How to improve your foot point in the air

The only way someone who doesn’t have natural dancer’s feet achieves a nice point is to train ankle and foot flexibility over a long period of time. This process is easier if you start young, but it’s possible for anyone to gain some improvement with a consistent training regimen. In order to get you started on your journey, you’ll need to assess where your problems are and from there you can start improving your foot point.

What is a good foot point?

Correct alignment ranges from neutral, which is a straight line between the knee, ankle and third toe, to the foot arching outwards towards the pinky. Then, to create the line we want, we must extend through the all the joints and point the entire foot and ankle. Imagine an invisible line of energy shooting through and past your body. This is one reason that dancers’ lines look super lengthened. 

Ballerinas are known for their unnaturally high arches, which is achieved through heavy training as children on top of naturally flexible feet. The look of it is amazing, but don’t put pressure on yourself as an adult to achieve it. We can only work with what we have and sometimes a big gain is just improving your toe curl.  

The opposite of a ballet point is what we call a sickle. It’s when the foot curves the opposite way with the toes arching inwards. Sometimes in aerial, we have no choice but to do it because that’s what the technique calls for, but we must be mindful so we don’t do it unintentionally. If you’re sickling without intending to, you probably have a combination of weak and tight outer shin muscles, a lack of flexibility in the ankle and/or you’re simply not being mindful of it. It’s not the worst offense, but it’s not pretty and can be painful in a foot lock when the taut fabric can yank the ankle out of alignment. When in the air, try to be in correct alignment unless a skill calls for a sickle.

Controlling your feet in the air

My students struggle with controlling what their feet do in the air because they’re busy thinking about a million other things – not falling, not getting lost in the wrap, assessing how much fuel they have, second guessing themselves, breathing, not throwing up, etc. You name it, the thought has crossed someone’s mind up there. The feeling of being overwhelmed is real. 

How do professionals focus on performing when the pressure is on? Are we thinking of a million things in the air plus pointing our feet? The answer is no, but it’s not from a lack of mindfulness. Our brains don’t go into panic mode because the years of training kick in. The hundreds and thousands of times a professional’s body has practiced something will do it’s job so that we can focus on emoting and connecting with the audience. Movement training makes your brain to body connection strong so that you can command your muscles to do your bidding. Flexibility training gives you range of motion through the joints so that you can make the desired shapes. Aerial is a mental and physical game and we need to train both equally.

Another common problem worth mentioning is foot cramping in the air. From my experience, this is caused by a lack of training, dehydration and muscular imbalances across the bottom of the feet. I used to struggle with foot cramping in dance class all of the time as a kid, but if maintain my feet, warm up well and stay hydrated, then I no longer have the problem. There’s also side effects from an adult pointing and flexing as hard as they can on silks all of a sudden after a lifetime of never doing it. It’s like intensely working out any other body part for the first time when you’re just not used to it. When you feel pain, take all of the steps you would for any sore and achy muscles – rest, stretch, massage and keep on training.

Assessing your feet

Ballet training teaches us to separate at the joints and this is a big key to improving your point in the air. The foot has a total of 33 joints so there’s a lot of opportunity to articulate through the feet as we move. When you go from a flex to a point, first extend the ankle joint and shorten the Achilles tendon as much as possible. The more your heel slides under your ankle the better. Continue by pushing your metatarsals downwards (your mid-foot) and finally curl your toes to complete the line. To flex from there, reverse the process step by step. Everyone may mentally register the peak position of a point, which is the foot at full extension, but a lot of what is attractive about the feet is the presentation of the joints moving to get to the peak position. 

At what joints do you have more mobility? Perhaps your ankle can barely move but your toes move quite well. If your feet are flat or some degree of flat, pointing can be super frustrating. Maybe you have high arches and your ankle joint moves easily but your toes refuse to curl. I’ve got a couple students who wear heels at work everyday. Not surprisingly, they have high arches and shorted achilles tendons because their shoes have “trained” their feet by stretching the metatarsals and shortening the back of the ankle over time. That might sound great but these same women have no toe curl because their feet are used to being flexed at that joint, they have a tough time flexing the ankle and the greater percentage of them have tight hamstrings and muscle imbalances all the way up the leg.

I’m not advocating heel wearing as a training tool because there are better ways to stretch the top of the feet, but I mention it to bring attention to what “training” actually is. Training the body is just doing something repetitively until it obeys. As you do the exercises in the video, take notice of what’s easy and what’s not to assess your feet. If you find out that your toes won’t curl for example, then you know what you need to focus on. 

Are your feet healthy to begin with?

If your foot muscles are imbalanced and painfully tight, they must be loosened before building greater flexibility and strength. How do you know if you are too tight to begin strengthening? Grab a lacrosse ball and step on it. Investigate the bottom of your foot and take note of your pain levels in different spots. If this exercise is excruciating, then you’ll know that you need to loosen the muscles. Use the ball to loosen up or massage your feet.

There’s one piece of good news. You can stop beating yourself up if you struggle with pointing your feet in the air. Don’t feel bad about it. With the exception of a small percentage of the population, it doesn’t come naturally to most people. If you train your foot and ankle flexibility consistently on the ground, then you’ll have the neuromuscular control of your feet when you’re in the air.  Maybe you feel like your teachers sound like a broken record when they keep nagging you about this, but we have a good reason. One way to get the brain to body connection to fire is to be constantly reminded to make the connection. Long story short, I say it until I don’t have to anymore. Over time, I don’t have to keep reminding the same students over and over again because their bodies have started to obey their brains. If your teacher is always yelling at you to point your feet, they’re actually just nagging your neuromuscular connection to fire.