600 landings, one ankle: how sports science is helping ballet feet

Talks on Tuesdays: Real lectures in your favourite venues. 45-min + Q&A with Dr Aaron Fox Talks on Tuesdays is a live event series bringing big ideas, real experts, and curious minds together - at your favourite local venues. Think thought-provoking lectures, audience questions, and post-talk mingling over drinks and dinner. This isn’t a uni lecture. It’s a social, intelligent night out.Come alone or with friends, leave with something to talk about. Event Schedule: 6.30pm Arrival & Doors Open 7pm Lecuture Starts 7.45pm Q&A 8pm Talk Concludes 8.30pm Event Closes. *Please arrive close to 6.30pm A La Carte menu and full bar available throughout the night - pay as you go. Your Topic: 600 landings, one ankle: how sports science is tackling ballet's huge injury toll Beneath the grace of ballet lies extraordinary physical power. In fatigue tests using repeated jump-landings, professional ballet dancers outlasted elite athletes by a significant margin - a result researchers put down to years of training the body to absorb impact. But endurance has a cost. A professional dancer lands an average of 600 high-impact jumps a day, each time sending the force of around 7 times their body weight straight through the foot and into the ankle with each landing. Repeating that every day for years causes the body to break down - painful foot and ankle injuries are almost universal amongst dancers. Sports Scientist Dr Aaron Fox studies exactly what happens in those moments of high impact. His uses biomechanics to map how the foot and ankle move and absorb load during ballet, uncovering why injury rates are so high - and what might be done to change that. Join us to explore: • The biomechanics of feet and what happens with every high-impact landing • The high cost and waste of ruined ballet shoes • What dancers wish would change This talk blends hard science with the lived experience of dancers, for a rare look at the physical toll behind ballet's pursuit of perfection. Your Speaker: Dr Aaron Fox is a Senior Lecturer in Applied Sports Science at the Centre for Sport Research in the Deakin Institute for Physical Activity and Nutrition. His research focuses on the mechanics of the lower limb, foot and ankle in high-risk sporting movements to understand how this influences injury risk and performance. He can’t dance – but that hasn’t stopped him from taking a deep dive into the biomechanics of ballet. Dr Aaron Fox will be joined by Haydee Ferguson. Haydee is a dance physiotherapist and PhD candidate at Deakin University. Her research explores the biomechanics of the foot and ankle when ballet dancers are en pointe and the requirements dancers need to meet before starting pointe training. With a lifelong background in dance and more than 14 years of experience working with dancers as a physiotherapist, Haydee combines practical experience with scientific research to help dancers train safely, prevent injuries and achieve the extraordinary movements that make ballet so captivating.