Thread: The One-Legged shimmy--keeping it going?

We do the one-legged shimmy in class all of the time, and I can't seem to keep it going. Obviously, I can't show any of you to see if I'm doing it right, but I'll describe it.

The movement comes from the knee (right?). I basically just shake one leg, letting the movement come from the knee. I isolate that leg and only let the vibration move in my leg and hip. So, I'm wondering, how do you do it? How do you keep it going? Am I completely off and misinterpreting this movement? My main issue is keeping it going for more than-- 5 seconds! ..l;,

Thanx,

BDF

If you're from the Suhaila camp you do it with your glute.

It's probably a matter of practice, like keeping up a 2-legged shimmy. Of course if you have compromised knees, not a good thing to do.

Knee strength is something that I'm working on now. I don't have good knees, which is a problem in my dance.

The glute? Good God, that sounds difficult! So, it can be done in various ways? The movement coming from the glute or the knee?

you're shimmying the back leg right? your weight should be in the front leg or the leg not shimmying (front leg if you're standing at an angle). you move your knee back and forth (bend and straighten) ensuring that you never hyper extend back. your hip doesn't really do anything but your bum and thigh will be jiggling.

if you're doing it right, it will feel easy- there's no muscle tension or contraction going on...just sweet sweet jello jiggle. if you are finding that you lose the beat or yout thighs or calves are tensing and your shimmy is getting super tight and spastic, slow back down.

it sounds like we're on the same page...to keep it going just start slow and then slowly speed it up- if you tense, slow it back down and just keep working on it. i like to actually imagine jello in my head...jiggle jiggle jiggle! and that keeps me from tensing.

hope that helped!

Wow, I was recently taught to do it with the weighted leg, one foot slightly in front of the other, the front foot holding the weight.... the front leg has the knee moving back and forth, but evenly, slowly, without hyperextending. I think the key is moving it slowly but steadily....

if you do it slower you get a much bigger movement. But it also looks really good as a tight shimmy done on the unweighted leg

I also use the weighted leg, and think about it less in terms of the knee so much as a little jiggle coming from the ham.

I think there are different places to correctly originate the movement as mentioned above, but I had something different to add. Sometimes it is hard to keep any kind of shimmy going if you mentally focus too hard on it. If I *think* about shimmying it comes to a grinding halt, but if I do some sort of arm movements and focus on my hands and arms, the shimmy is fine and relaxed--just a companion to my arms.

Just food for thought.

I do it on the weighted foot and it's a vibration that comes up the leg-I never use the knees to power a shimmy, its always a vibration in the legs - the knees are soft though, as in not locked.

I shimmy the weighted leg. I do this exercise to practice:

• Stand with the feet farther apart than usual, shift the weight to one side, and start the shimmy in that leg.
• Shift the weight over to the other foot, transferring the shimmy from one side to another. The tricky part of this exercise is keeping the shimmy going smoothly through the weight transfer.
• As the weight transfers through the center of my body, I am shimmying both legs
• As the weight transfers over to the other foot, I let the unweighted leg stop shimmying, and the shimmy fully transfers over to the weighted foot.

It's fun, and can be done for effect onstage - it's great during a drum solo!

Shimmying in any position is sort of a fight between relaxation and tension, or alternating between the two in quick succession. You are tensing your muscle (no matter what muscles you use to drive the shimmy) at regular intervals to get the thing going, but you have to remain relaxed between the tenses so that you don't cease up into one big ball of tension. It's a tricky thing to get your body to understand, particularly at the speed we like these things to go.

So there are a lot of exercises and tricks I do to get my body to cooperate with all the crazy shimmies I do. Here are some of them.

1 - stretch out your legs, particularly your hamstrings, but also you quads, if your muscles are tight they will fight you and be uncooperative, you want them feeling nice and limber and relaxed.

2 - warm up your legs, my shimmies tend to be their least cooperative when I try to just jump into them with out previously warming up a little. Even if the warm up is starting your shimmy really slow, you want to warm up to your full speed max capacity monster.

