personal trainer through the National Strength and Conditioning Association, as well as the United States weightlifting level one coach Jason is a member of the International Association for dance medicine and science, whose training interests include developing systematic approaches for enhancing dancer performance and injury prevention strategies rooted in strength and conditioning best practices.

I think today’s episode is going to be really interesting for both coaches and athletes, Jason has a really clear vision for how he wants to support his dancers and his clients in his studio. And as a coach myself, I found that really inspiring. So I hope you all enjoy it.

Welcome, Jason, thank you so much.

Jason Harrison

Thank you for having me.

Siobhan Milner

How are you doing?

Jason Harrison

I’m well, I’m, it’s Friday. And so I’m feeling good about that. I had a good training week in our studio, so I had some good coffee this morning. So I’m ready. I’m ready to have a Good Friday.

Siobhan Milner

I feel like coffee is one of the things that a lot of strength coaches bond over, but I’m a tea drinker. I had a good tea this morning, though.

Jason Harrison

That’s fair, that’s fair.

Siobhan Milner

Maybe tell us a little bit more about yourself and your studio.

Jason Harrison

My name is Jason Harrison, I am the co-owner of present tense fitness in Dayton, Ohio in the United States. In our studio, we train about half of the people that we work with our dancers, and the other half are just general, I shouldn’t say just but our general population clients, you know, we get a good look at a lot of different bodies. And the work that we do with our general population clients informs the work that we do with dancers but also vice versa. So a lot of the work that we do around dancers, we’ve learned a lot from like, my colleagues, Susan and Anna are both postpartum exercise experts.

And we’ve really used a lot of that knowledge around functional hip anatomy and pelvic floor to apply to the dance work. So, you know, we were really proud of the work that we’re doing in our little studio here and in Dayton.

Siobhan Milner

I also want to say I love the name of your studio Present Tense Fitness, what inspired this?

Jason Harrison

There’s, you know, there’s a, there’s a few things I found that over, I mean, I started work, I’m a strength coach now. But I started out as a personal trainer just working in commercial gyms. And I found that over time, most of the work that I was doing with clients involved, getting them to sort of like feel what was going on in their bodies, like in the moment. And so people, oftentimes people don’t, they just, sort of, either mindlessly exercise, or they just, they just sort of have this view of it as like, it’s just supposed to be really hard. It’s supposed to be really sweaty. And I found myself often trying to get people to feel what was actually happening at the moment. And then that and that the same is true of like, sort of like the outside of the gym stuff around their nutrition around their hydration around their sleep. Some people just didn’t realize how not good they felt sort of like on a daily basis, because they weren’t thinking about it. They weren’t being intentional about it. They weren’t stopping to assess, like, oh, I ate this. And then I felt terrible. Like, that was just sort of like passing them by. So a big part of the name came from what I found to be a big part of this work, which is getting people to be present with where what they’re feeling, both emotionally and physically.

Siobhan Milner

I feel like this must be something that really resonates with the dancers as well, because so much of dance is awareness, bringing yourself into certain positions as well.

Jason Harrison

Sure. And I think I think sometimes it’s a little bit of a shock to the dancers that we work with because we want them to actually, I mean, they’re definitely dialed into awareness in terms of performing. But I find that like a lot of times, there’s a disassociation from the pain that they’re feeling, and we have very much demand of the people that we work with that they don’t ignore pain. So like, if you come into our studio, we want to know what’s hurting, so that we can address it, work around it, and account for it. And that’s very much new, I think to the vast majority of particularly of the professionals that we work with. They’re used to sort of like almost disassociating from their body, particularly when it comes to pain because they’re taught, essentially, that they’re just like replaceable objects. And so we try to see the human in front of us and say, no, no, no, like, if you’re hurting, like, we want to know that. And there’s nothing wrong with hurting. There’s nothing shameful around feeling pain, but like, let’s, let’s take a look at like, why you’re hurting and see if like, maybe there’s some strength stuff that we can do to help address that.

