Thread: Ideas for teaching rib slides??

Bhuz colleagues, I need some ideas! My students usually pick up rib slides during the first beginner session. But... I have one student who recently moved to this area. In her previous location, she had studied with several instructors and was dancing in a troupe. She's taking her second session of classes with me. She is totally unable to do a ribslide. I have run through my usual bag of tricks and then some. No luck. She is quite out of shape and seems to have a very low degree of body awareness. We're working on some alignment issues, too. She's very sweet, and I would love to help her find a way to do this. Can anyone help?

i can tell you how i learned it when i was really really little in jazz class....or at least what i remember. our teacher had us put our arms straight out to the sides palms up fingers to the ceiling and then focus on pushing one side to the other while keeping our hips still and the upper body tight & together.

eventually she brought it down to hand on hips n just moving the chest without the image

im sure ppl will offer better solutions but that one has always stayed with me through the years.

A lot of students seem to have a much harder time with ribcage work than anything else, don't they?

I usually have the best luck sitting difficult cases in a chair. With their hips stabilized, they can locate the muscles needed to move the ribcage. While seated, facing the mirror, I would have her put her hands on her hips (I use folding chairs in the studio, so no arms in the way). Then think about bringing the bottom right rib toward the right elbow, then the left bottom rib toward the left elbow.

Some students seem to do better when they think about the *opposite* side, too. Have her contract on the left side as if you were going to tickle her side, at the bottom rib, and she's pulling away. Then the opposite side of course.

Does she tilt when she tries to do it, or is there just no movement at all?

When students tilt, I usually find it helpful to reassure them that it's OK for the movement to be very small while they're trying to keep the shoulders level.

But if there's NO movement, warming up by tilting side to side can help them find the right movement.... I wonder... if she sat in the chair and bent to the right and you poked her (gently) under the left side rib if she'd automatically come into the correct posture??? LOL I just tried it with my son, he popped right into a ribcage slide when I did this to him!

Sitting down, in general, is the biggest help to my students. I tell them to practice in their cars!

to echo Lauren's idea----also they can sit on the floor to practice chest isolations

I like all the above ideas. Sitting, reaching for the walls with the arms fully extended, tilting first, poking.

I also find that if it is a mobiliity issue, which for some it is, a really good side stretch warm up can help to open that area up right before doing the movement. I like arms above the head, bend the right knee, engage the core and lean over to the left, then while down there take a deep breath and lean a little more deeply, repeat other side, then repeat both sides again, then spread the legs wider and do a side stretch before going into a giant hip circle and a side stretch coming out. Upper body twists also might help to loosen the area up.

Once the area is all warmed up and loosened up, the hit all your exercises, reach for the walls, isolate by sitting down, draw the alphabet with your chest, exaggerated rib cage circles, whatever gets the side to side movement beginning to happen for your particular student, poking, talking about which muscles need to engage, whatever. Ask them to try to identify it in themselves, so they are having to start looking inside, maybe ask them to close their eyes and look inside. Once found in some form, then refine.

Part of the problem may be that your student hasn't personally identified or worked on the problem. So I also recommend that you make an issue of it on your students behalf. Tell her you would like her to make it her personal goal to get that movement. Say "this week, I'd like you to practice these exercises we've worked on every day. Make it your personal goal to find this movement and polish it." Give her permission to focus on that move exclusively for a week. I usually will pull the student aside after class to go over all of this with them in a few minutes, so they don't feel like they've been called out in front of everyone.

When I've done this in the past almost invariably the student has come back the next week either having mastered the step in question or greatly improved it. I often tell my students it can take some time to build those brain to body connections, but repeated attempts to do something, given some good tools to work with, and it will eventually click and the student will wonder why they ever struggled with it at all. I think that kind of encouragement, helps them to keep trying.

Good luck. Let us know how it goes.

Thanks for these ideas. Right now she has no movement whatsoever. But I'll try some of these tonight when she comes to technique class and see what happens.

My Bhuz buddies are the best.

Originally Posted by Lauren_

[/COLOR]Sitting down, in general, is the biggest help to my students. I tell them to practice in their cars!

When I first learned how to do rib slides, sitting helped me isolate the movement and increase my range of motion. (I also practice when I'm in the car.)

This is going to sound really depressing and negaative, but I've had a few students that could generate absolutely no ribcage movement even after several classes, and my experience is that they just never get anywhere, because they have so many issues going on. This is not to say that ribcage movement is impossible for them, its just that they first need:

physical therapy
core strengthening
postural alignment
stretching regimes
weight training
massage therapy
biofeedback and/or meditation to increase body awareness

And they are just not going to do everything necessary to address their issues. Or at least 999 out of 1000 with such issues are not going to. And a once per week dance class is just scratching at the surface of the issues.

I'm sure there are some students who will never do a ribcage slide.

But IMO my role as a teacher is to keep giving them instruction and feedback. Part of my feedback is that there is always hope... the other part is that if they can never do a ribcage slide, there is still lots to learn in my class and lots of fun for them to have.

I've had students who couldn't do ribcage slides after several *months* of classes -- one with fibromyalgia and one with MS come to mind immediately -- who went on to find perfectly acceptable levels of movement for a student-level performer and danced with my student troupe for years.

