3 ballroom dance mistakes that most beginners make

3 ballroom dance mistakes that most beginners make

When you start ballroom dancing for the first time, you’re bound to make mistakes. This is why we need a lot of practice. But trust us when we say this, ballroom dancing benefits are totally worth the hard work. Even the most award-winning, impressive, and accomplished dancers made (and still make) mistakes. But what are the most common ballroom dance errors? Here, we list some of them.

Looking at your feet while dancing
When you start ballroom dancing, you’re uncertain and underconfident of your moves. So, you tend to avoid eye contact and look more at your feet. It’s also because you have a fear of stepping onto your partner’s toes. In all honesty, this can be a difficult habit to overcome. But there’s no way out. If you keep looking down at your feet, it will directly hamper your posture, bend your shoulders forward, and weaken your frame.

The objective of social dancing is to utilize your whole body to communicate with your partner. You have to feel your partner’s movements; if you can feel it, you won’t have to look down to know where you should place your feet. To practice looking up, you can fixate a focal point at your eye length anytime you start dancing, say a window, a clock, or even your partner’s smile. This will make your dancing smoother and improve your posture.

Taking wide steps
As a beginner, you may take wide steps at times. Sadly, the broad steps can put you off-balance and make it challenging to focus on the beat. And when you go off-beat, your partner finds it hard to keep up with you. This can lead to a whole lot of other errors as well. So try to take smaller steps until you gain more confidence.

Dancing in only one style
If we list ballroom dances one by one, we might run out of time. There are so many of them! Hence, most people focus on one dance form and get better at it. There’s no problem with it if you’re trying to get perfect for a specific event or aspire to learn only a single dance form. However, if you wish to be a well-rounded ballroom dancer, it’s always good to perfect multiple dance styles.

Learning numerous forms can get you out of your comfort zone and make you a more eased-out dancer. More so, when you know multiple dance forms, you can dance with more people socially because not everyone will know ballroom dancing, right?