To become a professional dancer you must be able to overcome numerous limitations. To do this, dancers tend to become very nervous perfectionists. They become highly motivated individuals who are not willing to give up, no matter what it takes. The dancers' strong work ethic gives them the ability to fly their bodies across the stage and extend their legs skyward. Sometimes dancers overcompensate their bodies to achieve these skills, which causes minor injuries. In the dance world this can be extremely dangerous as it leads to other chronic pain disorders. Due to highly motivated personalities, dancers tend to ignore pain in some areas because they fear disappointment from their teachers and themselves. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Dancing with an injury for any length of time can build up and get worse, causing much more serious injuries to develop. Therefore, dancers develop certain coping mechanisms that allow them to dance with extreme levels of pain and exhaustion. Dancers are taught from a young age that to be successful in this industry they must overcome pain and exhaustion if they want to succeed. Even when dancers' bodies are experiencing various changes, they are taught to continue training. Bowerman et. al. (2014) specifically examined how young dancers going through puberty are at increased risk for injury due to their maturational changes. During the puberty period in a dancer's life, they usually transition to pointe shoes, while experiencing increased growth rates of their feet and lower extremities. Therefore, dancers tend to make various compensations to the valgus angle of the knee, especially on the leg they prefer to work on. This results in misalignment and overuse of the lower extremities which can ultimately lead to injury (Bowerman et. al., 2004). Overuse of particular muscles is commonly associated with the pervasiveness and inability of dancers to stop training when they feel pain. Dancers tend to fear specific injuries because they feel the need to remain competitive with their peers and not being able to train for several months can cause total disappointment in a dancer's life (Encarnacion et. al., 2000). It is of deep concern to understand at what point a dancer should experience pain severe enough to constitute a possible injury. Dance becomes more intense with hours of longer and more rigorous rehearsals, with more years of training. The increase in years of dance training has been found to correlate with the intensity exerted on both the mind and body of professional dancers. The higher the skill level of dancers becomes, the more likely they are to overlook existing injuries. A simple pop from a dancer's hip or pain from a pulled muscle can actually cause small injuries that ultimately lead to chronic ailments. This suggests that extraordinary dancers teach themselves to have pain assessment strategies that help them dance with an injury (Paparizos et. al., 2005). Studies have examined the neurological strategies and methods that highly physical people use to tolerate extreme amounts of pain. Specifically, it is possible that dancers learn to control pain-related emotions in their highly stressful environment due to the competitive nature of the performer. Dancers acquire certain coping mechanisms that allow them to dance for many years with an undetected injury. THEDancers tend to have a lower level of catastrophizing emotions. The catastrophizing process occurs when people believe their symptoms are much more negative than they actually are. It has been found that physically very strong people tend to ignore these catastrophic emotions to achieve certain levels of success. The study conducted by Paparizos et. al (2005) supports this catastrophizing theory. They found that catastrophizing strategies predict pain perception behavior in non-dancers, so they show more negative emotions related to pain. For professional dancers, however, Paparizos et. al. (2005) found that measures of magnification (level of perceived threat to the painful stimulus) were much more effective in determining dancers' perception of pain. This can be interpreted as dancers' ability to monitor their own pain level and push through existing painful stimuli occurring in their body. The non-dancers who participated in this study experienced higher levels of helplessness, which therefore explains their stronger catastrophizing emotions (Paparizo et. al., 2005). Dancers who have been training for several years are typically professionals who are experts at monitoring their bodies; but sometimes they are unable to detect an accumulation of lesions. Most commonly injuries occur when dancers overtrain and use improper technique. Therefore, it would be safe to assume that a more skilled dancer would be able to detect when they are appropriately injured. Incarnation, et. al. (2000) worked with a range of professional and nonprofessional dancers at the high school and college levels, and then compared their perception of pain with that of other athletes. Participants were asked to complete the Sports Inventory of Pain (SIP), which measures levels of cognitive appraisals, coping mechanisms, catastrophizing, and body awareness. When looking at classical dancers compared to other expert athletes, the dancers who participated in this study and other studies like it showed significantly different results. The dancers scored lower on cognition and showed strong coping mechanisms. Their coping mechanisms seem specific to their talent/sport. This ties back to the interesting psychological abilities of dancers. Dancers are more willing to endure high levels of pain than the average person because that is what they must endure on a daily basis to be successful (Paparizos et. al., 2005). Among the group statistics the continuing question is whether professional dancers have a higher pain tolerance than recreational dancers. Interestingly, the results of several studies found that there was no significant main effect on pain management mechanisms for pre-professional and professional dancers. However, in terms of catastrophizing emotions Paparizos et. al (2005) and Encarnacion et. al. (2000) both found that more skilled dancers exhibited lower levels of catastrophizing emotions. This subtle difference in results may be due to the greater threat value of an injury occurring at the professional level, rather than at the recreational level. In addition to the difference in catastrophizing emotions, it may be inclusive to believe that the reason why dancers of various levels may have similar perceptions of pain is because of their psychological uniformity trained to be a successful dancer (Encarnacion et. al., 2000). That said, it's possible that the competitive nature of the sport causes dancers to have a pain threshold.