Throughout my professional career, my style of warm up has developed as I have developed as a dancer, as a person and as a human to suits my need. It developed by having an internal stimulation which is to do with my mental and physical condition, same time effected by having an external stimulation, such as seeing and meeting other
dancers, athletes, martial artists, gymnasts and artists such as painter, author, architect, photographer, etc.
At the beginning I use to spend over an hour for warming up before the lesson. I did everything I can think of and everything I knew in that time. So, there was no sense of development or clear aim. It took about six years to realise a fact: there is no point doing things just for the sake of it. I gradually realised by having advice from more experienced dancers, reading books and understanding the human anatomy. A big turning point was when I realised that human muscle is like a clay. If, we pull/stretch a cold and a hard clay, they would break or toned, same as muscle. This made a perfect sense to my feeling of my muscle getting colder as I spend more time in stretching before the lesson. I was not getting warmer, I was actually getting colder! However, I have completely ignored my internal signal/stimulation/message and just copying stereo typical "Ballet dancer warm up" ritual!
So, since then, my warm up moved on to second era, "Pilates", muscle development and floor barre. However, once I moved on, I realised there was another unexpected blind spot to it, which I will explain in next blog.....