Rise and Fall in the Modern Waltz International Style. Stand against a door frame and measure your height. If you are six foot and raise your heels you have risen from a position of where your knees are slightly flexed by about two inches. A five foot person
who understands the technique starts with the maximum lowering he can manage., say two inches. Now he can rise past his natural height plus two inches. From the other end of the floor who looks the best. Again as mentioned before, do all your lowering on the last beat of the bar of music you are leaving. Thats right you are at your highest and your lowest on the third beat. Don't go any lower on one than you are already, lest you dig yourself into a hole that doesn't look too good as you try to climb out.

Hi Quickstep
This point about lowering on beat 3 and not going any lower has been made before (by yourself i think, and also others)and the technique books do only mention lowering on 3.
The topic fascinates me because i love waltzing.
But here's a point to ponder. The 'look' of the rise and fall in waltzing should be a gentle undulating movement - a sort of 'wave' motion up and down (someone pointed out that in foxtrot it's the same, but a shallower wave - that was a good visualisation)
If the lowering all takes place in the same beat as the highest point (beat 3)then it's hard to see how this would produce a gentle undulation.
The 'lowering at end of 3' possibly refers to the conscious dropping onto the heels at the end of 3, but then with the long stride of beat 1 (into a natural turn, for example) there will be more lowering from the simple mechanics of keeping the legs soft, but now they're spread apart.
Thinking about the rise and fall of the natural turn (and other figures) and visualising the 'gentle undulation' required, it would seem that lowering at the end of 3 would have to be followed by some lowering during beat 1, which is maintained during at least some of beat 2, rising at the end of 2, continuing to rise on 3, then lowering on 3.
The shape obtained by strictly lowering just at the end of 3, then not lowering or rising during 1 and 2, then rising during 3 - this wouldn't be a 'gentle undulation'.

The leg division into 1 should not cause your body to lower. Remember that as the moving foot passes the standing one, the standing heel will come up - this lets the standing ankle help maintain body altitude. Between 1 and 2, a similar rising of the ankle is also what begins the swing.

"The leg division into 1 should not cause your body to lower. Remember that as the moving foot passes the standing one, the standing heel will come up - this lets the standing ankle help maintain body altitude. Between 1 and 2, a similar rising of the ankle is also what begins the swing."

I have to correct my previous post based on new information.

At the completing of step 1, we must start the upswing by raising the heel before the moving foot passes on it's way into step two. This is why the footwork is given as HT - initially heel, but toe by the end of the step which is defined as the time the new moving foot passes.

However, I was wrong about the case between 3 and 1. Here we are actually just finishing the lowering at the end of three, so we do not want to create rise yet. As a result, the standing heel will still be down as the moving foot passes, and will come up only a little before the moving foot pops up into its heel lead. This should have been clear because the footwork is TH - the heel is still in contact when the moving foot passes, wheras my version would have been listed as "THT", which it clearly is not.

This does unfortunately ruin my "easy" advice for how to avoid double lowering. The best I can say is to make sure to lower complete on time, and make sure to really actively use the foot as you prepare the step. While the heel stays down, the weight obviously still moves very far forward in the foot, to support your body until the moving foot is in position to take weight.

Sometimes it's difficult to work out exactly what's happening when i dance, and it's easy to become too mechanistic by defining exactly what should happen exactly when. But i've always been a little 'uneasy' about the idea of completing all the lowering at end of 3 and no more lowering after that. So i sat down and thought about it more, and lots of tricky concepts sprung up in my mind - i'm not sure i can articulate them (but of course i'm going to try!).
I started thinking "what do i actually mean by beat 1". Because of a musical background, i think of it as the instant i would hit the keys if playing a simple three-notes- in -a- bar waltz. When i place my heel or toe on '1' in a waltz, it plants at this instant. Most dancers seem to dance this way for slow waltz.
Then i split the bar into 1&,2&,3&. And i'm visualising a natural turn followed by a backward step (as a man).(actually, i went through this in the office - fortunately nobody saw me)
On '3' i'm at maximum height and my feet close. On 3& a lot seems to happen. I lower onto the heel of my right foot, but my knees continue to soften as my left foot moves back (i can't take a long stride without softening the knees of course)and then on '1' my left foot is planted (it may have skimmed back across the floor, but it only plants on '1')and on this beat '1' i am clearly at my lowest point.
i guess the technique book is strictly correct (AGAIN!) but at a first or even second reading it could be confusing. I always thought of softening the knees and taking the stride to plant on '1' as somehow part of '1', but i guess it's part of 3&.
Whatever the technicalities (and if you've struggled through this i would welcome any comments, as my dancing needs improving!!)i'm always influenced by 2 visual images, which are worth thousands of words.
The first is a picture of the waltz as a dance with undulating movements (a 'saucer' shape as someone on this site once put it) rather than bobbing up and down.
The second is a teaching wideo i have with Marcus and Karen Hilton showing slow waltz. I once played this in slow motion (almost frame-by-frame) and was stunned at how low he got at the moment of foot plant on beat 1. I thought of that lowering as part of the '1' but i'm now beginning to think of it as the end of 3&.
Do people talk about dancing the way they do about golf?

Yet more on rise and fall..
A post elsewhere talks about the physics of converting the speed of motion (kinetic energy) into rise (potential energy) so i thought about this too, being a lover of physics (it's true).
Skim over the next bit if you don't like maths, but the formulae for these two forms of energy are:
1/2 m times (v squared)
and
m times g times h
m is your mass, v is the speed (strictly velocity for you gurus out there) g is acceleration of gravity and h is the rise.
Putting in numbers, and equating, we get

1/2 times (v squared) = 32 h
now we're working in units of feet and seconds.

for slow waltz stride length of 4 feet occupying 1 beat (an assumption i know), v works out as 6 feet per second, which gives h as 18/32 feet or just under 6 inches.

Of course, this is the center-or-gravity rise, and body rise etc would add to it.
But the other interesting thing is that v depends on stride length, and h depends on v squared. This means that if you increase stride length by 10%, your rise from energy transfer alone increases by 20%.
Of course, as the energy transfer increases, the difficulty of controlling it increases too, but that's another story

Pretty numbers, but since rise is vertical and traveling is horizontal, I doubt that the numbers have any correlation.

Jerry

Ah, but they do. Refer to the classic high school physics textbook analysis or a pendulum.

Jerry - next time you get the chance ,watch some high jump.
The jumper accelerates into the bar (to maximise his energy), softens his knees (sports coaches call this 'lowering the hips') to maximise the efficiency of the leg and thigh muscles, and then takes off, converting the kinetic energy into height over the bar (addding leg muscle action too)
Nobody could jump over a door from a standing start.
As far as i can see, all these concepts apply to dancing - in a slightly different way, of course.
And anonymous is right - it's school physics concepts put into practice.
My original post wsn't just about the numbers - there was an important concept buried in there too!

This is the fourth time in this session. I don't want to hog up all the space here but i will put on once again about a lecture i attended given by Steven Hillier. He said we have a child on a swing. Our two arms are above our head grasping the seat of the swing . As we get to the bottom of the arc there is a moment where we still push the swing on its upward motion before we let go. He went on to say That is that elusive part we are looking for. Nobody can tell you exactly where it is.
Keep looking.