If you are maintaining your body at a constant height for any lenght of time, you are lifting it with your feet.

But if you establish your body on an upward trend, it is possible to coast along that path without actively lifting - yes, the path will start to curve downwards, but in the short term you need lift only to counteract this, not to accomplish all of the rise. When you establish a good upswing, you launch your body on an upward path - if your arriving leg merely unfolded to fill the distance between your hip and the floor you would continue to rise before you began to lower. Of course we want to finish the rise even steeper, so the arriving leg will lift some.

But this is different than the all too common mistake of failing to establish a sufficienlty upward trajectory from the first step, and accomplishing almost all of the rise by lifting the body with the muscles of the arriving leg on the second. This is how you would rise if you stopped after the first step and took the second as a seperate action - it's not how you sould dance in the swing dances.

"The second step of the natural turn is only longer than the first because the body swings further,it's not the size of the step."

This is true for dancers who do not know how to keep their bodies together while clearing a path for the second step, of which a number of low-ranked finalists are current examples. Becuse they don't know how to do this, they seperate to take a large first step, and finding their bodies seperated are constrained by the slingshot effect to taking the second step no larger. In contrast, those who take the action of the first step without seperating their bodies (by delaying the forwad leg swing until after the CBM is underway) are in a position to take a very large second step together.

To restate it more clearly, there's a common tenadancy at all levels for the backwards partner to step bodily out of the track of a natural turn on the first step. This allows the forwards partner to place the first step while still holding a right side lead and generally take a huge stride with reduced risk of a leg bumping into their partner. But the problem comes on the second step. Because the backwards partner moved their entire body out of the way, they now have to accelerate in an almost entirely new direction and attempt to catch up during the second step. Because their ability to do this is limited, the forward partner's second step is constrained to be moderately small. If the forwards partner tries to continue the drive into a full swing, they will either slingshot around the comparatively stationary backwards partner into an overturn, or slingshot up into an overly early rise. As a result, these dancers tend to have a shorter second step and a smaller swing running to an extreme of sway-shape - they develop in place because they cannot develop through travel.

In contrast, the few who really understand the figure use an earlier CBM in the first step, so that they place the first step with the left side already in advance, which is to say with the right leg held back from being in their partner's way. Their backwards partner is then free to move nearly straight backwards, gently curving only a foot width or two out of the way. The conclusion of the early CBM serves to open the right side of the backwards partner's body, creating a clear path for the forwards partner's second step. Because the backwards partner moved in nearly the same direction as the forwards partner, both bodies have compatible momentum to now move sideways together through step two. With the feet pointing into (or for the backwards partner's left, against) the motion and the bodies sideways, it's possible to take a maximum length stride free of geometric constraints - the forwards partner is constrained only by their flexibility, foot strength, and the momentum they are carrying, while the backwards partner is free to move almost as much. While this method creates a slightly smaller first step in order to stay coordinated, the result is a truly huge progressively unfolding second step underneath a free, elegant swing.

Are you saying that that the left side arrives before the right foot touches the floor on the first step. Gleaves demonstration of cbm shows right foot arriving in place ahead of the left side on the first half of the beat,the left side arrives alongside the right foot so that the body is square when the weight is fully on the right foot at the end of the beat. The left side is back becuase we have a right side lead from the previos step. I am missing something?

Gleave students are known for doing something like what you describe; unfortunatley it doesn't really work - the action is being done backwards with the leg ahead of the body instead of the body ahead of the leg. Might have worked better on Gleave - may be subtly different than what is describe/commonly seen.

THey use to say that going back the Lady swings her right hip back and up like a bowling ball and the man going forward rotates his left shoulder forward and around.