Lesson today and I requested that we work on a little bit of everything since we have been focusing a lot on dance (don't get me wrong, I love dance but I don't want my other skills to slide).
Spinz - We started with spins, particularly camel spins since it's been about a month or so since we looked at them. I have been practicing them so I know they didn't regress, in fact I think they have improved. My suspicions were correct! Christopher says they do look like they've improved since the last time he saw them. I'm able to hold the position better and am much more stable coming out of it into a scratch spin to finish it off. So, we worked on improving that initial push onto the edge from the windup. I'm also still struggling with remembering to lead with my left arm instead of swinging it. When I remember to do all of these things, I'm able to get a nice spin. He briefly mentioned me working on a camel to sit spin and I admitted that since I'm still really sore from that bad fall, I have not been wanting to work on sit spins since there's a pretty good chance I'll end up on my ass (which is now hella bruised. My entire left check and back left thigh is all kinds of colors!). But he suggested working on a back sit so I tried it...and I ended up on my ass. Ugh, it hurt! He suggested going into the coaches room to get some padding and I'm just like "Thanks but maybe we should just not do the thing anymore." It hurt more than I wanted to admit. :(
Movez - Moving on to moves! He asked me what I wanted to work on and honestly, I couldn't think much beyond the pain so I said it was "coaches choice." He chose Cross Strokes (thank gawd). I'm doing better at holding the free leg back before the cross on the forward strokes so now he would like for me to make them curvier. Cool, I can do that! The backward strokes are fine but he would like to see me get my feet closer together on the cross and also lean on those curves. I can do the lean but the closer feet thing still has me spooked.
Flipz - My flip jump is a constant work in progress. I think over this past month I've been able to make some more progress but my biggest downfall with this is that I cannot stop forcing it. This causes me to over-rotate every single time and the jump overall looks chaotic. So, he took me waaaay back to basics and had me do a slow and flat 3 turn entry, hold, pick, and then do an almost back pivot into the actual jump. This forced me to think about each part of the jump and not just fling myself in the air as I usually do. I'll keep working on it this way. It clicked for me.
Dancez - We had some time at the end to look at some dance stuff. I now have the steps and timing memorized for the Swing and the Cha Cha so since we only had time to look at one, we worked on the Swing. We sorta partnered it? Instead of the proper waltz position, we were basically just face-to-face holding hands with some good distance between us (it reminded me of a Catholic School Dance, lol). Anyway, I got all the steps right but my transitions were a little wonky on the end patterns mostly because I've been practicing it by myself so I wasn't sure which side of him to get on with each end pattern. Since he seems confident now that I know the steps, he said we can do it in proper waltz hold next time. Kinda scary. It's going to feel really different and I'm still scared about kicking him or tripping us both. He also said we will look at the Cha Cha next time too. I imagine Fiesta Tango is in my near future.
So yeah, it was a productive lesson and I think he has seen some improvements from me. I'm glad because although we haven't been looking at some of these things during our lessons lately, I've been working really hard at them in my practices. We didn't look at backward 3 turns but I'm still plugging away at those too. Unfortunately, the improvements cannot be seen with those. Sigh.
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