How to Warm Up Before Dance Lessons

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 offshoots. 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. In this free video series on hip hop, a dance instructor demonstrates several hip-hop dance tips. Learn to warm up before any dance routine, and find out how to do drills to improve hip-hop dancing skills. Gather the right clothing for hip-hop dancing, and find out where to find hip-hop classes. By watching hip-hop music videos, learn hip-hop moves from observation, and get tips on simple moves like locking and popping. Begin hip-hop dancing with these general tips.

Video Transcript

"Hi. This is Yvonne Chow from the Blade Dance Academy in New York City. In this clip we're going to talk about how to warm up before a dance lesson. Before you start stretching you want to make sure that your muscles are warm. In order to do that you can just do some arm circles and swing your arms around or you can do some brisk walking. You can even take a jog if you want to. All this will increase the blood circulation in your body and make your muscles warm. Afterwards you want to go into your stretch. You want to make sure that you cover every single part of your body. So you start from your head all the way down to your feet. You can start with some head isolations. You want to roll your head around all the way and you can do some shoulder isolations as well. Bring your shoulders around. Then you want to lean over and stretch your oblique muscles. You can come then to a flat back to stretch your lower back. You can come down to the ground, bring your nose to your knee, to stretch your leg muscles. You can come to a lunge to get even a deeper stretch, and afterwards put that leg down to push through for an even deeper stretch. Now you want to go through all these in about a ten second time period for each one, and you want to do it on both sides of your body. So you want to go all the way from your head to your feet. This has been Yvonne Chow on how to warm up before a dance lesson."