Siobhan Milner

Yeah, I think this is something that we see across a lot of sports performance, but also performing arts, it’s that if you’re injured, yeah, you potentially don’t have work. So the pain is threatening in multiple senses.

Jason Harrison

People are taught to either ignore or hide. And it’s just not a healthy way of approaching one’s own body. But like you said, like, I very much understand where it comes from. And the fear that comes around injuries are feeling pain, or, you know, we’re in the midst of a global pandemic, still even being sick. So like, we’ve had people who have had experience with COVID. And it’s a scary feeling, especially given you know, the strangeness of that infection and the way it affects the lungs and the heart like that can be not only life-threatening, obviously, but career-threatening. And so, you know, I think a lot of the work has, you know, given the level of athletes you’re working with, like a lot of the work is of a coach is to support people through whatever process like whether it’s injury or illness.

Siobhan Milner

So what got you into strength coaching for dancers in kind of a little side thing I’m wondering now, was this focus perhaps on awareness, something that drew dancers to you? Or was it something that kind of evolved after you started working with dancers as well

Jason Harrison

Our my work, I’ve mostly been a personal trainer, I started training in New York City in 2006. For most of my career over that time span, I’ve been a personal trainer working with general population clients. When we moved to Dayton and opened the brick-and-mortar studio, we just, I just wanted something. I think part of it was just like, almost like selfish, like I wanted, I needed something to give my work more purpose, I wanted to do something interesting. Like I sort of fought the idea of working in fitness for a very long time.

Like when I started working as a trainer, it was ostensibly to facilitate a screenwriting career, which went nowhere but I ended up working in this in this field. But like, for a long time, like I taught school, I flirted with being a journalist, and then finally, like, none of that stuff was working out, I was sort of lost in a lot of ways. Finally, around 2000 – 2011, my wife basically said, like, listen, like, you’ve been training now consistently for these years, like, why don’t you steer into that. And I’ve had these experiences in my life where I just needed sort of like out outside permission to do a thing. And that was very much it.

And so like, I’d say, I have been a trainer since 2006. But I’ve only been really taking this seriously in the way that I think it should be taken since around 2010 – 2011. And so when we opened the brick and mortar here in Dayton, in like 2016, 2015, something like that think 2016. We just saw this gap, like we knew Dayton’s a small enough city, it’s only 140,000 people. But we happen to have two professional dance companies here. And so we knew some of the dancers follow them on Instagram, Anna, who is a really fantastic personal trainer who works with us and a yoga teacher, knew some of the dancers from her yoga, yoga work. And so it was just like, sort of seeing what people were doing in the gym and thinking like, well, like, none of the three of us were dancers, but we could sort of tell like that they weren’t optimizing their time in the gym, and what dancers called cross training.

What, like in the strength coaching world, we were just called training, you know, they weren’t optimizing that time, there was a lot of like, and we started, we, you know, we started this journey just by asking questions like, so what do you what does your day look like? What do you do? Um, so we heard a lot of like, well, I’ll get up at six and do a hot yoga class, and then maybe do like an hour on the elliptical. And we’re like, Well, we think we think maybe you don’t need to be spending so much time and you’re cross-training, and we think we can give you more efficient stuff to do. So we just sort of began this journey with humility. And we it very much started off with us reaching out to them because we like we’re an unknown. There are two things there.

Number one, nobody knew who we were and number two, the idea of sort of sports style, strength, and conditioning is pretty much still foreign in the dance world. Like, I feel like this work is really in its infancy stages. And so there was no reason for them to trust us. And so we, you know, we started off with like working with one or two people and did, I think good work for them. And then you know, the way it works, like, if you do good work for one person, people will say, like, what are you doing, like, you’re jumping so high, and you look so strong.

