The exercise described in this video is a little more complicated, it looks at taking steps backward.  I thought this might be a good exercise to do next because walking backward is harder to do than walking forward.  Followers walk backward when learning tango and this can make learning to follow harder at first.  Since we don’t walk backward down the street we can’t start from something known and work toward tango; the movement we are working on is not familiar so it is easy to make bad habits that are hard to get rid of later.

The focus is going to be on the weight change, but in a different way than the weight transfer exercise in the first video (See Solo Practice).  Here we will start once again from something we all do normally and work from there.

Incidentally I made this video in my new space, it will take a little work to figure out how to best use the space, and how best to set up the camera.  Hopefully it won’t have quite as strong an echo when I am all moved in, and I promise I will memorize where the squeaky floorboards are.  Because of the echo you might have a little harder time hearing what I am saying so there is a description of the exercise below that you can read and compare with the video.

The exercise starts with a side to side weight change but instead of focusing on the subtle details of the weight transfer as we did in the first exercise I want to feel something else.  When you are standing for a long time it is natural to shift weight to one foot to rest the other foot.  When the foot you are standing on gets tired you shift your weight back to the other foot and so on.  Since you are doing this to rest a foot you aren’t trying to do anything pretty, there is no real technique to it, you just do it.  I want to look at this very natural movement and see how it can inform other movements we do dancing tango.  You can pay attention to this movement when you are in the checkout line at the store, since everyone is filling shopping carts these days stocking up for a week or more the lines move slowly and you will get a chance to do this.  I am interested in this feeling of relaxing your weight onto a standing foot.

Next we do a short step backward trying for the same feeling.  With your weight on one foot you can reach back for a short step, reach your foot first, and when your foot is touching the floor place your weight on that foot in the same way as you did side to side.  Don’t push your weight to the back foot just relax your weight there, just like you do side to side.  You should arrive with all your weight on the back foot and no weight on the other foot, which you should be able to easily lift off the floor.

This is the core point of this exercise, the feeling of relaxing weight on the back foot, and the front foot ending up completely free.  There is no feeling of pushing from one foot to the other and done this way it should be fairly easy to arrive on your balance.  When you push from one foot to the other it is easy to overshoot and lose balance, here since the feeling is more relaxing onto a foot you should just arrive over that foot.  If one step works well you might try a couple more.

As I emphasize in the video it is probably not good to do a lot of these backward steps in a row.  I find that it is easy to go from listening to the feeling of a movement to trying to control now my body does the movement, and that is where bad habits are created.  Instead I will do little bits of this through the day.  When I go to the kitchen to fix lunch or dinner I do a little of this exercise as I move around the space.  I do this kind of exercise every day, but I never do it for long.  Long enough to feel my body move, and not long enough that I start thinking about how I do it.  It is more like checking in and re-connecting to a feeling.

Also as I emphasize in the video we are not trying to do the perfect weight transfer.  If we try to do a ‘perfect’ technique when practicing alone there is a risk that it will make it much more difficult to connect with any partner.  Everybody moves differently and we want to be able to keep the feeling of a complete weight transfer even as we adjust how we do it to stay connected with our partner.  It is different with every partner and never ‘perfect’, just perfect enough.