Thread: Teaching spins

I would like to prepare students to do a bit of spinning with focus on their hand. Are there any excercises that prepare people to do it? I've never taught it before and I know that if people are not used to spinning, they might just give up instantly when feeling nausea, but I learned myself by practise and practise so the nausea stopped.
I know that when you get dizzy it helps to spin into the opposite direction.
But since I ought to give them confidence, maybe I'd have them doing not more than three spins in a row at first?

Dumdideldum...

Nobody?

I might structure half an hour like a lot of travelling with many turns, directional changes and also spins, as it's great for fitness and makes people bolder when it comes to use of space and confidence in their balance. Bellydance students are often a bit lazy when they're used to train mainly their isolations...

If this is their first introduction to spins, I would recommend staying in place rather than traveling for most of it to prevent frustration.

Once they are comfortable with spinning in place, the plan for traveling and directional changes sounds like fun!

Are you going to teach regular spotting, hand spotting, and non-spotting turns or just focus on hand-spotting?

I wanted to teach the hand spotting method, my idea being teaching them to find this inner stability, which is to me a sort of revelation I got out of the practice.

But I remember the beginning, how uncomfortable I felt, and I remember our troupe, how to some members it seemed close to impossible while others had less problems. I know it's very individual - some women react very strongly to turning around, like when sitting on a swing or on a merry-go-round.

I had this only while I was breastfeeding, so I understand if some will blatantly refuse. It's good to make people step out of their comfort-zone, but balance is subtle and different for everyone and I have to be considerate. And I can't do it if half of the students just say no. I'll show them the method and have them doing it only very short and slowly.

Alternatively I thought about travelling with turns, not while spinning of course. Just single turns, maybe double, directional changes, it makes the head amazingly fresh! And my kid, she can just do it, but kids can go crazy on swings, merry go rounds and all sorts of excercise that makes their head turn round and upside down, and they love it, they are so much more confident then we are. I want to get sth. like that for the students, win it back a little, this trust.

I've never been able to spin, go on playground spinning equipment, do yoga, or even ride on amusement rides because of frequent sinus infections which have led to inner ear issues. Keep in mind you may have students who will not be able to do this no matter how much they practice.

look towards classic ballet training -i've found it helps somewhat

One of the students in my dance class couldn't do one full turn without getting dizzy. The teacher asked her to do a quarter turn first, then another one, then a half turn. Then a full turn. Slowly she built it up to nice crisp turns.

hm. I guess I already plan too much. Mostly, bd students have no previous dance training (here in Germany and only as far as I've seen...) and since bellydance doesn't teach so much travelling, I find that they are often insecure about space and don't have a good balance on turns and so. Lazy was maybe the wrong word.

Sometimes I suggest paddle turns (one foot grounded, the other paddles around to make the turn) to keep new students in place. If they start doing the three step turn they tend to accidentally travel.

I always start with 3 step turns, moving both to the side and forward. I find this works well with beginners because there is a definate count plus a rest.
Eventually, in advanced beginning classes we work into 2 step turns ("chaines" in ballet, pronounced "shu-nay") in various pattern lengths.
Spinning/character turns are usually started around the same time. We start with spotting the back of the hand to reduce dizziness in character turns, eventually learning to focus inward/no spotting.
As for methods to un-dizzy: lightly bouncing up and down in place will stop the fluid in the inner ear from swirling, which is what causes the dizzy.

My first teacher taught us to spin to "whirling" music as an actual meditation.

At the very beginning when we were very new to it we would do one turn clockwise, one turn counterclockwise, one turn clockwise, one turn counterclockwise, over and over to a very slow rhythm. This way we would get used to the feeling of spinning but by alternating direction we wouldn't get dizzy.

We would speed this up slowly until we were ready to spin in one direction and we used the hand spotting technique as well. It worked very well, even newbie dancers could spin for several minutes at a time!