And so then, you know, then it grew from there. And I think what people appreciate now that they’re working with us, they do appreciate that to go back to your question, they do appreciate that sort of like rooting in intentionality, and, and being present. Because it’s, it’s a completely foreign idea compared to what they’re usually taught, like, really, from the time that they’re like three years old and start dancing. It’s basically a no-pain, no-gain mentality. It’s basically like, listen, like, dance is hard. You’re gonna be in pain, you just got to go through it. And we’re here to say like, no, actually like it, probably it dance is hard, of course. But like, let’s make it hard for the right reasons. Let’s make it hard for technical reasons and not because you’re under-eating and needlessly beating your body up.

Siobhan Milner

Yeah, I think, like you’re saying, making their training more efficient, this kind of training smarter, not harder, this is going to be one of the things that makes them feel better, too, because they’re not just burning themselves into the ground with lots of junk training, quote, unquote. I wonder because as you say, traditional strength and conditioning might be something that’s not that known or accepted in the dance world. What are some of the misconceptions, some of the dancers you work with had or have surrounding strength training?

Jason Harrison

I think the main thing is this topic that we’re on this idea of like, more is always better. And so like the very first professional that we worked with a ballet dancer, who, you know, is an absolute workhorse, she’s a person who smiles when things get hard. And so it’s very, like I we love working with her because like if you give her something like incredibly difficult to do this like little smile comes across her face, she was the first person we worked with. And when I first I was the one that was training her when I first started working with her, she was also doing CrossFit-style stuff, in addition to our work, and then slowly, she stopped doing less and less of that.

And then slowly, she just trusted, like, okay, I’m doing a maximum amount of movement through my dancing. And I feel really strong, just doing two days a week with you. And maybe that’s all I need. But that just takes, like I said, there’s no reason for her to trust us. And over time, the efficacy of like a full body athletic style programming, you know, she was able to see that and feel that in her body. And so I think so the first misconception, I think, is how much more dancers tend to think that they have to be doing than they really do.

And then the second thing that almost always comes up, if I give a talk to like a dance studio, or school or something like that is this idea of particularly around women, the idea around bulk. And so people are worried that if they do strength training with any sort of like a heavy weight they’ll just automatically get bulky. And when people ask me about that I’ve started I really it’s important to me to put that question around a bulk in its proper context. So I always start by saying the fear of bulk is rooted in misogyny and specifically anti-blackness. And so like, you know, if we look at the way like the Williams sisters have been treated throughout their career, and sort of the questions around their femininity and sort of like the what the ideal body type is, it’s usually a white male gaze that’s policing, like what a woman should look like or be.

And so I always start by saying, like this fear of bulk is rooted in these really dangerous ideas. And then the second thing substantively, like in terms of like the exercise science, I say, like, it’s impossible to just like accidentally get bulky, like, it just doesn’t happen. Particularly around like, mean we really advocate for two days a week of strength training, and there’s just not enough volume there to accidentally get bulky. I mean, you know, we dunk a lot of times, like strength coaches dunk on the bodybuilding world, but we learn a lot from the bodybuilding world and bodybuilders are figured out like if I want to grow my deltoid, this is how many sets and repetitions and at what loads we need to grow my deltoid.

So we can take advantage of that knowledge and know that like we can make these dancers stronger without putting the volume in front of them that would lead to like a great degree of hypertrophy. But I always answer that question first by the sort of like ruining it and the aspects of race and gender that are laced mean really throughout all of our lives, but particularly I think in the day dance world itself.

Siobhan Milner

Yeah. And I think it’s really important to have, like, these are the discussions that I think sometimes don’t happen in the world of strength and conditioning. And I think when you’re able to have these discussions, especially in a physical arena where there’s so much emphasis on aesthetic, yeah, I think this is super valuable to be able to have those discussions.

