Spinning takes time and effort to master…maybe more than any other skill in Cross Body Salsa.

And it’s one of the most obvious differences between recreational and professional dancers – the ability to perform multiples of multiple spins at any speed and make it look effortless.

It’s easy to get despondent and disillusioned if you struggle with spins – I did back in the early days of my Salsa journey.

And many teachers will tell you that you just need to practice more.

Whilst this is true to a point, it doesn’t always work quickly, and sometimes not at all.

Here’s why:

1. Until you know WHY you are struggling with spins, and fix THAT, you probably won’t see any significant improvement and things may even get worse as you ingrain bad habits.

2. Technique really matters – until you have your posture, balance and weight placement dialled in, adding the extra challenge of rotation into the mix is unlikely to work.

3. The quality of your practice is paramount – doing 3-5 quality spins with a high level of awareness and external feedback via video/mirror/teacher will always trump 20 aimless ones where you don’t really know what’s working and what’s not.

4. Your spin technique is ALWAYS limited by your body’s current physical status. Any weakness in the core, hips, feet and ankles will show up when you start spinning.

The Enemy Of Successful Spins

There are three symptoms which often appear when improver/intermediate Salsa dancers start to work seriously on their spinning:

1. Stress – a sense of overwhelm and increasing panic as difficulty/intensity increases.
2. Physical Tension – feeling muscles tighten in your neck, hands, arms and low back, sometimes resulting in pain.
3. Vertigo type symptoms such as nausea and extreme dizziness.
4. Brain Freeze – you forget simple moves and things you usually take in your stride seem much more challenging.

The Cause

It’s important to realise that all three of these are real and tangible physiological manifestations of the same root cause:

Things are happening too fast.

Things are unclear.

Things don’t feel certain or safe to the unconscious part of your brain and nervous system.

The resulting physiological “panic” response is involuntary and outside of your conscious control.

However usually the symptoms are temporary and vary in their severity on any given day.

This means that you can defuse it or mitigate its effects by creating a different physiological state once you understand what is happening and why.

The Cure

So you can see that there are many factors which can inhibit our ability to perform consistent and consecutive spins.

And that’s why the starting point of our approach has to be to work out the cause of our individual spinning issues.

Once these are identified, we can systematically rebuild your spin technique from the ground up and the inside out.

Step 1

The first step is to access a parasympathetic state where the nervous system releases tension and allows full range of movement and muscular activation.

I’ll show you how to switch on the core and other key muscles, reduce neurological tension in the neck which make spotting and balance difficult.

We’ll address foot and ankle flexibility and muscular firing deficits and see how this is a crucial factor when we set up and prepare for a spin.

Step 2

Once we have released tension and got those key stabilising muscles firing properly, we can start to work on building better spin technique.

We will cover all the ingredients of successful spins, including the preparation phase:

Balance – digging deep into topics such as posture and spotting

Energy – discover how we generate and maintain momentum through spins by working on correct preparation and holding our centre.

Understand the physics of spins and how this can help us mitigate the external forces acting on us such as rough leads, unbalanced follows, sticky floors and more.

Footwork – Discover how the placement, positioning, and pressure of the feet has a major impact on the outcome of your spins. Learn how to “use the floor” to greater effect.

Step 3

We’ll take our upgraded, higher functioning technique and learn some individual spin combos which you can use as practice drills on your own, but will also double up as shines for social dancing.

Finally we’ll integrate our spins into partnerwork with some lead/follow combos, including some common prep techniques.

I’ll show you how to make life easier for your partner, and style in a way that helps your spins as well as making them look good.

Join The Workshop

You can book this workshop now by clicking the button below.

The cost of the workshop is £55 per person and will rise to £60 on 1st January

All my workshops are limited to 10 places max so don’t delay!