The Hello and this week we unlock the secrets of how Dolphins can

Hello and welcome to the Naked Scientists with me Ginny Smith and with Kate

Lamble.

Hi Kate. is that a revolution in sport or a step too far.

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Later on in the show we'll be taking a closer look at sports science to find out

how athletes are managing to outperform past generations but first it's time to

take a look at what's been making the science headlines and

Ginny I gather you've been putting on your dancing shoes this week.

Yes so this is a study that suggests that marking through a dance can actually be more beneficial than doing it properly in a rehearsal.

So marking something that most dancers will be familiar with,

when you're rehearsing a routine, you don't always dance it properly like you would on stage, because that would use

lots of energy and if you're doing it lots and lots of times, you just don't have enough energy

for that. So sometimes you just sort of walk through the steps, you might not leave the floor if there are meant to be jumps and even make hand movements in place of difficult steps like turns.

But a new study, Warbited and colleagues at University of California, suggests there might be something more going on here than just energy conservation.

So they ask some expert ballet dancers to learn two routines, and each dancer practiced one of them entirely full out and one of them partly through marking and obviously they counterbalance the routines.

So as well as learning the steps, the dancers had to apply a quality to each movement so they had to make some things gliding

and some things floating and that sort of thing and then they performed their routines and

...