Wasn't our glorious 2022 Winter Olympics awesome this month? Watching those snowboarders tumble across the sky, ski jumpers fly, Cross country skiers sail. . . and then the figure skaters: Nathan Chen, Papadadakis & Cizeron, Chock & Bates soaring so spectacularly across the ice is breathtaking ehhh?
Now, let’s channel our fresh inspiration and consider what we can learn from those new world champion athletes that we can apply to our own humble journeys in learning to social dance. As well as being thrilled by their great talent and years of discipline, here we will take a closer look in particular at the way several kinds of Olympic champions use special footwork techniques to achieve success moving across snow and ice in their respective sports. You see, your feet are the mechanical foundation of movement for your whole body. Once you change the way your feet move, you change the way your whole body moves. Though your feet are only a small body part, just a few square inches that bear your weight into the floor, they are a big lever for steering your 50-to-300-ish pounds of body weight into any direction. Amazing! Thus, even tiny changes in your footwork will trigger a cascade of movements above. Your feet are the fulcrum for even a little effort to shift your stack of body parts, right up to the top of your head. A slight shift of your weight over your feet will make a big shift in the balancing, counterbalancing and leveraging of each block of your body weight. That’s why sports coaches worldwide make sure to include footwork in their trainings Do your footwork correctly, with proper muscle and joint alignment, and you will strengthen your toes, ankles and knees, align your spine, uplift your torso, solidify your shoulders, free up your arms, stretch up your head, and center all into a beautfiul posture. Your body, properly aligned with hips over feet, shoulders over hips, becomes a perfectly proportioned work of art, a living sculpture. You will then be able to delightfully connect with symmetrical counterbalance to your likewise finely-tuned dance partner. So yes, wonderful results await you when you do your footwork right. But first, let's get back to the beginning. Let’s start with putting our feet on a path towards excellence -- Olympic level excellence! So we’ll head back to the Olympics to see what we can learn. First, let’s start with my favorite winter sport: Ski Jumping! It’s all about a perfectly balanced launch, right? Let’s try it: First, stand upright and still, feet under you, shoulder width apart. Your imaginary Ski Jumping Skis pointed straight forward under you. Swing your arms back as you bend your knees, keeping your head up, then as you swing arms forward rise up onto the front ball of your foot and slowly swing your arms forward and up. See how long you can balance up high before swinging arms down again and lowering onto flat foot, bending your knees. Try it again a few times, pushing your feet into the ground, squeezing the muscles of your legs together to stabilize them. Still wobbly? Now try to squeeze the muscles of your knees, back, shoulders all to the center of your body and lifted up. You did? Great! Are you ready to go out on the ski jump now and try it there? Me neither, so let's just pretend, right here on our safe kitchen floors. Now, let's try cross country skiing. Here we learn to line up our feet like they have big giant skis. In the Ski-Athlon the first half was the old-fashioned style of cross country skiing which is toes pointed straight ahead sliding your feet straight forward and back. This is what we do in Waltz aiming feet straight forward, efficiently getting the most distance with each step Try it right now : line up your toes to point straightforward. As you step your feet are rolling through each foot lifting the heel up from behind you so you get maximum smooth distance The second half of the SkiAthlon was the more modern style of footwork. You push your feet back diagonally to get more power from them. This causes you to rock back-and-forth, diagonally side-to-side. This is also the motion used more in speed ice-skating, to efficiently get the most power from each step, with not only the foot pushing diagonally back but your bodies and arms swinging diagonally forward. Now let’s adapt this to Waltz. Swinging your body diagonally forward three steps to the left then three steps to the right. Feel it adding more power to your waltzing? Like an Olympian waltzer! Not only is footwork critical in the sliding, gliding sports of snow & ice, but even Martial Arts coaches proclaim the value, though for more violent goals: “Footwork allows us to do 3 things:
In a gentler view, Harvard Healthbeat advocates we start simply with walking. “It improves your cardiovascular health and can help your circulation, muscle tone, and mood. When you walk, you put your foot through its full range of motion, from the time your heel hits the ground until you lift off with your toes.” The goal of proper footworks, explains Vern Gambetta, President of Gambetta Sports Training Systems, is “control of and positioning the center of gravity... keeping the hips over the base of support if stability is desired, or shifting the center of gravity outside the base of support to initiate movement and change direction.” In other words, keeping your balance, Speaking of which … how about those awesome ice dancer couples! With just a couple more of our SCW&S lessons, perhaps you'll be ready for that incredible Olympic sport… he he – ha ha - uh ohhhh … I can hear the vigorous rattles of your head shaking from here. OK realistically you probably won’t actually DO what those champion ice dancers are doing . . . but you can FEEL like you are. Yes, that glorious feeling IS achievable. Even in just a few lessons you can feel the difference in your walking, in your posture and grace. And that is how YOU can start transforming your body into a dancer's body —from the feet up.
0 Comments
|
FOOT Notes from Teacher PeggyAuthorPeggy Pollard has been teaching social/ballroom dance in Santa Cruz since 2010. Archives
September 2022
Categories |