Tipsy Thursday

Dances:  Waltz, Foxtrot, Tango, Quickstep
Part:  Lead
Workout:  Arms and back at the gym.
Songs Learned Today:  1

This has definitely been an odd week for me.  Circumstances beyond my control have wreaked havoc on my usual schedule so everything seems a little off.  Today both Sarah and I felt the effects of it.

The workout was fairly routine.  We just focused hard on it and cranked it out.  The good news is, I'm down about 3 pounds from when I first started working out 2 months ago.  I'm not expecting to lose that much weight due to the gain in muscle, but it's nice to know progress is being made and changes are happening.  Working out hard is kind of a Catch-22.  While you feel better overall  and are getting stronger, you're generally too tired, worn out, and sore afterwards to utilize that benefit in the real world.  On the other hand, if you stop working out, our bodies are so efficient at tearing down the muscle that you lose all that you've gained in a matter of months or weeks.  Dance is much the same surprisingly.  As a lead if you stop dancing for a few months, amalgamations are much harder come up with on the fly.  Not to mention the loss of muscle mass in all the areas a dancer uses.  They really need to come up with a pill that shuts down the instructions your body sends out to tear down the "unneeded" muscle tissue.  More or less like a useful AIDS.  If you could shut down certain things other than the immune system.  I know they're working on it.  It'll be interesting to see what the future for working out holds.

Practice today was fairly productive.  We managed to hit all four dances.  After a round we hit up metronomic foxtrot, waltz, and quickstep for the first time this week.  Foxtrot was ok.  It actually felt a little less stable than it used to be.  Waltz on the other hand, was lot better.  Even the Hover at the end was good.  Quickstep was just the Tipsies.  Tipsies have always given us trouble.  Not so much the execution of the step, but the timing.  We never come out on time.  I figured out the issue a few days ago and relayed that to Sarah.  The "joints" of our Tipsies were too slow.  After the first quick-and-quick our 180 degree turn is supposed to take place in the space of an "and" then onto the next set of quick-and-quick.  I found out that joints were almost the length of an full quick.  So by the time we hit the second quick-and-quick set, we felt late and would have to speed it up.  The situation the got compounded at the second joint.  Knowing this, we applied the metronome to it and it's mostly on time now.  We'll have to work on consistency next.

In tango it was the Back Open Promenade again.  This step is really strange for us.  It seems to regress very quickly.  We'll work at it until it feels good and everything lines up, then over the course of the week it degrades.  Rinse, wash, repeat.  Not sure why.  I think consistency is an overall theme we'll need to start keeping in the back of our heads.  We're reaching the point where we don't need to think about the easier things such as what comes next in the routine.  Time to start worrying about doing each figure the same way every time.  Hopefully correctly, though I'd settle for being super consistent even if it's wrong.  We can always make it right later.

Sarah insisted on finishing out the practice with a full run through of our quickstep routine, to which I begrudgingly obliged.  I think I'm still feeling the after effects of leg workout day.  Can't wait to get some good rest this weekend.