A common question I get from other zoukers (especially followers) when I tell them I am a flexibility coach is How can I improve my back flexibility for dancing? As you’ve probably already experienced, zouk is very much a “full body” dance, so when your flexibility limits your range of motion, it can become a bit uncomfortable (especially with moves that require quite a bit of spinal flexibility, like body waves and head movement). So let’s look at some stretches and drills you can do to help!

Do you have a special someone in your life who is zouk-obsessed, but you don’t know enough about the dance to have any good guesses about what to gift them?

We got you covered with a whole slew of ideas, with options to fit every budget…

Continuing on from Monday’s post on using our turn out hip engagement, today we’re going to be talking about some of the muscles responsible for helping keep our hips quiet and level when dancing: our abductors.

Typically, in Brazilian zouk, when we talk about “hip engagement,” we’re often referring to a couple of different groups of muscles or ranges of motion: Hip external rotators (aka the “turn out” muscles), adductors (aka inner thigh muscles), and our abductors (aka outer hip muscles).

There’s a lot to cover here, so we’ll be breaking this topic into 2 posts, and today we’ll specifically be focusing on the concept of engaging our “turn out” muscles.

Because zouk is a dance that emphasizes keeping weight in the balls of the feet (requiring a lot of calf strength to keep the heels off the ground), and frequent pivots and turns (requiring strong stabilizers in the inside and outside of the ankle), our ankle muscles need to be hella strong to help us balance and keep our ankle joint safe and injury-free when dancing.

So let’s look at some of the best ankle conditioning drills you can do to strengthen the stabilizing muscles on the inside and the outside of your ankle.

One challenge several of our new students have mentioned is simply being able to keep track of the names of all of the moves! So today we’re giving you a “cheat sheet” with visuals of some of the most common zouk moves we think are foundational for beginner students to master.

Whether you’re totally new to dancing and don’t know where to start, or a long-time dancer looking to “upgrade” their footwear choice, there are a ton of options when it comes to zouk dancing.

Here’s a thorough overview of the most common options (for both leaders and followers) for dancing indoors (ex. on a proper dance floor) based on my own personal experience of 10+ years of dancing and feedback from other zoukers…