Conditioning for Dance improves your technique and performance in all dance forms by strengthening the body's core (abdominal and back muscles) while improving coordination, balance, and alignment and optimizing flexibility. The result is more lift without tension, deeper plies, higher jumps with less effort, tighter turns, and improved extension and turnout.Conditioning for Dance is the result of years of practical experience combined with scientific and anatomical analysis. Author Eric Franklin is an internationally known dancer, teacher, choreographer, and writer. His innovative, proven techniques will help you execute key dance skills better as you-strengthen the muscles you use in dance by performing exercises with elastic resistance bands;-start and move in proper alignment using imagery;-improve your balance and release tension through playful exercises with small balls;-develop leg and torso power that translates to higher jumps and tighter turns; and-optimize your flexibility through touch, movement awareness, and imagery.The book features 102 imagery illustrations paired with dance-specific exercises to help you maximize body-mind conditioning and develop more fluid mobility, balance, and tension release. The book culminates with a 20-minute, full-body workout routine designed to help dancers warm up, condition, and refine their dance technique. You'll learn how to execute lifelong dance skills that give power without the risk of injuries.By working the muscles through movements and ranges of motion that approximate the demands of your chosen dance form, you directly enrich your performance capabilities. And as you strengthen the body's core, stretch to gain just the right amount of flexibility, and incorporate the power of the mind, you unleash your full artistic and physical potential.

    Featuring over 200 full-color illustrations, Dance Anatomy visually depicts the unique relationship between muscle development and aesthetic movement as never before.Dance Anatomy features 82 of the most effective dance, movement, and performance exercises, each designed to promote perfect alignment, improved placement, proper breathing, and prevention of common injuries. In stunning detail, the accompanying illustration captures the dancer in motion and highlights the active muscles associated with each movement.You'll learn how to modify exercises to target specific areas to enhance flexibility and reduce muscle tension. You'll also learn to put it all together to personalize a program based on your style of dance, level of expertise, and individual needs and goals.Whether you seek to optimize performance, add a new movement to your repertoire, or minimize muscle fatigue, stress, and injury, Dance Anatomy is your perfect partner.

    To millions of football fans across America, he was the “Voice of the NFL.” And as open and giving as Harry Kalas was throughout his professional and personal life, there are countless layers of the man that have remained unknown . . . until now. Author Randy Miller interviewed more than 160 people—including all of Harry’s surviving family, many of his close friends from childhood to present, numerous colleagues from baseball and the NFL, and even Harry’s longtime personal psychologist—to craft a loving and shockingly honest portrayal of one of the most celebrated broadcasters in the history of sports. With incredible details from all phases of his life—from his upbringing in the Chicago suburbs, to his Hall of Fame broadcasting career in baseball, to his ubiquitous voiceover work with the NFL, to his personal vices for drinking and women, to his legendary friendship with Richie “Whitey” Ashburn, to his ongoing feud with on-air partner Chris Wheeler— Harry the K: The Remarkable Life of Harry Kalas will surprise, delight, and enlighten all fans of the man they called “Harry the K.”

    How do they stay slender and willowy while maintaining the extraordinary energy it takes to perform night after night? Can a nondancer or an amateur attain a dancer's figure and a dancer's vitality? And keep it?Here, in The Dancers' Body Book, the legendary ballerina Allegra Kent discloses the health, weight-watching, and relaxation secrets of some of the world's greatest ballet dancers -- from Suzanne Farrell and Fernando Bujones to Darci Kistler and Madame Alexandra Danilova. Combining them with two well-balanced diets -- one to lose weight by and one to live by -- and an exercise regimen that can be tailored to the individual, she provides a fabulous fitness program for everyone who longs to be slimmer, healthier, and more energetic.Fourteen varied menus incorporate delicious recipes from the dancers themselves (such as Jacques D'Amboise's Wonderful Dinner Salad and Dierdre Carberry's Almond Meringue Kisses), along with calorie guides and advice on how to create additional menus using your own favorite dishes. Helpful discussions on sports and exercise systems -- ranging from jogging and swimming to the sophisticated "Pilates" workout -- are also included, and in a special chapter entitled "A Healthy Outlook," the dancers talk candidly on such issues as smoking, anorexia, vitamins, doctors, massage, junk foods, fad diets, and injuries.Dancers take meticulous care of all their equipment because training and performance depend on it. Of course, the most essential piece of equipment, the body, needs the most care of all, and that is what this book is about: how to take care of the world's greatest machine.Allegra Kent joined the New York City Ballet at the age of fifteen and was a principal dancer with the company for thirty years, during which time she created a number of starring roles in ballets by Balanchine and Robbins. The mother of two daughters and a son, she is also the author of Allegra Kent's Water Beauty Book.

