Your Daily Belly Dance Break

This video covers good posture for belly dance.  

Posture is really important because it helps prevent injury.  

Holding proper belly dance posture helps you build core strength and lengthens your spine. This decompresses your intervertebral discs (those pesky little spots that can start to bulge and cause all sorts of back pain and other problems when they are compressed).

You can practice your belly dance posture, anytime you're standing, wether that be at your standing desk, in line or while cooking dinner.

This video is a demonstration and practice of single hip drops.  It includes an optional embellishment of adding a little kick which is used in the more advanced version of the choreography.  

If you're brand new to belly dance, just start with the drop, you can always add the kick later.

This movement is great for your core and is also wonderful for hip mobility. 

In this video, you'll learn how to do hip bumps which are a foundational belly dance move.  When you speed up this move, you get the popular belly dance move the shimmy, which you'll also learn in this video.

Towards the end, we'll practice walking with hip bumps.  You can always come back and practice the walking later if it's too much right now.  In the beginning version of the choreography, you'll have the option of doing the hip bumps in place without walking.  in the more advanced version of the choreography, the hip bumps are doing with walking.

In this video, we add arm variations to the hip bumps.  We'll also practice walking with the movement in releve (which is just a fancy word for walking on your tippy toes).  Doing it in releve is totally optional and just a more advanced variation of the move.

In this video, you'll learn how to do chest lifts and drops and chest bounces.  Chest lifts and drops are foundational belly dance movements and chest bounces are a movement you'll use in the choreography.

In the second half of the video, you'll learn how to make the movement really bouncy and relaxed and how to add traveling (moving through space) to it and some other optional embellishments.  

In this video you'll learn how to do diagonal hip drops.  This move adds a slight twist (pun intended) to the first move you learned, hip drops.  

You'll also have the option of adding arm embellishments.

In this video, you'll learn how to shoulder shimmy.  This is a foundational belly dance movement and it's really fun once you get the hang of it.

We focus on using the correct muscles so that you don't create any unnecessary neck or shoulder tension as you do it.  One of the many benefits of practicing in this way is that you can actually open up the front of the shoulders and the chest by doing it.  

You'll then have the option of walking with the shoulder shimmy.  

In this video, you'll learn the foundational belly dance movement, the undulation.

This is a really great movement for spine mobility and core strength.  

We will practice undulations in both directions, up-to-down and down-to-up.

I then teach you some advanced variations that you have the option of using in the choreography.  Remember that the advanced variations are something to work towards.  If you're brand new to belly dance, come back and practice these advanced variations once you feel comfortable doing the undulations by themselves.  

In this video, you'll learn how to do big hip circles.

We use this movement as a transition in the choreography.

In this video, you'll learn how to do a popular hand movement called the floreo.  This movement is not only a beautiful dance move, it's also really good for your wrists, hands and fingers and can be really helpful when you're wrists get tight from too much typing or other repetitive hand movement.

It's a great quick break you can take anytime even when you're sitting at your desk.

You'll also learn the intro of the choreography which incorporates arm movements and floreos.  

This is the video you've been working towards.  We're going to put all of the movements you learned together into the choreography.

I'll show you some of the advanced variations which you have the option of including or you can leave them out.

At the end of the video, we'll run through the entire choreography twice, first we'll do the basic version and then the more advanced version.

This video is a demonstration of the basic version of the choreography from beginning to end.  Play this one anytime you just want to practice with the music and no instruction from me.  

If you're ready to do it completely on your own, you can purchase the song for this choreography "Two Gypsies" by Solace from the album "The Beginners Guide to Solace" on itunes.

This is a demonstration of the more advanced version of the choreography and includes all the options and embellishments you learned in the other videos.  When you're ready to practice all the embellishments in the choreography with just the music and no instruction from me, this is the one to watch.

If you're ready to do it completely on your own, you can purchase the song for this choreography "Two Gypsies" by Solace from the album "The Beginners Guide to Solace" on itunes.