Assessing & Treating Dancers and Artistic Athletes - Level 2

Overview

Assessing & Treating Dancers and Artistic Athletes – Level 2 is an advanced on-demand course delivering over 13 hours of expert content for clinicians ready to move beyond the fundamentals and build genuine clinical mastery with dancers and artistic athletes. Recorded from a live 8-week virtual series, this course captures real case discussions, live patient assessments, and candid conversations with professional dancers, Olympic-level athletes, and specialist clinicians, giving you a unique and immersive, multi-perspective learning that a textbook cannot replicate.

Building directly on the foundations introduced in Level 1, the curriculum tackles complex and often under-represented clinical presentations across the full spectrum of artistic disciplines, including ballet, commercial dance, circus arts, gymnastics, artistic swimming, and competitive diving. You'll explore scoliosis, foot fractures, pelvic health and menopause, mental performance, male dancer considerations, nutrition and RED-S, and objective performance testing - all in a single, cohesive program. With lifetime access and a certificate of completion, you can move through the content at your own pace and return to sessions whenever a complex case lands in your clinic.

All 8 modules in this course are available immediately upon purchase.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this course, participants will be able to:

1. Apply advanced, discipline-specific assessment and treatment strategies for dancers and artistic athletes across styles, genders, and life stages.
   
   
2. Critically interpret current research and emerging trends in dance medicine and performance science to support evidence-based clinical reasoning.
   
   
3. Assess and manage complex conditions including adolescent idiopathic scoliosis, foot fractures (avulsion, Jones, and Lisfranc), pelvic floor dysfunction, and menopause-related performance changes in dancers.
   
   
4. Understand the fundamentals of pointe shoe fitting and integrate pointe work considerations meaningfully into rehabilitation planning.
   
   
5. Incorporate mental performance principles; including psychological readiness, resilience, and management of perfectionism and burnout and into rehabilitation and return-to-stage programming.
   
   
6. Identify the distinct training demands, injury risk profiles, and psychosocial considerations of male dancers, including body image and lifting mechanics.
   
   
7. Apply objective performance testing tools (VALD ForceDecks and DynaMo) to detect jumping asymmetries, strength profiles, and injury risk indicators in artistic athletes.
   
   
8. Expand clinical assessment and treatment frameworks to serve diverse artistic populations, including gymnasts, artistic swimmers, figure skaters, and competitive divers.

Audience

This course is designed for licensed clinicians and performance health professionals who already have a working foundation in dance medicine — either through completion of Level 1 or equivalent clinical experience with dancers and artistic athletes. It is directly relevant to physiotherapists, athletic therapists, chiropractors, sports medicine physicians, and strength and conditioning coaches who encounter artistic athletes in clinical, studio, or performance settings. If you've ever felt under-equipped when a dancer presents with a stress fracture, pelvic floor complaint, or pre-performance anxiety — or if you've struggled to communicate within an interdisciplinary artistic team - this course directly addresses those gaps. Clinicians working across the spectrum from recreational performers to national team artistic athletes will find the content both clinically rigorous and immediately applicable.

Prerequisite: Completion of Assessing & Treating Dancers and Artistic Athletes – Level 1 or equivalent clinical experience working with dancers or artistic athletes.

Why This Course Matters

Dancers and artistic athletes impose extraordinary physical, psychological, and aesthetic demands on their bodies yet they are routinely underserved by traditional sports medicine frameworks that were never designed with their world in mind. The culture of dance adds clinical complexity that few programs address directly: a high tolerance for pain, delayed help-seeking, and presentations that sit at the intersection of biomechanics, performance psychology, and aesthetics.

Topics like pelvic health through the menopause transition, Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (RED-S), male dancer-specific vulnerabilities, and mental performance readiness are not supplementary but rather they are the difference between an athlete who sustains a long career and one who retires early. This course bridges the persistent research-to-practice gap by equipping you with specialized clinical vocabulary, current evidence, and the kind of nuanced reasoning that only comes from learning alongside elite performers and the clinicians who work with them every day.

Whether your patient is a 16-year-old pre-professional navigating early scoliosis screening or a 45-year-old company artist managing perimenopause symptoms mid-season, Level 2 gives you the framework to meet them where they are.

Led by Dinah Hampson, this course also features an exceptional lineup of guest contributors across all 8 modules, including:

• Heather Ogden: Principal Dancer, Canada's National Ballet
• Brooke Winder, PT, DPT, OCS: Associate Professor, Department of Dance, California State University Long Beach; pelvic health and menopause specialist
• Kristin Ruggieri: Professional pointe shoe fitter
• Jordan Long: Principal Soloist, Miami City Ballet
• Lauren Ostrander McArdle: Master's in Sport and Performance Psychology; former Soloist, Sarasota Ballet
• Sarah Power, RD: Registered Dietitian specializing in performance nutrition and RED-S
• Lindy Mesmer: Artist, The Joffrey Ballet
• Lucas Ayranto: Canada's National Ballet School
• Jacqline Simoneau: World Champion, 3× Olympian, Artistic Swimming
• William Emard: Olympian, Men's Gymnastics
• Katelyn Fung: Canadian National Diving Team
• Emily Scherb, PT, DPT: "The Circus Doc," circus medicine specialist
• Mireille Landry, BScPT, MSc, Sport Physio Diploma: Olympics Team Canada, Figure Skating
• Katie Smith, BScPT, FCAMPT, Sport Physio Diploma: Olympics Team Canada, Artistic Swimming
• Plus additional case guests: Sarah Ouellet, Emma Ouellet, Macyn Vogt (Indianapolis Ballet), Elsbeth Ward, and Journie Kalous (Indianapolis Ballet)

What's Included

• 13+ hours of on-demand video content across 8 modules
• Live patient assessments and real case discussions captured from the live series
• Downloadable resources and clinical tools
• Lifetime access - revisit any session whenever a complex case requires it
• Certificate of completion