Or injury, to be specific. I popped my cuboid bone out of place (it's a small bone in your foot) doing a toe rise (that's actually the video I used to learn how to do a toe rise in the first place). For those of you who don't know what a toe rise is, it looks a bit like this:
...except I didn't do it anywhere that prettily. That's not me, by the way (I wish). And I didn't do it with a backbend. I just pressed up. And apparently, I pressed too hard and slid a bone out of place. Yikes. No more toe rises for me! (if you're interested in seeing the performance where I dislocated it, let me know!)
Anyway, all that happened back at the beginning of October 2010. Once it was popped back, I was given the choice of using tape or an ankle brace to physically hold the bone in place. My therapist told me that, since the ankle brace would cut off some circulation in the foot and ankle, it would be best to use tape (which also holds better). Since then, I've been taping my foot every time I danced or wore heels higher than 2 inches (just a safety measure). It's been almost a year, and I can still feel the bone sometimes, not that it hurts chronically, but I tape my foot even though it's probably as good as it's going to get now. It is possible to re-injure - I popped it out again after the initial injury once doing pointe, once dancing on a concrete floor in performance (I was wearing the tape, but the floor was too hard). I'm still a pointe dancer, and I can dance pointe without any popping of bones or pain, if you're wondering.
After trying out a few different tapes, this is the one I've stayed with, and I wanted to recommend it to you guys! It's great, breathable, I tape my foot every day without a prewrap (plastic wrap underneath the tape so the sticky stuff doesn't peel your skin off and irritate it) and it doesn't hurt my skin at all! It does leave a kind of sticky residue on the outlines of the tape, but it comes off with a bit of scrubbing in the shower. Bonus tip: when I started performing and auditioning for college with this injury, I realized I couldn't have a glob of white stuff on my foot. I found this exact tape in beige (skin tone) at Ithacasports.com! It works just as well as the white stuff and might be even softer! If you have to tape some part of your body in place to dance (that sounds horrible...), I highly recommend this beige tape.
my beautiful foot.
Has anyone else had a weird injury like this? How do you avoid bruises/dislocations in your toe rises? Leave me a comment below! :)
