Modern Dance Warm-Ups: Arm Swings

Video Transcript

"Hi my name is Chell Garcia-Trias and I'm a modern dance instructor in Austin, Texas. I'm going to show you how to do some large arm swings in modern dance. So a nice way to do this is to bend your front let, put your back leg behind you a little bit so they're a couple of feet apart and bend your back leg and now I'm going to swing the arm up and around. The arm is the opposite arm as the leg that is forward and I'm going to bend my knees to help swing it so that I get a lot of momentum, so that the action is really happening in my legs, and my arm is just opening up. So I'm going to bend and swing, swing and whenever I reach down with my arm, that's when I bend my knee and I can do it the other way too, same thing, bend, bend, bend. My arm is really just flying around, I'm not really thinking about what it is doing too much I'm just letting it move within its socket. Now if that feels pretty simple to you and you want to add a little handstand in there you can. The way to do that is to swing, swing, swing. Now when I swing the last time my feet come together. So when I swing my feet come together and I'm just going to collapse on to the ground, reaching my hands on the ground and pushing the back leg up and coming up again so I swing, swing feet together and down, foot up and down. Do it again, swing, swing, swing. Together, hands down, foot up, come down. That's a great way to get your whole body moving and warming up doing large arm swings in modern dance."