How to Improve Your Dancing Without Help

What if you didn’t have to have your instructor looking over your shoulder to improve your dancing? What if you could figure out what was holding you back and correct it all on your own?

Don’t get me wrong: virtually all of us need expert advice from time to time to avoid practicing bad technique.

But with a little body awareness and a lot of patience, we can make the lessons we’ve learned go a lot farther when we take it from the studio floor to the practice floor.

Step 1: Decide What To Practice Before You Start

Whether you learn best following a list or following your instincts, it helps to have a plan. Maybe you’re just trying to get a step or sequence of steps in your head, or maybe there’s a specific technique you want to improve. Focusing on one thing at a time will always give you better results faster.

Some of the most common things you might focus on:

1. Posture
2. Frame
3. Timing
4. Footwork
5. Balance
6. Leading/Following
7. Cuban motion (hip action)
8. Arm-styling

Step 2: Start Slowly

Anyone can speed through a half-understood dance move. If you truly want to improve your dancing, try dancing at half speed, or even slower. Pause in the middle or end of difficult moves to see if you can hold your balance.

Step 3: Ask Questions

Practicing your steps without asking yourself what works and what doesn’t is like starting a conversation and then covering your ears. Are you balanced? Did you lead with the correct part of the foot? How’s your rise and fall? Your Cuban motion? where exactly does it run into trouble? Why? Look at your body like a scientist, and experiment with little changes. Pay close attention to what seems to work and what doesn’t.

If you’re having trouble with this step, you can at least learn more about what’s going wrong and ask your instructor in your next lesson.

Step 4: Drill the Sticking Points

Once you’ve figured out what you need to change (and be patient - it will take some time), practice it slowly until you can do it ten times in a row without messing it up. Focus on the specific place where the problem occurs, then build backward to the whole step.

Step 5: Dance Full Out!

Time to put on some music and dance through the step to see if what you’ve learned has sunk in.  Use the ’10 times in a row’ strategy to test your consistency. When you reach the point where you feel you could hold a conversation or wave to a friend while dancing, you have truly reached your goal.

Of all the steps, step 3 is the hardest to apply, unless you’re already familiar with what might be throwing off your body. Next week, we’ll tackle some common technique problems that plague ballroom dancers, and show you how step 3 can be used to identify them - and their solution.