People love complaining about how busy the holiday season is. There are presents to buy—or, in this economy, payment plans to sign up for. There are parties to go to, trees to decorate, and relatives to avoid (and cider to spike if that’s not possible). While it’s easy to lose a bit of your merriment as you slog through what seems to be a never-ending avalanche of holiday responsibilities, you should count yourself lucky that your Christmastime schedule isn’t as packed as that of the dancers at Houston Ballet.

Every year since 1972, Houston Ballet has celebrated the holiday season by putting on performances of The Nutcracker. It’s a huge moneymaker for the company, and an estimated 70,000 patrons come out to see it each year. This year, the production runs from November 24 through December 27 and includes 35 performances as well as seven dress rehearsals. Every dancer in the company will participate in the production, as will dancers from the Houston Ballet Academy and children from the local community. By the time the curtain closes after the final performance, they’ll all be very sore and very, very tired.

While it takes a long time for the ballet to prepare the costumes for The Nutcracker, it also takes time for dancers to prepare their bodies for the deluge of performances. First soloist Harper Watters, who will be playing the role of the Nutcracker Prince for three performances this year and Drosselmeyer for another two, starts months in advance. “I’m a big proponent of working out and making sure that my body is ready physically for the grueling Nutcracker schedule because once we start, it’s pretty nonstop,” he says. “You kind of have to get ahead of it.” He’s spent the past few months doing Pilates and a lot of high-intensity weight training to get his heart rate and stamina up.

Soloist Aoi Fujiwara, who plays the role of the Sugar Plum Fairy in four performances this year, has been following a similar routine. “Whenever we start getting close to The Nutcracker, I make sure I have protein every day or work out. I don’t go crazy, but I do it consistently,” she says.

The ballet’s on-site clinic—facilitated by Houston Methodist Hospital, the official health care provider for the ballet—is staffed with full-time dieticians, athletic trainers, and physical therapists. The team spends much of the months leading up to The Nutcracker advising the dancers on how to prepare their bodies for the long performance run. Once the shows start, they’ll be on hand to provide physical therapy, massages, dry needling, and advice to dancers on how to get their bodies through the demanding performance schedule.

“What we emphasize for the most part is, are you getting enough sleep?” says athletic trainer Carina Nasrallah. “Are you eating well? Are you making sure that on a double show day, you are getting a meal in between your first and your second show? Are you getting a nap? Are you getting a really good dinner after the show? Are you getting a snack right after you finish? How are you hydrating?”

Dancers like Watters and Fujiwara all have their own tricks to keep their bodies fueled during the season and to make sure they’re spending enough time resting between performances. Watters turns to brands like Liquid I.V. and LMNT to replenish his electrolytes. He also makes sure he’s eating regular meals and snacking a lot. “Despite the popular misconception that dancers don’t eat, we’re constantly eating. We’re constantly trying to load on carbs and to have snacks and to keep our energy levels up,” he says. After every performance, before getting out of hair and makeup, he makes sure to spend a good five to 10 minutes cooling down his body and stretching, which he says helps his muscles recover before he has to do it all over again.

Fujiwara helps restore her body by taking hot baths after every performance and by making sure she is getting enough sleep. “For me, sleep is the most important thing. On my days off, I sleep as much as I can. I also sometimes take naps between shows,” she says. “I also get massages. There are only a few spots, so maybe not every week. Sometimes when my body feels weird, I also go to the physical therapist.”

Despite all the physical preparation and recovery rituals, injuries still happen. Fortunately, Nasrallah will be backstage during every performance so she can tend to them right away. She looks for red flags such as any kind of significant swelling or visible discoloration or deformity on dancers’ bodies. Pain level is often used to determine the severity of an injury. Nasrallah says she’s a lot more concerned about pain that’s sharp, stabbing, or throbbing than she is about pain that can be described as tight, dull, achy, or sore.

Fortunately, most Nutcracker injuries are pretty mild, things like puffy ankles or swelling in the toes or knees—inflammatory issues that stem from a lack of adequate recovery time. “With a couple of days off to rest or by getting enough sleep or hydration, they’ll usually resolve on their own,” she says. “But cumulatively they can become an issue because they’re not getting as much downtime as they would during other parts of the season.”

One issue Nasrallah sees regularly is one she and her team have started referring to as “sugar leg,” an injury that is not as sweet as the name implies. The injury tends to occur in dancers performing the role of the Sugar Plum Fairy, which is one of the hardest roles in Stanton Welch’s staging of The Nutcracker. “The majority of the choreography is done en pointe on her left leg, and she is almost always standing on her left leg,” Nasrallah says. “It’s a fatigue-related issue that leads to swelling in the ankle and limited range of motion.”

To make things easier for the dancers, the role of the Sugar Plum Fairy is switched out frequently during the production’s run. Still, serious injuries do occasionally happen.

“Injury is definitely a nature of the game. That doesn’t just happen during Nutcracker, that happens anytime of the season. But during Nutcracker it always happens just because of the frequency of the performances.” Watters says. “Fortunately, there’s usually a cast member who can step in. It does create a sort of domino effect sometimes when it comes to replacing the roles. The run is so long that sometimes people get injured and then they come back and finish the run.”

Injuries, sore muscles, achy feet, and tiredness aside, 35 performances are also a lot to tackle mentally. In order to get through it, dancers in the production cling to fun rituals. Every year they put up 35 stickers of reindeer or snowmen in their dressing room. After every show, they rip one down. “It just gives us some sort of hope that there’s a light at the end of the tunnel,” Watters says.

They also conduct a house count game before every performance where members of the cast try to guess how many people are in the audience. The ticketing people will let the stage manager know what the actual count is, who in turn will announce the number to the dancers during intermission. Whoever guessed closest to the number without going over wins a small holiday prize.

Seemingly little things like that can go a long way in helping dancers push through the season. Watters likes to compare the buildup to Nutcracker season to how people may dread going home to visit family for the holidays, but once they actually get there, they end up having a blast because they’re with their family.

While Watters admits the Nutcracker run is exhausting, he says he doesn’t necessarily spend all year dreading it. Instead, he likes to view it as a chance to spend a lot of time with his chosen family, all while reconnecting with a work that he and many of his fellow dancers have performed in since they were children.

“With the amount of shows we do, it is physically grueling, and it is a big demand on the body and our patience,” he says. “But it’s a tradition, and the season would seem incomplete without doing it. It’s a real magical time because I’d say that, for the majority of the company, it was the first ballet they saw and that they danced in. And so it brings up these emotions of childhood dreams.”