    Now, in her own words, Twyla Tharp offers a rare and provocative glimpse into the mind and heart behind her famously deadpan face.Much more than a dance book, Push Comes to Shove is the story of a woman coming to terms with herself as daughter, wife and lover, mother, artist. A child of Indiana Quaker country, Twyla Tharp was traumatically uprooted to California when her stage-ambitious mother built a drive-in movie theater. Soon Twyla was studying piano, violin, flamenco, drums, French, baton twirling, tap, classical ballet...But it was in adolescence - tangling with a rattlesnake in the California desert and observing overheated couples in the backs of cars - that she began to learn the powers of the body and the erotic mysteries of dance. In New York her raw talent came under the influence of such giants as Martha Graham, Paul Taylor, Merce Cunningham, and George Balanchine. But Tharp fought to find her own vision as an artist. In the process she created a new vocabulary of movement: quirky rebellious, sexy, comic - a daring and defiant marriage of Jelly Roll Morton, Bach, the modern dance, and classical ballet. Her collaborations with Mikhail Baryshnikov, Jerome Robbins, director Milos Forman, and David Byrne of Talking Heads built bridges between ballet audiences and fans of popular culture. Now with a stunning accompaniment of photographs by Richard Avedon and others, she reveals the development of the Tharp style - the rendering of order out of chaos, and chaos out of conventional order - that won critical acclaim in such works as Deuce Coupe, The Fugue, Push Comes to Shove, In the Upper Room, and the movies Hair and Amadeus. But her spectacular success did not come without personal anguish.

     She was a gifted midwestern beauty, the daughter of Ohio State University's marching band director: to dance on Broadway. Soon after high school graduation, Catherine left Columbus for New York City, determined to be a star. Three years later, she was dead -- murdered in cold blood in her East Side apartment. The shocking revelations that emerged from the police investigation made tabloid headlines: few knew that the struggling artist paid her bills by dancing in a topless club. But there was another hidden facet to Catherine's life -- a shattering love triangle with two men, one of whom would ultimately be convicted of her brutal stabbing death. It's a chilling account of obsession, violence, and the surprising, minute evidence on which the entire case hinged. For a talented young woman reaching for the top, and the heartbroken family she left behind, it is truly the death of a dream.

    Written just before her death in 1958, it is Miss Humphrey's autobiography in art, a gathering together of her experiences in performance and a lucid and practical source book on choreography. One of the truly great figures in the dance world -- a pioneer of American modern dance, a great choreographer and teacher whose influences and innovations are apparent everywhere in the field -- Miss Humphrey has given us the first modern book on the "art" of choreography, and indespensible guide not only for the modern dance but for all stage creations.The Art of Making Dances presents modern dance as theater. It contains a short history of the dance and various chapters discuss design, dynamics, and rhythm of dance. It includes a check list for composers of dances and an appendix of all the dances composed by Miss Humphrey.

     The Athlete's Way program, focusing on cardio, strength, stretching, nutrition and sleep, uses neurobiology and behavioral models to enable you to think, train and behave like an athlete, making you more optimistic, resilient, and intense. You will want to get a glow on every day to increase your daily bliss quotient. Exercise will no longer be something to dread but something to enjoy and experience to the fullest. The Athlete's Way teaches you how to make exercise a source of joy and something you will want to engage in daily. Sweat will become a symbol of your striving for a standard of excellence and a solid work ethic that is synonymous with peak performance. The stamina, tenacity, and drive fortified through athletics--and this program--can be applied to any dream, obstacle, or goal you aspire to achieve. Christopher Bergland is a Manhattan-based world-class endurance athlete. He holds a Guinness World Record for treadmill running (153.76 miles in 24 hours) and has won the longest nonstop triathlon in the world three times. He completed The Triple Ironman, a 7.2-mile swim, 336-mile bike, followed by a 78.6-mile run (done consecutively) in a record breaking time of 38 hours and 46 minutes. He directs the triathlon program at Chelsea Piers and has been sponsored by Kiehl's since 1996. He has been featured in dozens of TV, magazine, and newspaper articles including CNN, PBS, ABC, CBS, Fox, Men's Journal, ESPN magazine, and the L.A. Times.  He currently manages a specialty sporting goods shop in New York City called "JackRabbit Sports." Inspiring Lessons from a World-class Endurance Athlete"I love to sweat.  All told, I have run distance equal to four trips around the world on a treadmill and on the streets of Manhattan where I live.  I have biked to the moon and back, dueling it out with a red, blinking pacer light on a LifeCycle control panel or logging countless laps in Central Park.  I've even crossed the Atlantic a few times - in the pool - and I've swum in almost every ocean around the world competing in Ironman triathlons.  When I am running, biking, or swimming, happiness pours out of me.  I am not alone.  Everyone who exercises regularly experiences this bliss.  And it is available to you, too, anytime you break a sweat.  The Athlete's Way is an individual process but ultimately a universal experience.  We feel good when we sweat.  I have learned how to find Nirvana on the treadmill, and I am going to teach you my secrets."            --Christopher Bergland

    A Dance Book Club main selection, this guide offers a general explanation of anatomy, kinesiology, and technique for ballet dancers, students, and teachers.