3 - practice them sitting on the floor. Sit (or even lie) on the floor with your legs stretched out in front of you. If you are working on:
*a glute shimmy, squeeze your glutes in alternating fashion,
*a knee shimmy, bend and straighten your knees and let them flap against the ground,
*an inner thigh driven shimmy, pull up on your inner thighs in alternating fashion (so if you watch your feet it's like one leg becomes shorter then longer than the other, no knee bending involved).
With all three of these, you will want to keep a very steady rhythm and sustain it for a few minutes straight.

part II

4 - Start it slow and steady. Learning a new dance movement is like learning to play a song on the violin, you have to get the movement in muscle memory before you can speed it up. The first time a fiddler plays a new tune, she is slowly thinking of their fingering "1, 3, g string, 2, a string 4" or maybe the notes "d, d flat, b, f, a", when she speeds it full speed, she doesn't have time to think that anymore, her fingers just have to remember on their own from all the practice repeating those patterns. Muscle memory. It takes slow practice to build, and when you've repeated it long enough slowly, your brain no longer has to tell your body how to do the movement and you can speed it up gradually and your body will continue to remember the pattern you taught it on it's own.

5 - Shake a leg - need to get that shimmy warmed up in a hurry? Stick your leg in the air like a dog that about to mark it's territory, flex your foot and shake that leg out with a fast shimmy shake. It helps remind your leg what it's supposed to do when you are standing on it. It looks ridiculous, but it is surprisingly effective.

6 - Do Tamrahenna's suggested weight transfer exercise, it's a great one.

7 - Utilize multiple impetuses. Some on this thread mentioned driving the shimmy from the weighted or the unweighted leg. Well, if you are doing it exclusively one or the other it gives a different look. I've used both at different times depending on what I was trying to achieve visually. That being said, if I'm having an ornery shimmy day, I'll use both at the same time, while standing with all my weight over one leg, or whatever I can get to shake. Sometimes your muscles just don't wanna do it. If you let one side help the other, don't always insist on it being an exclusive thing, then once you get things going you can shift into a one leg exclusive shimmy more easily. Along this same concept, if you've practice driving shimmies with different muscle groups (like glutes, inner thighs, knees, even abs) you can sort of try mentally activating a different impetus, so one can pick the slack up for another if one isn't working for you. When I get into more complex layering, I find that I use switching impetuses a lot to keep my shimmy consistent.

8 - Breathe deeply - this is probably the most important thing you can do, it helps you relax, it helps oxygenate your blood and in my experience, it is one of the most effective tools to improving my shimmies. When we are trying to force the issue and get that darn shimmy to shake, sometimes we concentrate, tense up, hold our breath and all that works against us. Take a deep breath relax and just let your shimmy be an easy enjoyable thing.

Good Luck.

Just a note, when I say a knee shimmy, that's kind of a deceptive name, because even though your knees bend and straighten, your thighs are doing all the work. The knee is just a joint, it doesn't have the power that your quads and hamstrings give you. I think this is why so many people were giving you the general good advice to think about jiggling or vibrating your thighs and bum and not try to work the knees.

- Of course the inner thigh shimmy is more the abductors, I think....keeping the names of muscles straight....

Originally Posted by shems

- Of course the inner thigh shimmy is more the abductors, I think....keeping the names of muscles straight....

Adductors, actually. Otherwise, wonderful tips! I never thought of concentrating on driving the shimmy with these muscles. I like it.

the way that works for me is powering as if from the ground, on the weighted leg, with a soft knee, more a quake than a shimmy, don't know if this is what you're looking for........the 'keep it going' part is just practice...........

This is a good a place to threadjack as any, sorry BDF, but at least I waited a while! I posted a thread called Asmahan with a request for the body mechanics of the shimmy that she, Dina and Randa seem to have in common. Perhaps it is that they all have the same body type. But the shimmy looks very much alike, so perhaps it is a mechanical issue. The shimmy looks wonderfully relaxed yet very powerful and it travels up the body to the ribcage, and it is sustained for long periods of time. Anyone?

