How to Remember Salsa Moves (the MISTAKE that’s holding you back)

what's up guys it's Robin here and today I want to share a question that we got from one of our online students who posted in our Facebook group and we'll hear this question all the time so Chris asked I'm looking for tips on how to remember moves I have a partner I practice with and I try and run through the moves by myself at other times but come social dancing all the practice seems to vanish and I can only remember a small amount so as a lead how can you more easily or better remember moves firstly this is such a common problem so don't feel bad if you experience it we've all gone through it myself included the first thing to know is that not being able to remember moves or forgetting patterns is just a symptom the actual problem or challenge that most dancers are having is a lack of vocabulary and understanding of how everything connects trying to memorize patterns from class isn't the answer but unfortunately it's what most leads try to do and it's what most teachers teach so let's change that turns out Chris was also living in Colombia so he's more comfortable with Cali style salsa which is definitely different than cross body lead salsa so the style change also made it tougher on his brain the first suggestion one of our members had for Chris was to stop thinking about patterns and to focus on handholds instead and I think this is a great idea because if you think about a hand hold it can end up being a trigger for something that follows a single hand hold can trigger a mini combo that you remember in your mind or just certain moves that you know from that position the next piece of advice that someone offered was to focus on moves instead of patterns and I a hundred percent agree with this moves are smaller bits of information and when you go to a social when you go to a party instead of thinking about trying to remember a whole pattern you can just think ah I just want to remember this one move and I want to try and work it in to what I already know just biting off a little piece at a time and not overwhelming yourself and once you're able to start identifying and remembering the individual moves you'll be able to start putting them together without thinking once one move finishes based on the position you're in naturally you'll be able to flow into the next move so my question to you is how many individual moves do you know write them down because these are your Lego blocks and once you expand the vocabulary you know with new moves one by one then you can think of a simple system to think of all the ways you can use them instead of memorizing combos think in concepts for example coming up with seven different ways to hold hands here's one here's two here's three cross four cross five cross six cross seven so there you have it seven different ways to hold your partner's hands and you can lift her hand above her head to turn her give a turn at neck level or give a turn at waist level there's a simple concept right there another system that's foolproof that you could use is thinking right left up and down it's even simpler at any position you could turn your partner to the right you could turn your partner to the left and while you're doing that you could keep your hand up or you could keep your hand down so now that you have one simple system to help you come up with ideas and remember things on the fly when you're social dancing let's get into some of the more of the sciency geeky techniques for improving your memory the first technique is spaced repetition and the simple fact is we forget most of the information we acquire so what you want to do is reinforce that information on a regular interval to help you move it from short-term memory to long-term memory and you want to do that just before you're going to forget it so a simple way to do that is flashcards you've probably all used these when you're studying for school so simple exercise is this make three piles one pile of moves and you write them on the cards that you don't recall very well you a very poor recall of make another pile of things you can recall in an OK fashion and another pile for things you can recall very easily idea is practice of things that you can't recall very well more often so take a card from the hard pile if you can recall it move it to the pile that you can recall ok test yourself ten minutes later if you're able to remember it move it to the easy pile and by doing this you're going to reinforce and remember more of the things that you suck at and then you're also gonna at the same time practice the things that you're really good at remembering just enough so that you keep them in your memory now if you're not actually dancing you can use this flashcard technique just to test your memory and improve it but you can also do it and practice dancing same way you can pick up a card and you can kind of shadow dance with yourself especially if you're your lead imagine the follows there go through the move pretend to do it and then if you remembered it move the card over to the next pile likewise if you have a follow there you can also do the same thing the next memory technique is chunking and chunking is the process of grouping information together based on a context that connects it so for example if you're going shopping you make a list of things you need you can try and remember those things based on the area of the store the item is found in when you're dancing try and remember the moves you know from a given position or hand hold as I mentioned before this helps your brain organize things in a nice easy to remember package kind of like a filing cabinet so here's a simple exercise you can do grab a piece of paper and write down two or three hand holds or common position you find yourself in relative to your partner and underneath each of those lists as many moves as you can think of that you could do from that position or handhold and this is not only going to help you remember moves but it's going to help you stop always repeating the same thing because I don't know about you but when I'm social dancing I always have specific habits and I always do certain things from certain places and it's nice to help switch things up in summary let's recap everything we just learned so instead of focusing on patterns that don't help you improve your knowledge of salsa instead focus on individual moves the building blocks that create everything as you get comfortable with all the individual moves and pieces you'll naturally find yourself becoming more comfortable combining them together and if you want to remember one of those really long combos it's going to become easier the bottom line is you can't understand something that's really complex until you understand the basics it's made from and this is where so many beginner dancers go wrong and it's largely a fault of the teachers so focus on moves not patterns used space repetition like flashcard exercise and chunking to better remember your moves and when you go social dancing work one move in at a time into your repertoire don't try and do too many things if you overwhelm your brain you'll forget everything and don't forget that simple system of turn right turn left raise my hand lower my hand so right left up down as a simple system to help you come up with ideas on the fly from any given handhold or position celebrate the small wins that have fun out there guys if you enjoyed this video hit the like button it'll help spread it around YouTube and help more people and if you want to expand your vocabulary develop it deeper I highly recommend checking out our online salsa and bachata courses the curriculums are super super detailed and we always name every single move so it's very easy to reference it's essentially like having a giant X cyclopædia that you can reference any time and it really helps develop your understanding your knowledge of the as a whole because then you can start connecting all the dots understanding the little pieces that make the big picture the basics that make the complex things happen check out the link in the description below thank you so much for watching subscribe for the next video and watch some more that are popping up here I'll catch you in the next video

Channel: Dance Dojo

Views: 151,584

Keywords: how to remember salsa moves, salsa moves, salsa on 1, salsa on 2, how to remember salsa patterns, salsa patterns, salsa tips for guys, salsa tips for leads, salsa tips, salsa tutorial for beginners, salsa tutorial for men, salsa lesson for, salsa lesson for beginners, salsa lessons for beginners men

Id: 6W58JLb04AA

Length: 8min 27sec (507 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 05 2020