I think it's really important to help people not to feel discouraged. A lot of my beginners can't do ribcage work at all, or can't undulate. I have to reassure them over and over that it's perfectly NORMAL to come into class unable to do the moves. It takes time to build neural connections, for your body to figure out which muscles to fire, to build strength and flexibility. I also reassure them that the body firing the *wrong* muscles at first is part of the process, so if your body does strange twitchy things that aren't what you asked it to do, just laugh and keep trying.

Adult recreational students are funny creatures. They sign up for class thinking it'll be fun, then the whole time they're there, they judge themselves and feed their insecurities. If they can't do something after trying for 2 or 3 minutes they say "I can't do that."

I tell them that if you limit yourself to the things you can do well after 3 minutes of trying, you will lead a very limited life. You have to be willing to do things badly for a while if you want to do new things at all!

Most of my time with beginners is spent explaining to them how *learning* works. Class isn't someplace you come to show off what you can already do! We all stumble around together and do things badly at first, and it's OK.

For some people, it seems to be as simple as they've never thought about it. I'm very good at isolation, but rib slides were difficult; I always share with sutdents with problems that once my ribs moved, everything else just clicked!

My best trick, from the teacher that helped the most, is a visualization: there are crayons in your nipples. Now, draw a straight line across the wall. It's also a funny visual, so it keeps things light.

Imagining your nipples are pieces of chalk and you're drawing a line on the wall worked for me too! Not just for slides, but for circles and figure 8 too. I've also heard teachers saying to imagine you're dusting a shelf, sweeping the dust from side to side - but I prefer the chalk. It's not a movement we really use at all in everyday life, so it can be really hard to 'get' and a visualisation of what direction everything should be going in can really help.

Originally Posted by Lauren_

I'm sure there are some students who will never do a ribcage slide.

But IMO my role as a teacher is to keep giving them instruction and feedback. Part of my feedback is that there is always hope... the other part is that if they can never do a ribcage slide, there is still lots to learn in my class and lots of fun for them to have.

I've had students who couldn't do ribcage slides after several *months* of classes -- one with fibromyalgia and one with MS come to mind immediately -- who went on to find perfectly acceptable levels of movement for a student-level performer and danced with my student troupe for years.

I think it's really important to help people not to feel discouraged. A lot of my beginners can't do ribcage work at all, or can't undulate. I have to reassure them over and over that it's perfectly NORMAL to come into class unable to do the moves. It takes time to build neural connections, for your body to figure out which muscles to fire, to build strength and flexibility. I also reassure them that the body firing the *wrong* muscles at first is part of the process, so if your body does strange twitchy things that aren't what you asked it to do, just laugh and keep trying.

Adult recreational students are funny creatures. They sign up for class thinking it'll be fun, then the whole time they're there, they judge themselves and feed their insecurities. If they can't do something after trying for 2 or 3 minutes they say "I can't do that."

I tell them that if you limit yourself to the things you can do well after 3 minutes of trying, you will lead a very limited life. You have to be willing to do things badly for a while if you want to do new things at all!

Most of my time with beginners is spent explaining to them how *learning* works. Class isn't someplace you come to show off what you can already do! We all stumble around together and do things badly at first, and it's OK.

I think i need to remember more of this and then i'll retain more beginner students.

When Mom started teaching BD 40 years ago, she discovered that students learned upper body isolations, such as rib slides, more easily if they were seated. When seated, the body weight rests on the hips, helping* them to remain static, so the student has a better chance of feeling what it's like to, say, slide the ribs independent of the lower body.

The technique works so well that I continue the practice of beginning classes with a seated warm up, going through dance movements for the shoulders, ribs, chest and belly, before moving on to traveling, etc.

Deborah

* Being seated is not a guarantee of correct technique for things such as rib slides. I've found that students will continue to transfer weight across the hips (lean or roll) even when seated, so it's important to coach students to keep the weight evenly distributed and static regardless of the location of the ribs.

And I am happy to report at least partial success with rib slides. We did a number of upper body and ab moves seated in a circle last night, and I detected some recalcitrant ribs sliding! I asked my student afterward and she said she had felt it. She was happy and is eager to continue to try for more control and range of motion, Thanks, Bhuzzers!

Originally Posted by taji-dancer

to echo Lauren's idea----also they can sit on the floor to practice chest isolations

Yeah.. Lauren stole my answer too.

If she's very heavy, the movement may simply be too small to see, especially if she's got a lot of belly connecting her top and bottom halves, and if she's not aware of her body she may not be able to tell where the movement is happening. Large women have to move farther to appear to make the same movement as smaller women. When that was my predicament, I found it easier to do slides when I held my hands firmly on my hips, otherwise they were swallowed up. At first the movements were tiny, almost imperceptible, but with diligent practice I gained flexibility and could make larger movements. The tip I got that really made a difference was to focus on the muscle opposite the direction I wanted to go - so if I wanted to move left, I'd focus on my right side (sorry, don't know the names of muscles) and think of it as pushing to the left, then reverse. That way I really focused on the sensation of the working muscle, and didn't worry so much about the range of motion of the rest of the body, which took care of itself as I built up strength in that pushing-side muscle.

I get my students to place their hand on the bottom of their rib cage and push. This gets the feel without doing a slide mostly from the back (which a lot do)

One thing that can prevent rib slides is if a student is concentrating on lifting the chest to an extreme--this makes it hard to isolate the muscles for the slide. One image I like: plop "the girls" on a countertop and wipe it off from side to side. This gets the student out of the extreme-lifted-all-musles tense mode. Might help!