Originally Posted by anala

This is a good a place to threadjack as any, sorry BDF, but at least I waited a while! I posted a thread called Asmahan with a request for the body mechanics of the shimmy that she, Dina and Randa seem to have in common. Perhaps it is that they all have the same body type. But the shimmy looks very much alike, so perhaps it is a mechanical issue. The shimmy looks wonderfully relaxed yet very powerful and it travels up the body to the ribcage, and it is sustained for long periods of time. Anyone?

I have a theory, but I haven't learned from any of them personally so I hesitate to act like I know for certain what drives it. It would be easier for me to show you then talk it, but here is my guess. I think it is driven by adductor muscles (thanks Taj) as well as by their quads and hamstrings. Try a standing shimmy where you bend and straighten your legs completely, then try a shimmy where your knees stay slightly bent and you use your inner thighs to make your hips go up and down, and then try to combine the two, letting your hips go up and down and letting you knees bend and straighten to a certain extent like everything is just driving and it gives you a rockin' shimmy. At least that's what I think they are doing, but like I said, they only person who can tell you for sure is the source.

I liked that shake the leg like a dog analogy. I tried it and it did seem to use the muscles I use in my one legged shimmy. For me, I stand on the balls of my foot, left leg crossed over the right. The movement comes from the back or right leg. The right foot is pressing into the floor, the back right leg is carrying all the weight. The shimmy comes from the thigh muscles, glutes, quads and hamstrings. Not the knee.

Shems..lets pretend for a moment that I found the movement. As a new movement, it should cause a bit of fatigue or soreness in the more "unused" muscle groups if done for a long enough period of time, yes? Where can I expect that to show up..in the inner thigh?

Am I the only one that shimmies with my obliques? I don't think it's been suggested here, but when I'm on one leg, I pull my hip up with my oblique muscle, alternating each really fast so that it ends up in a shimmy. When I try to use my glutes, nothing really happens (and I've been to many a Suhaila class before. It just doesn't really work for me! My shimmies are much stronger on one leg when I use my obliques, or at least a glute-oblique combo).

Originally Posted by SummerSahar

Am I the only one that shimmies with my obliques? I don't think it's been suggested here, but when I'm on one leg, I pull my hip up with my oblique muscle, alternating each really fast so that it ends up in a shimmy. When I try to use my glutes, nothing really happens (and I've been to many a Suhaila class before. It just doesn't really work for me! My shimmies are much stronger on one leg when I use my obliques, or at least a glute-oblique combo).

Oh, I use my obliques to help pull the hip up and down or front and back. I don't think my shimmy comes from there though.

Originally Posted by anala

Shems..lets pretend for a moment that I found the movement. As a new movement, it should cause a bit of fatigue or soreness in the more "unused" muscle groups if done for a long enough period of time, yes? Where can I expect that to show up..in the inner thigh?

Oh, heck if I know, I don't ever remember getting sore from just shimmying alone. I suppose yes, in theory.

But if you want more instantaneous physical feedback. If I bend over awkwardly and put my hand on my inner thighs, first from the front then from the back (the muscle wraps around and attaches under your bum, right?) while I'm executing whatever semblance of that shimmy I can still execute from that position I can feel that muscle, or muscle group as the case may be, working.

Originally Posted by SummerSahar

Am I the only one that shimmies with my obliques? I don't think it's been suggested here, but when I'm on one leg, I pull my hip up with my oblique muscle, alternating each really fast so that it ends up in a shimmy. When I try to use my glutes, nothing really happens (and I've been to many a Suhaila class before. It just doesn't really work for me! My shimmies are much stronger on one leg when I use my obliques, or at least a glute-oblique combo).

The obliques are basically your waist's muscles right? I use them too, but rarely exclusively, unless I'm in a position that makes it difficult to use anything else. I consider it just another tool in the arsenal. If I remember correctly, Karen Barbee uses her obliques a lot in her shimmies too.

No. up the leg. easy peasy

Originally Posted by Candi

No. up the leg. easy peasy

Eh? What are you referring to here?