    A volume which no teacher, scholar, or student of the dance can afford to miss. "A serious, indeed indispensable, textbook." -Clive Barnes

    The development of this school was largely due to Mme. Vaganova (1879–1951), not only a great dancer but also the teacher of Galina Ulanova and many others and an unsurpassed theoretician.The principles of Vaganova's system are presented in this well-known book. Mme. Vaganova's aim of creating a personal approach to the Russian dance was based on the critical assimilation of the experience of her contemporaries. Her ability to choose the best of what had been accomplished in the various ballet traditions (French, Italian, and Russian) and combine these into a unified teaching practice in itself amounted to a new school of dance. She firmly believed that the teaching process should be a planned exercise, ever changing with innovations in the dance. She sought from her pupils emotional expressiveness, strictness of form, a resolute, energetic manner of performance, and the understanding of the underlying coordination of movements.Her book discusses all basic principles of ballet, grouping movements by fundamental types. Chapters cover battements, rotary movements of the legs, the arms, poses of the classical dance, connecting and auxiliary movements, jumps, beats, point work, and turns as well as material for a sample lesson. Diagrams show clearly the exact foot, leg, arm, and body positions for the proper execution of many steps and movements. The result is a fundamental theory of dance that offers dancers, teachers, and ballet lovers information often difficult to locate in other books. 118 illustrations.

    Susan Au's lucid text covers the entire spectrum of dance, vividly describing the great performers and performances of the past as well as exploring in detail the dance world of today. A generous selection of illustrations completes the picture, taking the reader from the palaces of the Medici to the lofts of Manhattan, from the dancing of Louis XIV to the experimental choreography of Twyla Tharp and Pina Bausch. A completely new final chapter documents the work of the chief dancers and choreographers from the 1980s to the present, covering offshoots of modern dance such as Tanztheater and Butoh, and recent developments such as performance art and site-specific choreography. The author discusses the upsurge in the popularity of dances of the past, among them ballroom dancing and the Argentine tango, and notes the revival of tap dancing as well as the successful adaptation of Irish stepdancing to the theater. In addition, she records the uses dance and dancers have made of recent technological advances, including cinedance and videodance, CD-ROMs, and the Internet.

    Drawing on his world-wide research and the thousands of classes he has taught to athletes around the world, he breaks down kettlebell training like never before. He offers hundreds of movements, both beginning and advanced, shows dozens of the most common errors students make while training, and offers numerous workouts for athletes of all varieties. With over four thousand step-by-step photographs, descriptive narrative, and detailed programming, Kettlebell Rx is the only complete Kettlebell book on the market.

    You can achieve your ideal body and develop the strength, grace, and elegance of a dancer by following Mary Helen's proven program-one that's got everyone from celebrities to busy moms to executives raving!Ballet Beautiful is a fitness method that blends the artistry and athleticism of ballet with an easy, accessible eating plan that works for every body - and absolutely no dance experience is required. Created by professional ballerina Mary Helen Bowers, this transformative approach to fitness and health will reshape your body and your mind!Ballet Beautiful's three-fold approach is not an extreme workout nor is it a radical diet for an overnight fix; it's a roadmap to achieving and maintaining your ideal health, shape and size-all with the elegance and strength of a ballerina. Part One of the book introduces the program's empowering mindset, the key to supporting and guiding you through lasting change. Part Two, the Ballet Beautiful Method, consists of challenging, effective, and fun workouts that sculpt and tone sleek ballet muscles and build beautiful posture. Whether you have a full hour or only 15 minutes, you can tailor the program to your own schedule and needs. Part Three shares the Ballet Beautiful Lifestyle, a healthy, balanced approach to nutrition. With meal plans, shopping tips and quick but delicious daily recipes that will satisfy and nourish your entire body, it's a stress-free, diet-free plan that will help keep you feeling as strong and healthy as you look.

    Having run out of options, former YouTube star Dax Flame must get a job at an ice cream shop in order to make ends meet.