Hip Hop Dance Warm-ups: Head Isolations

Series Summary

Hip hop dancing covers a large range of styles and specific moves and techniques, but the cornerstone of the style is undoubtedly break dancing. Over time, that so-called old school way of dancing and participating in hip hop culture has evolved into many different off-shoots. Funk dancing, popping and locking, jigging, freaking, krump, and hyphy are examples of types of hip hop dance, and each style contains certain moves that distinguish it from other forms. Many people take hip hop dance lessons, and although some people believe that teaching orchestrated steps is contrary to the roots of the culture and history of hip hop dance, many people benefit from taking lessons.

Take a few moments and watch this free video series designed to help teach some of the basics of hip hop dance. Our professional dance instructor will teach you head, shoulder and knee isolations. You will learn pops for your chest and torso, heels, elbow, wrist and shoulders. Your hips will get into the act with dips, circles and pops. Start practicing the basics and before long you will be ready to take over at your favorite club.

Video Transcript

"Hi I'm Emily Larew and today we're going to be talking about head isolations. We're going to start with our feet apart and you want to keep a slight bend in your knees staying low to the ground. From there we're going to start with our head going side to side. So it's going to side and up, side and up, side and up, side and up. Now to make this hip hoppy and add some pop to it I want you to pop your shoulders so we are going to go side and pop, side straight up pop, side and pop, side and pop. You just want to drop your shoulders into the ground, down, down. Now we're also going to add a pop of our heels, we're going to pop them right off the ground straight up, straight down, up and down. We want to make sure our level stays the same and we're not going up down like this, but keeping it level we're going to pop up down our knees straight out to the front. So adding that together we have side pop, side pop, side pop, side pop. Now we can turn it to the side and add that as well as being stationary five, six, seven, eight. We can look up and down and up and down. From there we are also going to start with a circle to our head. The more we loosen up our neck in hip hop the more we'll be able to do different things. It'll loosen up your muscles and be able to allow you more maximum movement. From there we're going to go ahead and circle it to the right you want to start your neck to the right going to the front and around. So go side and around, side and around. So from the front you see me going side and around, you want to make sure that you really press it out to the front. So to kind of make it a little bit more hip hoppy again we're going to go around we're going to pop right left. Around right left, around right left, around right left. Let's take it to the left, we're going to left, left right, around left right, around left right and seven and eight. In this clip you have learned head isolations."