How does a ballerina stay fit during the grueling ‘Nutcracker’ season? A day in the life of a Sugarplum Fairy.

When New York City Ballet dancer Unity Phelan steps on stage, her solo is set to the tinkling sounds of Tchaikovsky’s “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy,” one of the most recognizable songs of the holiday season. Wearing a long pink tutu for the starring role in the dance company’s annual Nutcracker season — an event that draws 100,000 people to New York City’s Lincoln Center each year — she exudes beauty, poise and grace.

But behind the sparkling tiara and flawless technique is the rigorous schedule of an elite athlete.

“It's among the most grueling jobs that you can have,” Phelan tells Yahoo Life while simultaneously applying her makeup backstage before a performance with the care yet speed of someone who has done this hundreds of times before.

“Your whole body and soul goes into what you do every day. It's not all pretty. It's exhausting — mentally, physically, emotionally. But you love it, so you do it every day.”

A day in the life of a Sugarplum Fairy

During the Nutcracker season, which lasts for six weeks between Thanksgiving and New Year's Eve, Phelan performs six or seven shows per week: two to three shows with New York City Ballet, and four shows over the weekend as a guest artist with schools or smaller ballet companies. When she isn’t on stage, the Princeton, N.J., native is knee-deep in rehearsals for other shows for New York City Ballet’s upcoming winter season, which begins a few weeks after Nutcracker wraps up. Mondays are her only days off.

It’s a tough schedule, but Phelan has paid her dues. Since being promoted from the corps de ballet to soloist and eventually to principal dancer (the highest rank in New York City Ballet) in 2021, Phelan alternates between the lead roles of regal Sugarplum Fairy and spritely Dew Drop during the Nutcracker season. Phelan shares the roles with other principal and soloist dancers, so she doesn’t dance in every show; members of the company’s corps de ballet, on the other hand, are on deck for all 49 performances.

“They really bear the brunt of The Nutcracker, I would say, for the company,” Phelan says of the ensemble dancers. “They're here every night, every day, working. It's kind of like a rite of passage.”

Still, Phelan frequently works 12-hour days — often on the go from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Those days follow a similar routine:

• Morning: Waking up. Phelan doesn’t drink coffee or tea; instead, she starts the day with a collagen supplement in hot water, along with a breakfast of yogurt, granola and berries. She then heads to the ballet studio, where she does physical therapy exercises and warms up for thirty minutes. “For dancers, once we activate one of our muscles we’re able to access it more easily throughout the day,” Phelan explains. “Turning on certain muscles that might lie dormant otherwise — like turnout muscles, deep abdominals, some of my multifidus muscle in my back — that [is] going to keep me not only protected from any sort of injury, but also strong and pulled up and long.”

• Afternoon: Working out. After warm-up comes an hour-long ballet class, followed by three to six hours of rehearsals. Then, it’s showtime. “At 5:30 p.m. we stop rehearsing, and I come back to my dressing room, turn on my lights, turn on my heating pad, do my makeup and do the show.”

• Evening: Winding down. After the show — or if she doesn’t have a performance that night, after rehearsals — Phelan heads home. “I love my wind down. My wind down is my favorite part of the day,” she says. She usually keeps moving for a bit, dropping her stuff off at her apartment before taking her dog, Pippin, for a walk to decompress and “let everything get out” of her system. “Then at home, I usually sit back, soak my feet in a bucket of ice for 10 minutes to take down any inflammation that may have arisen in my ankles, and then I will spend some time on a tennis ball or some sort of ball rolling out my hips and my back.”

A dancer’s diet

Phelan leans heavily on two habits to stay healthy and avoid injuries: a good diet and cross-training.

Eating well is instrumental, but Phelan says it’s sometimes hard to make time for a full meal; so while she packs a lunch from home every day, she also has her dressing room stocked with healthy snacks.

“I'll eat all of these as the day goes on,” she says, gesturing to a dressing table stash of granola bars, peanut butter and other quick bites. “It's really important to have something because if you start dancing hungry and don't feel like you have kind of a backlog of sustenance to pull from, that's when I feel like injuries happen.”

She eats a banana before every show and later has some almonds and pretzels — “because I always want something salty toward the end of the day.”

A dancer's workout

Many dancers benefit from some form of cross-training, like yoga or swimming, in addition to the daily ballet grind; Phelan supplements her ballet regimen with plyometric workout classes taught by fitness instructor Beth Nicely, who is also a professional dancer.

“When I was young, I had a really hard time building muscle,” Phelan says. “So by the time I was 15, I had a gym membership and was pretty active in working out and maintenance and training my muscles.”

Rather than using heavy weights, Phelan says the classes focus on shifting and leveraging the athlete’s own body weight, doing things like jumping onto boxes, using trampolines and turning.

“Usually what happens when you get injured is your body moves in a way that you weren't prepared for, and then it reacts by something shifting,” Phelan says. “So training myself to do those turns and jumps and moves preemptively has been a total game-changer for me, and I also feel like it keeps my stamina in incredible shape. I have noticed that I don't get as tired and can do longer, harder days.”

On mental health: ‘If people don't like it, then that can really affect you'

While a dancer’s job is physically taxing, it can also take a heavy toll on mental health, even for the most seasoned performers.

“It's a very heady career because you're kind of giving yourself every show,” Phelan says. “It's very personal. It's not like you're submitting a report; you're not going to a meeting where it doesn't really matter. You've worked your whole life to do this thing, and if people don't like it, then that can really affect you.”

One way Phelan copes is to avoid reading reviews of her performances — whether good or bad — at all costs. If you believe other people’s praise then you also need to give credence to their criticism — and Phelan would rather be her own judge.

“Dance is very subjective. Some people might love your rendition; some people might hate it. But especially now, at this point in my career, if I feel happy with what I've done, that's all that really matters,” she says. “And of course, my bosses should be happy with what I do too."

A major source of comfort that helps Phelan stay sane despite a demanding work schedule is her strong support system: her family, her sister, her dog, Pippin, who helps her appreciate life’s “simple joys,” and her husband, Cameron Dieck, who danced with New York City Ballet until 2018 and understands all the rigor that goes into regularly churning out moving performances each season.

“What we do looks so beautiful and effortless, and there's so much work behind it to make it look like that,” Phelan says. “It's that kind of dichotomy that I also think is challenging for dancers: to have people realize that it's actually really hard work and blood, sweat and tears every day — but what you see on stage is a beautiful pink princess in a tiara.”