Jason Harrison

Yeah. And I mean, the strength and conditioning world is, I mean, I like I, you know, to go back to the question, why dance? I just don’t really, I just am not really interested in sort of like the, you know, like, I know, we follow each other on Twitter, sort of like the normal. I mean, I’ll say, like, white male, sort of aggressive, hyper-masculine approach to this work, I just don’t like the culture doesn’t fit me, I don’t think I would love for more people to read outside of strength and conditioning, and like business books, so they can understand the context in which we’re all working.

And I just, I find, there’s really no place for me in that world. And so, dance really offers me the opportunity to work with a lot of the people where I feel really more at home and having these discussions among marginalized communities among queer communities among people of color. You know, one of the dance companies that we work with here is the date and contemporary dance company, like literally a world-class, historically, black contemporary dance company, and I just feel much more at home in those spaces than sort of, like, you know, listening to, you know, strength coaches talk about what they learned from Gary Vee, or like, I just, it’s just not me, so I avoid it.

Siobhan Milner

Ya, fair enough. And I think, yeah, this macho attitude doesn’t serve athletes, either. Personally, when I see someone kinda like standing in the quarter, you know, a graph look on their face, I think for years, I felt like as a female strength coach, I had to kind of put some of that on. And then eventually, I was like, no, like, I am empathetic, I do care about how my athletes feel. And I do care when they’re hurting as well. And I think that’s, that’s where you build trust with your athletes too. But I also totally understand moving away from certain spaces.

We talked a little bit about kind of some of the buy-in that you’re getting from some dancers over time when they’re seeing the results. Is that something that now as you say, you’re working with a lot of dancers, so people are kind of already having some of that trust around the efficacy of strength training when they come to you? Are you still having to kind of convince dancers about this?

Jason Harrison

No, I think, you know, one of the things that are important for us is to show our work. And so a lot of times before dancer ever comes in, like they’ve been like on, you know, our Instagram feeds, or they’ve seen like blog posts, so they sort of know what we’re about. And they know they trust the experience of their colleagues. And so so many of the people who come to us come to us through either a referral from a colleague, which is always the most powerful, or you know, other people who work in the dance medicine space.

So you know, people who, either chiropractor in the dance medicine space, or physical therapists in the dance medicine space, people who understand like, hey, I’m working with this dancer, I have this lane of the road, I think you’d be really good with working with them to make them stronger, like and so we’ll get referrals that way. And so there’s less convincing that needs to happen when people come in that way. And honestly, that’s very much the same way we like to work in our with our general population clients too.

My favorite people to work with are people who have sort of like been stalking us on Instagram for like six months, because then like, they get it, it’s a more difficult thing when somebody comes in, honestly, like sometimes, like, the most difficult clients are people who just like live in the neighborhood, and they walk over just because there’s a gym, and so they’re expecting, like, I don’t know, I don’t know what they’re expecting, but it’s not what we get.

Is that, you know, because we make people like pay attention. And it’s not for everybody, but like, we really will work best with people who have bought in man, we’ve had like a dancer or two who just wasn’t like a great fit. Like they were, they literally just saw, you know, dancers who just see like, what we do is just like the same as like going to a spin class or something or just like, you know, just sort of that boutique, I go to spin and I do yoga, and I do this or I do that. And it’s like no, like, we’re, we’re trying to train you. And so that is a more comprehensive approach. It’s a much more individualized approach.

The phrase that we always use is instead of dance specific, we like to talk about dancers specific because there’s really more individualization is what matters more than the fact that somebody’s a dancer or not a dancer because there’s just dramatically different. There are just dramatically different bodies that you see doing that work. And so what matters most is that we tailor their training program to how that individual moves, irrespective of their chosen activity.

Siobhan Milner

Yeah, I have to say your whole vision for your studio. And the way you work is really, really inspiring.

Jason Harrison

Thank you so much.

Siobhan Milner
I really, I really mean it. I’m like, Wow, it’s really nice to hear yeah, how clear you are on this. And then when you get these people, you know, who come in that it’s the right fit, it’s going to be so awesome for them. So I love it.

