Investigating a range of influential movement training practices, this ambitious book considers the significance of professional training to performers and their bodies. Performance training approaches are examined within their wider social and cultural contexts, illuminating their evolution in response to the changing context of theatre practice and production. Adopting a rigorous critical angle, Mark Evans' approach is at the cutting-edge of Theatre scholarship, drawing on interviews with recognised practitioners and considering the implications for movement and the body in the digital age. Engaging and enlightening, this is essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students of Theatre, Drama and Performance wishing to understand and contextualise the theories behind performance training.

In Stability, Sport, and Performance Movement, renowned physiotherapist and performance consultant Joanne Elphinston teaches that sporting technique is rooted in movement efficiency, stability, symmetry, and balance. These elements work together to ensure that physical restrictions and inefficient muscle recruitment patterns don’t inhibit technical movement goals. The right muscles firing at the right time, and in the right sequence, can help athletes achieve their full physical potential. Elphinston provides clear explanations using applied sports examples, shows how to evaluate movement accurately, and provides a detailed method for improving performance. Filled with Performance Movement guides readers through an approach that has been used with international-level athletes in every sport. A major focus is on injury prevention. Athletes sustain injuries and want to know why they have them and how to prevent them. Sports medicine professionals need to know how to relate their rehabilitation back to sports-specific movement, and coaches need to understand the relationship between injury prevention and performance. This practical guide presents new ways to understand stability as it pertains to injury prevention in sport, bridging the gap between sports science and sports medicine.

Investigating a range of influential movement training practices, this ambitious book considers the significance of professional training to performers and their bodies. Performance training approaches are examined within their wider social and cultural contexts, illuminating their evolution in response to the changing context of theatre practice and production. Adopting a rigorous critical angle, Mark Evans' approach is at the cutting-edge of Theatre scholarship, drawing on interviews with recognised practitioners and considering the implications for movement and the body in the digital age. Engaging and enlightening, this is essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students of Theatre, Drama and Performance wishing to understand and contextualise the theories behind performance training.

In every sport, there are athletes who represent true technical excellence. Their movement seems effortless and efficient: they create and control forces in the most effective way. Functional force management, the foundation for effective sporting movement and injury resistance, results from the integration of stability, mobility, coordination and balance. These elements combine to prevent the physical restrictions, imbalances and inefficient muscle recruitment patterns which can block athletes from meeting their movement goals. The right muscles firing at the right time and in the right sequence can enable athletes to achieve their full physical potential. This book is full of color photographs and images to illustrate the techniques and theories involved, Stability, Sport, and Performance Movement introduces functional stability principles as they apply to sporting movement. A comprehensive chapter on movement testing is followed with four chapters of integrated exercise techniques, which clearly demonstrate form and progression from early activation through to higher-level neuromuscular drills. Programs and clinical examples help the reader to appreciate the application of this approach across a variety of sports. It is an approach that has been used with international level athletes in disciplines as diverse as swimming, badminton, gymnastics, karate, cycling, weight lifting, basketball, athletics, snow sports, football, golf, equestrian sports, and tennis. Effective movement starts with great foundation, and these are applicable and relevant across all age groups and ability levels, from beginners through to veterans.

If you want better physical performance and health, and are frustrated with simplistic recipes or blueprints for guaranteed success, this book is for you. Playing with Movement is about helping you solve "movement problems," such as completing your first marathon, recovering from back pain, putting on more muscle, or improving your agility on the soccer field. These challenges can't be met with simple recipes because they are are all complex, meaning they depend on interactions between many different individual factors - muscular, skeletal, physiological, psychological - and also social and environmental context. Play is a natural and intuitive behavior that helps animals explore different ways to solve complex problems. If you want to get better at a sport, find a sustainable exercise program, or even get out of pain, you will need to play with movement. Play means getting physically active in a way that is fun, curious, variable, and personally meaningful. All animals develop skill and fitness through play, not "working out." But the mainstream approach to training and therapy is all work no play. It is focused on movements that are boring, repetitive, planned, stressful and done only to accomplish some external goal. This stems from a reductive mindset that views the body as a machine that needs to be "fixed," instead of a self-organizing system that can grow, adapt and learn. This causes a wide range of common problems, including: Pain treatments that expensive, medicalized and ineffective. An obsession with correcting "dysfunctions" in posture and movement patterns that are in fact normal variations. Sport training that relies on repetitive drills, as opposed to varied games. Exercise programs that feel meaningless and dispiriting. For example, "going through the motions" alone on machines in the gym, versus interacting with friends outside while developing functional skills. The arguments in this book are not based in romantic feel-good reasoning, or nostalgia for sunny days at the park when we were children. They rely on a substantial body of evidence and theory pulled from diverse fields of study, including the sciences of play, complex systems, pain, motor control, exercise physiology, and psychology. They show that the best pathway to movement health is found not by tracking huge amounts of data or following a set of complicated algorithms, but by going on an adventure. If you want to take control of your movement health in a way that is fun, meaningful, and empowering, this book is for you.

Before athletes can become strong and powerful, they need to master the movement skills required in sport. Athletic Movement Skills covers the underlying science and offers prescriptive advice on bridging the gap between scientist and practitioner so coaches and athletes can work together to achieve dominance.

Since the turn of the century, Performance Studies has emerged as an increasingly vibrant discipline. Its concerns - embodiment, ethical research and social change - are held in common with many other fields, however a unique combination of methods and applications is used in exploration of the discipline. Bridging live art practices - theatre, performance art and dance - with technological media, and social sciences with humanities, it is truly hybrid and experimental in its techniques. This Companion brings together specially commissioned essays from leading scholars who reflect on their own experiences in Performance Studies and the possibilities this offers to representations of identity, self-and-other, and communities. Theories which have been absorbed into the field are applied to compelling topics in current academic, artistic and community settings. The collection is designed to reflect the diversity of outlooks and provide a guide for students as well as scholars seeking a perspective on research trends.