Are You an Improver Who’s Not Really Improving?

Being an “Improver” level dancer can be a mixed experience.

On the one hand you’ve made it out of beginners so you’re enjoying the fact that your skills and confidence are growing.

On the other hand you are presented with a whole new set of challenges and it suddenly dawns on you how much there is to learn.

It’s exciting but sometimes a bit scary!

And it’s easy to find yourself getting a bit overwhelmed.

If You’ve Been in Improvers For a While

You’re Probably Frustrated

 You desperately want to progress, but know you’re not yet ready to move up.

You’re probably feeling that you’re repeating the same stuff over and over but are unclear on what you actually need to do to improve.

And with a higher volume of more complex material going into your brain, the challenge of remembering is becoming greater.

Improver Is a Very Broad Category in Most Clubs

In a typical club based Improver class you’ll find a huge range of ability/experience among participants – people who have been learning a few weeks alongside people who have been there for months.

Because there tends to be a big emphasis on moves and routines, often the technical details which make everything feel and work better are missed.

This extends the time it takes to actually make progress significantly – many people find themselves stuck on this treadmill for 6-12 months…sometimes more.

And this makes it harder and harder to remember and apply what you learn from one week to the next.

At the end of the day, “Improver” is just a label.

If you want to progress faster, what matters is building the technical skills and understanding how moves link together so you can start getting a better dance floor experience right now.

Are Your Current Classes Really Working For You?

Typically you will find you go straight from learning beginner basics to learning routines – sequences of moves taught chronologically.

Routines, however fun, stylish and creative they may be, are essentially throwaway. This is because most are simply too long or complicated for leads to remember either in chunks or in their entirety.

Many routines look and feel very similar – this isn’t surprising because they are all built with the same handful of components.

But there may be one thing that’s different – a hand change or hammerlock here, an extra turn there, the direction of a turn, or a difference in positioning of the lead.

There is one big problem with this:

If you don’t understand the individual components and concepts in isolation, you won’t know how to get the most from them in social dancing.

It’s a bit like making a cake.

You may be able to follow a recipe, and at the end you will likely have a cake that’s probably fine – but lacking a bit of finesse. 

But without understanding the individual ingredients and the principles of cooking it will be hard to create your own cake recipes with different ingredients and flavours tweaked to your taste.

You probably won’t have the skill to time that cake so it’s just perfectly light and moist, to decorate it quickly yet make it look pro, or to take the taste to that michelin starred perfection.

You may not be capable of troubleshooting when your cake goes a bit wrong either – or know how to get around it if you don’t have all the right ingredients.

This is why people get scared to experiment – because without deeper understanding of the skills involved, you’re flying blind.

You end up repeating the same stuff over and over (including the mistakes) without actually improving or expanding your skills.

Done-For-You Choreography Has Limited Value

Our brains are wired to look for similarities and make connections – this is our primary learning mechanism, but when every routine is presented as a stand-alone choregraphy, it’s not easy to join the dots in your head.

This is why learning everything as a pre-choreographed sequence is not that effective. You need to know how to link moves and create varied sequences on the dance floor FOR YOURSELF.

If you think about how many classes you have done in your Salsa journey to date, and compare that with the amount of material you actually lead or follow in a typical social dance with one of your peers, most likely there will be a huge disparity.

My own experience – from my own dance journey and teaching others – has taught me that smaller chunks of learning with plenty of repetition works best if you want to commit what you learn to the long term memory.

Context is also really important as this will help you understand WHAT you are learning and when to use certain moves and techniques as opposed to others.

If You Are A Follower

You may be thinking “well this doesn’t apply to me – I’m not in charge of the moves”.

But whilst you may not be deciding or orchestrating the content of the dance, they are still YOUR MOVES!

YOU have to know them in order to follow and execute them.

You have to recognise them and know the footwork.

This means you have to be rock solid in the following:

1. Correct footwork and precise timing

2. How to reciprocate and maintain the connection through multiple turns

3. How to generate your own energy and momentum and stay on balance

4. When, where and how you can style without interrupting the lead

There is power in knowledge, and in order to follow well this is what you need to know for every combination.

