Monday, September 5, 2011

Zumba Girl Returns. We Dance Egg-beaters.

Part: Follow
Dances: Night Club 2-Step, Tango, Waltz
Hovers: 1

Since today was a holiday, we decided to get our workout and practice out of the way earlier in the day. Today was arms and back day, and we both got a pretty good workout in. I continue to pull a little more weight and more efficiently too, so I think I'm getting more out of the workouts now.

Today ushered in the return of Zumba-girl, bearer of the title of previous post of mine. She had the music going, so we realized we weren't going to have music today. Instead, Jeff popped open his Macbook and started "researching" night-club 2-step figures to add to our growing repertoire. We ended up spending about 45 min. of practice figuring out a new sequence, I'm not sure if it was the advanced egg-beater...there was one figure in the video with that title. Of course, we'd have none of those easy newcomer egg-beaters! In any case, it involved a couple of spirals for the lady and some interesting hand changes for the guy, and also a dip that terrified me at first because it required me to release all of my weight and essentially have Jeff strong arm me...and I'm not a tiny girl. After a few scary first tries, once we got the momentum going it worked out okay. I'm such a standard dancer I just have a hard time getting over the idea that I must be on my own balance and supporting my own weight, it's been drilled into me so much.

Tango was our drill dance today. We did a little bit with the bar, but it was frustrating because it was sometimes tipping not so much because the frame was, but because of the dynamics of the bar as it fit into our frame. We also practiced the middle difficult section a bit by itself, and I finally brought up to Jeff how I've noticed all along that it feels like he has to drag me out of our oversway lung into the next figure, and that I always feel that he's having to do too much of the work there to make up for something I'm not doing. He agreed that he always feels this, so I decided to try to figure it out. I remembered Kora saying something about me needing to take a largish step with my left foot right over Jeff's coming out of this figure, and then I also made an effort to rotate my left side forward strongly to match his rotation. The first time it didn't work because I did all of these things too soon (because I was thinking hard about them, I'm guessing). The next time Jeff said it felt so much better. I didn't feel such a dramatic difference myself, but I felt like I was more involved in the figure instead of being dragged into position, so now I know why it was feeling off to me and why Jeff was feeling that drag. I'll to need to practice this a bit more to get it consistent.

We ended, at my request, with a waltz. It wasn't our best run ever, I think I was a bit out of sync with Jeff in some parts and I was getting light-headed due to low blood sugar, so that wasn't helping anybody. Still, the hover was good; whatever Jeff's figured out about how to balance it has been working out great.

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