Jason Harrison

Thank you.

Siobhan Milner

I work with curlers and also some other performing artists who really value mobility. And so I’ve found that sometimes this means that they can be resistant to resistance training, because they have these ideas that like, oh, if I strength train, I’m going to lose mobility. I assume you’ve experienced this with some dancers as well. And if you have, what do you say to them to offset this fear?

Jason Harrison

There are two answers to that, that we give. And I’m actually curious how you approach that with your people to the first is that if they’re doing quality, strength, and conditioning, they should be actually more mobile, not less because we’re going to teach their bodies to be stronger in these different positions. And so, you know, there’s the adage among strength coaches around like the difference between like passive flexibility and active mobility. And so what we, what we try to teach the dancers is, you know, if you put them on a, on a massage table, you can put their hit their ankle behind their head, and that they need that passive flexibility, they need that.

It’s not a bad thing, they need that in order to be able to get into some of these shapes that they have to get into for the art form. But the more that we can close that gap between passive flexibility and active mobility, then, you know, the more resilient they’ll be to injury, we hope. So that’s the first thing is like, yes, let’s keep that passive flexibility. Let’s keep that but let’s close that gap. And then the whole point of strength and conditioning what dancers called cross-training, is to fill gaps that don’t get filled through their dance training.

And so if they have like a ton of flexibility, then what we want to give them is like a little bit more stability, not so much that like, we don’t want them to have the stiffness of like an elite powerlifter, because then they wouldn’t be able to get into the arabesque, but we want to give them maybe a little bit more stability. So it’s meant to complement the work that they’re doing. And it’s meant to fill in the gaps that don’t get addressed in there, in their current training. And that’s not a hard sell.

Like they feel that in their body. And the other thing is like, I’ll add a third thing, which is like, you also have to live. So like we think about like, a dancer is just like living in the studio, and especially in season or something like that cracker season like yes, that they’re like most of their waking moments are spent like dancing or thinking about dance, but they also have to like move apartments and carry boxes and like go to the grocery store like we want them to be. We want them to have bodies that can do those life things, too. So that’s the third thing that I that we talk about is that you know, we’re not going to rob them of any flexibility. But we’re going to give them tools to be able to handle a lot of the other stuff that they have to.

Siobhan Milner

Yeah, I think for me, it’s often with those sorts of athletes starting slow. And like you say, building that trust. So I’m not going to go in, you know, for example, when I started working with the curlers I took over from a previous strength and conditioning coach who’d been with them. So when I go in, I usually keep things pretty similar to what they’ve been doing for a while and just kind of ask questions. And then you slowly start to change things. But yeah, with the mobility perspective, for example, with curlers, but also with speed skaters, like adductors are something that we’ve got to keep strong because it can be a site for injury around the groin and things.

But I know with my curlers, there are certain adductor strength exercises that if we do them in season, they tell me that they do feel that it makes them just get this tightness and response. And you know, I think it’s it’s probably primarily neuro, but they feel it and they feel that it affects them on the ice. So I’m like, Okay, we just don’t do that. And season we find other ways to do this. We know that sometimes tightness is actually a neural response. So what else is going on in life as well? So yeah, that’s a discussion, I suppose.

Jason Harrison

I love that too. Because you’re also accounting for like the mental aspect of their work. And it doesn’t matter if somebody is feeling discomfort or tightness or something, and it’s distracting to their performance. I can give them the science all day long, but the truth is, they’re distracted. And so I love that you’re honest and I think that goes back to the discussion we were talking about earlier. And this is not to say that like there are other people who sort of apply that sort of approach, but I think that that sort of like empathetic human approach is I just would like to see more of that in our industry. I think a lot of coaches confronted with the same thing would say like, no, like, bro, your adductors or you’re fine. This is the program and that’s what we’re gonna do. Yeah. And I love that you love the humanity of that.

