Given today is addicted2salsa’s 4th birthday, it is time for a new salsa dance video. There have been several salsa dance videos of patterns and steps over the years, however, I wanted to address a few fundamentals that sometimes are not addressed in some salsa dance classes. Hopefully, for some of our beginner dancers, this video will make your basic step look and feel more comfortable at the club. For our fans looking for something more complicated, don’t worry - it is on its way.

For those who are ready to add something extra to their cross body leads in salsa dancing, this video will provide three ladies’ styling techniques to bring your salsa dancing to the next level. Julie demonstrates three cross body lead variations for ladies: “the hop,” “crosses,” and “the booty roll.” Now that the men have their styling video, we have to spice up our dancing as well!

The often-requested men’s styling for salsa dancing has arrived! Once you have a solid basis for your cross body leads, the next step is to be able to do variations of it. In this salsa video, we teach ways to spice up your salsa by adding style to your cross body leads. Anthony will teach you how to do a monkey move and a hook step into a cross body lead, and at the end how to add a shimmy. For the ladies, see the sister video with ladies’ styling, taught by Julie.

Credit of the “Monkey Move” goes to David Stein from Majesty In Motion.

If anyone out there is wondering, “what can I do to improve that doesn’t involve the natural process of getting good over time,” I have some answers for you. Using body language (one of the main ways people communicate), you can improve how you look when you dance simply by remembering these easy tips. Look at it this way…for dancers who are taking classes or doing what they can to improve their dancing over time, these tips will help you look good while you are in the process of learning. Often, when a dancer is learning something new, the basics are thrown out the window. What ends up happening is that the body language suffers, so while you may have a great new footwork pattern, you’ve sacrificed some important basics. While you learn, keep these tips in mind, and you’ll always look great!

In this episode of Addicted2Salsa Dance Lesson show, we travel a bit to the East Coast in order to show you a very common and popular move to do at the salsa dance nightclub. The first move, which I call the “Cyclone Bounce” for no apparent reason, can be seen in many salsa dance congress on the East Coast. The second dance move is really taking most of the concepts from the The Windmill Combo salsa dance episode and putting a different spin on it.

This video will help provide you with three great ways of improving your dance spinning technique. While most of the advice presented in Julie’s video tends to be ‘known’ by most intermediate dancers, we believe it does not get addressed early on by beginners. The three main items that we will cover are good dance frame and position, the salsa dance prep and spotting.

This video Cha Cha lesson of Addicted2Salsa will teach you the basics of Latin style cha cha dancing. We will go over the basic step of Cha Cha dance for beginners and instruct you with basic dance partnering. If you are coming from a salsa dancing background, we will show you how you can transfer your salsa dance moves and patterns over to Latin Cha Cha by exchanging the pauses in the salsa dance steps with the Cha Cha (triple) step. At the end, we provide you with a set of intermediate cha cha dance moves for the Latin dance club.

This is part one of a short series of salsa dance instructional videos to encourage you to incorporate salsa footwork and Latin dance shines in your social dancing. Most beginners will compose their dance in a neverending series of turn patterns. This should help you get started on adding simple footwork dance segments to your dancing so you can allow the lady to enjoy herself by styling on her own.

In this episode of Addicted2Salsa salsa dance video lessons, we will show you how to perform a basic salsa windmill combination into what we call the “hourglass copa”. The Windmill is very similar to other moves you have done that require an cross-body lead with an outside turn, except this is just a variation in styling of that basic move. The hourglass copa is based off of basic copa move (a.k.a in-and-out), except that the lead requires the use of two points of contact on the ladies’ shoulder blades.

At the end, Julie will break down some basic ladies’ styling techniques when performing this move. Finally having a woman’s voice in the video is refreshing!

I am very happy to have found out that interest in learning to dance on2 (NY/PR) timing has started becoming very popular on addicted2salsa.com. To help everyone become more familiar with the clave and the VERY important conga slap, I have edited the original salsa clave track I created in Garageband for Episode 25 : Finding the Salsa Beat and modified it for an easier learning experience. This should help everyone make it part of their daily schedule to play the track at least 3 times a day while they do some other task. Doing this will allow your brain to sink-in that clave beat and rhythm subconsciously - so that it starts becoming easily recognizable by your ears.

At first, I recommend forget about the clave when listening to the soundtrack first. Focus on the ‘tu-ku (small pause) PA!’ sound first. That ‘PA’ sound are your 2’s and 6’s when dancing on2.

In this episode of Addicted2Salsa we show you how to perform a basic blind cross-body lead with a loop-over lock salsa move. While the move may look easy at first, it is the timing and the proper leading where some may have difficulties. Also, we will take it and chain it together with going from a cross-body hammer-lock to a reverse loop-over. I consider this a more intermediate dance pattern because you have to be very careful on how you lead this move. These moves done incorrectly can hurt the girl in VERY bad ways. Julie Merrill also adds a few key styling points for the ladies.

We’d like to thank our sponsors for this episode: Gabellini Dance Shoes

In this episode of Addicted2Salsa, we go back to the basics to help you learn how to do a 180° Cross-Body Lead with a Turn (*a few others call this the ‘Coca-Cola’ move). We first start off refreshing you what a Cross-Body Lead with a Turn looks like and from there add-on the extra dance steps required to do a half-revolution. Getting the 180 degree cross body lead will help build the salsa framework for you to execute the 360 cross body lead - which will show you in a future episode. If you have any questions, feel free to post them at http://social.addicted2salsa.com .

The song used in this video is ‘Manias’ by Tito Nieves.