Heather Herod Cole owner of P3 Precision Physical Therapy Pilates Center in Nashville reveals valuable tips and tools to heal and to avoid dancer injuries.

What's your advice for preventing injuries?

You have to be a healthy person before you can be a healthy dancer. You need to make sure you have balance in your life and generally take care of yourself, emotionally and physically. Eat well. Get enough sleep. Stay hydrated. Walk in parallel. And know that there are resources out there to help you. For example, Dance/USA has several valuable informational papers online to help guide dancers in healthy decisions and practices that are totally free about things like staying healthy on tour, nutrition, dealing with depression, and health care options for uninsured or underinsured dancers.

Are the advances in dance science trickling down to teachers and students and having an impact on how people train?

Definitely. People at all levels in the dance world are becoming significantly more aware of dancer health issues -- from companies to schools. (IADMS publishes a Bulletin for Teachers on healthy training.) I think this is due to a few factors. For one, there's been so much progress in sports medicine that we are able to apply to dancer issues. Also there has been a rise in the popularity of dance, partly based on the reality and competition TV shows. There are more dance studios than Little League teams in the US now. With more dancers comes an increased demand for science and medicine to care for them. The response to pain used to be "just suck it up and deal with it" but it really doesn't have to be that way. And it shouldn't be. It's important to respond to an injury intelligently. You can give an injured area time to heal, and help it heal correctly, while continuing to move the rest of your body. The old attitude of trying to ignore the pain for fear of losing time isn't a good, or necessary, way to handle a problem.  READ MORE advice from Heather Cole.