Social Dancing: 11/11 Edition - Feeling Confident

I have to say, I was mostly planning on just surviving Friday night's classes as I ended up with a schedule change at work that had me working on Friday (and since I'm in retail I'm on my feet the whole day). The plan was to make it through both classes and not social dance, but not only did I pull through both lindy and bal classes, I was actually doing pretty well and ended up saying for an hour of dancing afterwards, despite the fact that I had to be up at 5:30am the following morning. But ya know, swing dancing is worth it and glad I did.

The Lindy class went really well. We've been working a lot on refining our technique in regards to pulsing, connection, etc. And for me I'm still trying to remember to take small steps *facepalm* It's a never ending struggle people. After that we learned some faux-Charleston and some variations on it.

However balboa was really the highlight of classes for me last night. First off, the other girl from last week didn't show, so it was just me and one other guy. So lots of one on one feedback which is awesome. We started off by practicing material from last week and getting more comfortable: some basics, come arounds, lolly kicks, and turns. Honestly I was surprised how natural it was starting to feel after just two weeks of class. Definitely still in the have-to-think-about-whats-happening-after-every-single-movement phase, but actually starting to flow. After that we worked on a few different turn variations before moving on to crab walks. Dun, dun, dunnnnn. Yeah, my crab walks are anything but good at this point. We started off doing them to the (followers) right. That wasn't to bad, other than the fact that you're only moving forward/backward one step before switching directions kinda throws me off. Then we decided to reverse the direction of the crab walks and that was definitely more challenging, especially since you A) can't do a full basic before, which confuses my brain at this moment in my Bal life. And B) switching what foot's going up and down vs across feels so unnatural! Then they decided to have us do a basic, 8 counts of crab walks, basic, then 8 counts of crab walks in the opposite direction. It was that point in class when my brain pretty much exploded. But hey, I tried, and after a few attempts I had definitely improved, though it was nothing close to proper.

After that I debated staying for the dance and staying obviously won. My feet definitely hurt, but they actually weren't any worse than the week before, which was surprising since I had already spent all day on my feet. The dancing started and I think I ended up dancing every song, which isn't hard to do. Highlights were definitely the first song; I just felt like I was following really well and I felt like my swing outs and turns were really good. Then there was the one dance I did balboa and it actually went really well. I had a couple small fumbles, as to be expected, but I was able to keep up well.

The best part is that I'm finally starting to feel confident on the dance floor. Until recently I've always felt a bit timid when social dancing, but now I'm feeling comfortable which makes it even more enjoyable.