As myself a practitioner and teacher, warm up has always been an interesting subject to me.
As a teacher, I believe I need to make sure that everyone is warm and ready to dance before my lesson. However, it is up to teachers. I know some ballet teachers spend first five to ten minutes to warm students up. It is absolutely fine at full time ballet/dance schools as students have no commitment in life but to get to their and dance: they have plenty of time to waste, like when I was in my ballet school. However, in my lessons time is an essence, we can not afford to spend five to ten minutes to warm in an hour lesson! And, everyone has an individual life so some of you can just about to make it or join the lesson five minutes after the lesson began, which is understandable.
as a practitioner, I actually do spend less the five minutes to get ready for my own lesson. However, I use to spend over an hour for warm up when I was a student and when I became professional ballet dancer! Over an hour to warm up! It is crazy and insane! It's six hours in a week and that is equivalent to a night sleep or imagine what you can learn or archive in six hours!
In my next blog I will explain how my warm up developed and why. And, I hope this blog made you think about the reasons of warm up. If you are serious about getting better in ballet, I need to you think why we warm up and where we need to warm up.