These are the details which will take you to the next level and cannot be learned organically by social dancing alone, or “just following”.

Problems of Leading

I firmly believe that a lot of the pressure and anxiety felt by leads in the early stages of their Salsa journey stems from three things:

1. Trying to learn long sequences of moves and then beating yourself up when you can’t remember.
2. Not having the confidence to improvise in your social dances because you haven’t been taught how the structure of the dance actually works.
3. Trying to lead increasingly complex turn patterns without doing the necessary work on technique

Imagine what it would feel like if you could switch your brain off and go with the flow of the music, knowing that all the moves you needed were there, and you could create something different every time you danced!

You don’t need anywhere near as much material as you might expect.

You just need to know how to use what you already know to full effect and get more mileage from it.

That’s what my improver courses deliver.

The fun begins when you free yourself from trying to be a “perfect copier” and learn how to be a creator…

A creator of fun and unique shared moments with every follower you dance with which will keep them coming back for more.

Problems of Following

Unfortunately, the routines taught in Salsa classes do not really help with the most important dance floor skill – how to TRULY follow.

When you know the moves in advance, you automatically go into what I call “performance mode” which stops you feeling and reacting to the lead.

Good followers need to be ok with not knowing what’s coming next, which means your connection skills have to be on point.

This is what enables you to be fully present without second-guessing, doubting yourself, or having to play catch-up.

And when you do this you will ALWAYS have time to style and look fabulous.

My method includes real following practice so you can practice and hone your following skills.

A Shift In Perspective

Most people aren’t thinking beyond the current lesson.

And then forget it immediately after.

You turn up week after week, copy the routine to the best of your ability but honestly – does it feel like you are getting a favourable return on your investment of time and energy?

If you really want to reach a decent level, you need to start thinking about the bigger picture.

This is where structure becomes a necessity.

It helps you see the wood from the trees, focus on what’s most important, and feel more confident that what you’re doing is actually making a difference.

Because just doing more of what isn’t working is not a plan!

The main challenge is to change your thinking. The whole Salsa industry is built on teaching you to copy choreography when what you really need is to learn how to create and collaborate in real time on the dance floor.

How My Syllabus Works

Every lesson sticks to a specific format – one that I use in both group and private lessons, and which has been highly successful in accelerating the progression of my students:

Warm Up

My warm ups are carefully designed to get your brain and body calm, receptive, and in the zone for dancing and learning.

Too often people rush into Salsa class feeling stressed and then wonder why everything feels hard. It’s simply because your nervous system needs specific conditions to bring the learning centres of your brain online, and my warm ups create those conditions, as well as mobilising all your muscles and joints so you feel more supple.

Solo Work

If you can’t dance alone, you can’t dance at all.

Your individual movement skills are at the core of what you do as a dance partner, and how you look on the dance floor.

And let’s be honest.

Everyone wants to look good.

Luckily, Shines are a fun way to improve all your dance technique – balance, footwork, speed, spinning, styling are all covered in this section, as well as equipping you for that part in the song where you break from your partner – to SHINE!

Partnerwork Process

This is where I’ll teach leaders my exact method for building a social dance to the music in real time without having to remember huge chunks of choreography by rote.

And I’ll teach followers how to understand what’s being led and respond correctly to any combination with elegance and style, even if you’ve never done it in a lesson before.

All freestyle social Salsa is built around a small number of classic turn patterns.

If you’ve been dancing a while you’ll know some of these already.

But you may not know all of them – OR how you can change them, tweak them, or re-arrange them to create new variations.

And you may ALSO not know how to improve the way they look and feel by applying better technique.

This is what I teach, so you get empowered to become a more skillful and creative social dancer.

As you progress through my syllabus, I’ll show you how to elevate and expand these patterns with technique, musicality, connection so you can get endless mileage from them.

Book The Complete Package

The cost of each course is £199 per person or £165 when booked as a complete annual package or with the early bird discount (at least 6 weeks prior)

This includes the weekly studio classes and accompanying video content for you to practice at home.

Booking is simple – just use the PayPal link below to make payment and I’ll send you a confirmation email within 24 hours.