Marching Band: Backwards Marching

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Matt Goms. Again, we're talking about marching band and choreography. We're discussing the basics of forward and backwards marching. Right now. what we want to talk about is backwards marching. O.k, we've already discussed forward. Back up is a lot different, backwards, the idea behind backwards, is to make sure that again your body, you start with the correct posture, standing up straight. This, I like to use the analogy of a pool. If you're standing, or treading water on the side of a pool, and you're holding onto the side of a pool, the next thing that you're going to want to do if you're going to take off, is you want to push off of the pool, push away from it. O.k, so, you're going to end up taking all of your weight with me. First you want to find a good, a good balance platform with your feet. O.k, you want to roll up onto the toes, as high as you can go. And, then roll back down just a little bit, just enough where my heels are going to be just above the grass form, where I could stand here like this all day long comfortably, without actually being flat on my feet, o.k. Now, the pool analogy again, take your hands and you're going to want to push your weight back all at the same time. So, that again we don't get any of the foot first, weight later, anything like that, or head first and then falling into the thing. You want to make sure that your weight all goes at the same time, like this. Another thing that you want to remember when backwards marching, again is knee and heel placement. Making sure that when you pick up the foot, that it actually drags across the top of the grass, it's going to skim across the top, so that you're not picking up the leg and doing kind of this prancing pony thing going backwards, o.k. Don't want to pick those knees up too high, make sure they stay low to the ground and that you're pushing off of the front foot away, and you almost kind of want to extend the foot just a little bit, so that your toe is pointing as you continue to move backwards, away from the direction that you're going."