Behind the Bio: Thomas Swords

Thomas Swords has quite a unique skill on his résumé. As a result of 12 years touring the world dancing and performing with circuses, he can juggle a suitcase with his feet.

“I did swing trapeze – the big swinging flying fabulousness. But then I also did a lot of acrobatics and tumbling and more of that gymnastics element, and then a skill that I never thought I was going to have – I started learning how to foot juggle.”

Mr Swords knows intimately the physical demands of incessant dance training and the pressure to perform, sometimes through injury. “I danced from the age of five through to the age of 28, and there is that mentality that you just push through and you get on stage and you do those things, and then you limp off stage after … That culture is changing now, which is really great.”

Since 2015, La Trobe University researchers have worked with The Australian Ballet to understand how to prevent injury and support the 70–80 dancers with different physical issues. The Australian Ballet is one of the only ballet companies in the world with an embedded research department focused on the artistic performers’ health.

Mr Swords transitioned from honours student to completing research on the foot, funded by the Shepherd Foundation, and has now been awarded a PhD scholarship at La Trobe University. His honours research, part of the La Trobe University and The Australian Ballet partnership, involved wearable technologies that can help determine load and forces on a ballet dancer’s body.

“When you look at a dancer’s daily schedule, their training load is incredibly high, so how do we counteract that if that’s then causing a higher risk of injury? Or are we finding that if they are at this certain sweet spot of training load, they’re actually getting really fabulous adaptations to the muscles and ligaments and tendons?”

Dream shattered

Growing up in an active family of competitive skiers, Thomas worked towards his dream of becoming a professional ballet dancer until, at the age of 17, he discovered he had labral tears of both hip joints and other issues that meant he wasn’t able to continue down that path.

“I very much understood my body wasn’t designed to do ballet, and wondered how could we then change that narrative for someone in the future.”

From a young age, he’d been interested in how the body works.

“I was notorious for asking, ‘Yeah, but why?’ Your knee is bending, but why is it bending? And that kind of constant curiosity about the human body and how things worked very much led me to do my undergrad in sport and exercise science.”

Initially, Mr Swords thought that would lead him towards a career in physiotherapy, but he discovered he loved the science-heavy subjects. That then led to research on the Winter Olympics team, work with the AFL and VFL, and his 2023 La Trobe Honours degree and subsequent employment at The Australian Ballet.

“The partnership between La Trobe University and The Australian Ballet is essentially a wonderful research agreement. It's about embedding researchers into The Australian Ballet so that we're constantly on the front foot in coming up with concepts, research and ways in which we can improve, maintain and enhance certain pillars – injury prevention, dancer health and performance.”

High-risk sports

Towards the end of 2025, Mr Swords will embark on a PhD project with the Victorian Institute of Sport.

“I'll be studying bone stress injuries in high-risk sports,” he says. “These sports include diving, gymnastics, aerial skiing, javelin and netball. I'll be doing a bit of an injury epidemiology aspect of the study and then a biomechanical assessment – looking at the movement analysis of these athletes utilising wearable tech to track and monitor their total load volumes and then hopefully piece it all together and perhaps explore correlations between bone stress injuries and their force profile and their training load.”