Siobhan Milner

If we feel that response in ourselves, when someone says actually, this isn’t working for me, it’s ego. And a mentor a few years ago said something to me along the lines of, you’re not trying to get your athlete to love you, you’re trying to get them to love movement. And so that’s the thing like you’re, I’m trying to sit that aside and share what I love so much about strength training with them, I think.

Jason Harrison

I like that

Siobhan Milner

Would there be kind of coming off the back of these certain things that you would or wouldn’t recommend for dancers in order to maintain or improve mobility?

Jason Harrison

I think a lot of times with dancers, like, I think the approach that I take with them, because like sometimes, sometimes a dancer will say like, Hey, I’m having this pain. And I’ll ask a lot of questions around like, you know, when are they feeling that pain? Why are they feeling that pain, and occasionally, it’ll come down to, they’ve been trying to improve some aspect of their shape?

So in other words, like, dancers need to be turned out. So we have a lot of external rotation in the hips to be able to get into like foot positions and dance like fifth position, like those sorts of things, especially in ballet. And so I’ll say, Well, okay, show me how you’re showing me the stretches that you’re doing in order to get into that shape. And often what you’ll see are these like, pretty extreme compensation. And so what I try to teach them is to, is to break down the shape into their sort of constituent parts, and then hold themselves accountable for stretching into a shape with good form.

That way they can, they can improve that or increase their passive flexibility. And then we’ll use like from the FRC world, like the pails and rails and stuff like that, to build some of the like the active mobility strength at some of those end ranges of motion, and sort of teaching them like, listen, I know, Saturday night performance, the lights are up packed house, you’re gonna do what you need to do in order to express but like when you’re building that capacity, outside of the dance studio, and in this in your quote, unquote, cross training, then let’s do that as safely as possible and like sort of methodically as possible. And that is usually something that they understand like, sort of the difference between performance time and like, sort of like the preparation for getting into those shapes.

So just distinguish, like I try to, I try to almost describe their cross training is like, this is like a controlled laboratory setting. So like we can do, we can confront our body with all this kind of stress, but in a safe way where we’re not going to be injured. And then we can sort of like intentionally progress, all of those things, whether it’s load, or whether it’s flexibility or mobility like we can be methodical about that. And they usually understand that concept pretty well, because I’ve been really surprised at how little dancers are taught in terms of like, safe flexibility and mobility training. And so that’s been I don’t know if that’s been a surprise that we have actually something to offer them when it comes to that.

Siobhan Milner

Yeah, I think every sport has its kind of stories that are repeated over and over. And I think some of this is like in dance, it’s like you just stretch as hard as you can and for as long as you can, you know, right?

Jason Harrison

Right. You see wild stuff on Instagram. Like if you follow especially like in the dance world, there’s like sort of these dance influencers who don’t actually dance like if you peel away, it’s like, Wait, you’re not actually dancing, but they have these huge followings. And they get into these outrageous shapes. But then people see that and they think like, oh, that’s I’ll do that step, or I’ll borrow that from that person. But yeah, I mean, that’s part of the sort of like passing down like, well, this is the way I did it. Like, you know, you still have, you’ll still hear stories of teachers like standing on students or pushing, you know, in like, pushing them into a deeper stretch.

Siobhan Milner

Oh, man.

Jason Harrison

Yeah, right.

Siobhan Milner

The one thing that just kind of came to mind, like, you know, that this is how this person did it. There was just a speed skater last at the last Olympics who decimated some records in the 5k and the 10k. And he released his training for the four years and wrote a little thing about it. But it was huge, huge, huge, huge volume, especially in the preseason. And that’s the thing, you kind of look at it and you think this doesn’t mean it’s the way to go. It means that he could survive it, you know?

Jason Harrison

Yeah, yeah. You see that a lot with, I don’t train athletes the way that you do, but you’ll see these high-level athletes, and it’s like, they’re good at what they do, despite their training and not because like you said, they could just survive it. Because you see some pretty crazy stuff. Like when the athletes post, this is what I’m doing. And it’s just like, oh, man, we’ve taught you how to squat.

