Feet together. Take a walk, a heel lead in Foxtrot. Step foreward on the right foot and keep the weight on the back foot. We haven't gone anywhere. Send the weight over to the front foot. Now we have moved and yet our feet are still in the same place. This is the problem. When do we move the weight from the back too the front. Remembering to keep our blocks of wood one on top of the other at all times.If you do this as practise with a succesion of walks, analyse exactly what you are doing and how you can impove your technique

Your weight needs to be moving forward before your foot starts moving.

Knee of the standing foot moves foreward with the body. As the knee of the standing foot bends, just a little when walking, we create compresion and with the help of gravity the free leg is swung forward(by the hips) and into place just in time to collect our body weight. We do not reach with the free foot(hence,we are not using any muscles of the free leg. When we lower more in order to dance we then have to use some muscle in the free foot in order to bend the knee to allow it to swing through under the body. When starting from a stationary position Barr,Gleave and some other past top dancers say to start the movement first by bending the knee forward carrying the body weight with it. Moving backward, the foot of the free leg will move back as the knee of the standing foot is pushed forward. Standing still feet apart at full stride with weight centered between both feet, you should be able to shift your weight back and forth from foot to foot with EASE.

Doug. Even though the weight is being passed to the front foot, very often the dancer is not level. And by that I mean, if we had a spirit level on the dancers side you would be able to see whether they are or are not vertical. One way of testing this is to deliberatly dance slightly apart. It soon shows up if one or the other is not standing as they should. As we know we have to move as one. Half an inch there by one or both can play havoc with the balance on some of those more difficult groups as well as the basics. Anyway I think well written. We have a term called giving your partner weight so that she can then gauge how far to move and can tell what you want her to do next. I think you mentioned that the person going backwards has a feeling of their weight going forward towards their partner and not back over their heel. Who said dancing was easy.

"I think you mentioned that the person going backwards has a feeling of their weight going forward towards their partner and not back over their heel."

But actually it does have to go back over, and then past the heel. Still there is a feeling of forwards towards the partner.

Best guess? Knee flexes slightly forward, frame stays to partner, head looks past them against the travel. But the entire body starting with the hip is already starting to move to the heel.

Well yes the weight does stay towards the partner going backward or forward, but remember the weight is always carried forward and virtical when we walk . We carry are weight somewhere between our instep and ball of foot,it does not move back over the heal at any time,even when rolling back over the heal,the spine is still virtical and over the instep,for example when dancing pivots as we push off from the back foot the the weight is still forward. When me run our weight moves over the balls and stays there. So in quickstep due to the speed of the dance and the fact that we are up so much(scatter chasses) are weight is a little more forward than in the slower foxtrot. I hope I got this right. Doug

Even though we carry the weight forward ,it still has to pass over the whole foot. Some say the head weight is slightly forward, but since so many of us have problems with piching forward, that I like to think I am dancing virtical balancing a book on my head.