Siobhan Milner

Yeah, totally, totally. Oh my god. But that’s one of the things that sometimes makes me a little bit sad about dance and you said you’re working with contemporary, right?

Jason Harrison

Yes, with both ballet and contemporary. 

Siobhan Milner

I’m not working so much with those dance forms actually. I’m working with a lot of world dance, but even in the world dance, I’m finding that yeah, there are dancers who have dropped out because of, even from a recreational perspective, believing that like this just was never gonna work for their body. And, if something was tweaked and you were taught to approach this slightly differently, I think you could have, yeah. It’s always interesting to see who kind of goes through with these things.

So, Jason, do you have any last thoughts or anything you’d like to highlight as kind of a takeaway for people? I know we’ve talked about a lot. 

Jason Harrison

Yeah. I want people to know I mean, and the work that you do with dancers and athletes. I really think that the personal satisfaction I get out of working with artists is really meaningful to me. You know, I’m 46 and the older I get, the more I realize how important finding joy and finding beauty in a very difficult world can be. And, for people who don’t know dancers or don’t know the dance world, these are people who are literally putting their bodies on the line, especially in the United States for not very much money at all, just to create beauty and joy.

And, I couldn’t have more respect for the artists or the art form. It’s just a really beautiful expression and it’s just like deeply moving to me. And so, I want people to know, who are listening to this, just how much I appreciate the privilege it is to work with these people. Given all that they sacrificed physically, really to make just like being a human easier, just a little bit easier.

Siobhan Milner

Thank you for sharing that. That’s really beautiful. Where can people find you, Jason? 

Jason Harrison

So our website is http://www.presenttensefitness.com. I am on Instagram as Present Tense Fitness. My colleagues, Susan and Anna are also on Instagram, PresentTense_Coaching, and PresentTense_Yoga. I’m also on Twitter as PresentTenseFit, at least for the time being.

Siobhan Milner 

You know, that’s so funny. Yeah. So we’re recording this today as Elon Musk is firing a whole lot of people and also Elon Musk is coming into Twitter. That’s really interesting you say that cuz I just had a conversation with someone like he just deleted his Twitter account on the weekend and I’m really sitting there thinking, yeah, maybe I need to.

Jason Harrison

Yeah. PresentTenseFitness.com is an easy place to find us, but we’re also on social media. The last thing I’d wanna say is my colleagues are really excellent. I tend to be the face just because I’m comfortable talking, but I have to tell you we really are a collective and it really is a team, and what Susan and Anna do at Present Tense Fitness is critically important. And I think all the most sophisticated stuff that we do with dancers comes from Susan and Anna. Their understanding of like the PRI world, and their understanding of just using breath and position and all of those things, and their postpartum work is just so critical.

So you probably don’t see them as much, but they are there. It’s like I have access to grad school every day at work and so I’m just really grateful for what they teach me every day and, the work that they’re doing. I think that’s one of the greatest things when you have colleagues that you really respect each other and you learn a lot from each other.

Siobhan Milner 

This sounds like an awesome environment. 

Jason Harrison

Yeah. Yeah. I hope so. I hope so. 

Siobhan Milner 

Thank you so much for chatting with me today, Jason. 

Jason Harrison

Of course. Thank you so much for asking. It’s a real honor. It’s just a real honor, um, to have somebody, like you, given the work that you do and the sophistication with which you do it, I’m really honored. So thank you. 

Siobhan Milner 

Really the honor is all mine. I’m really inspired after speaking to you. 

Jason Harrison

Good to see you. 

Siobhan Milner 

Thanks so much for listening to today’s episode. I hope you enjoyed it. Just a reminder that you can find further podcast episodes at www.siobhan-milner.com/podcast, and this is where you can also find different ways of working with me if you head to www.siobhan-milner.com. Enjoy.