Sure!
First, for those who need a primer, let me quickly go over the concept of stride, period. In my experiences as a teacher of students who came from other teachers (as well as coaching teachers at a certain chain school), there seems to be a good deal of confusion in this department.
Some teachers seem to be under the impression that the body should always be over the moving foot, while others believe that the leg should move first. Neither version will produce very pleasing results. Don't allow your moving foot to get ahead of the body and it won't be moving for very long. Start moving the foot before the body, and it will look and feel disconnected and "leggy".
To get the right blend, you should keep the following axiom in mind: [i]Legs and body always move at the same time, but never at the same speed.[/i]
"Reaching" is moving a foot all by itself, without any motivation from the body. Your moving foot should never engage unless the body is moving away from the standing foot in the same general direction. When you watch someone who appears "reachy" or "leggy", notice how the feet and/or legs seem to move detached from the body, particularly in the early parts of the stride. The correction is to work on slowing down the action of the moving foot in the early part of the stride, and don't allow any movement at all unless the body is in motion. A good teacher can help you to strike the right blend of foot and body speed.
The opposite problem is stifling one's strides by not allowing the foot to get far enough out ahead of the body. There's nothing wrong with having the feet well ahead of the body, so long as they don't move too quickly into position. A good general ratio is t 2 to 1; That is to say, the feet move approximately twice as fast as the body (although this is an extreme oversimplification). If you think of trying to stay approximately half-way between your feet, and you never allow your foot to move without the body, you'll always be reasonably close to correct.
Now assuming you already have a handle on these principles, but you now want to increase your stride, it gets a bit trickier. This is much easier to convey hands-on, but I'll put the information out as best I can, and you can have your teacher(s) take care of the torture and whip-cracking.
I generally find that students who take short strides are suffering from one of a couple of problems: (1) Moving foot not getting out ahead of the body, as discusseed above, (2) Lack of foot pressure from the standing foot, or (3) incorrect poise or body shapes.
#1. As I stated above, sometimes it's just a matter of incorrect foot-to-body speed. Simply concentrating on extending the moving foot can help. This is the eassiest problem to fix, but the fix only works if this (#1) is your issue. Fixing #2 and 3 requires more fine-tuning.
#2. Sometimes the problem has less to do with the foot your moving on to as it does with the foot you're moving off of. If you get the feeling of "falling" from your moving foot, you're probably not applying enough strength and pressure to the floor to drive yourself forward (or back, or whatever). Even if you're coming from a hovering action on toes, the foot you're moving off of needs to support you long enough to [i]allow[/i] the moving foot to keep moving.
A good exercise to fix this problem is to test yourself on how long you can keep your moving foot in motion. Start from a standing position, and begin moving your body and foot forward. For every 2-3 inches the foot is in motion, count, "one, two, three..", etc. See if you can get all the way to 10 before the foot takes weight and has to stop moving. There is a stipulation, though: You cannot count if the foot is moving by itself. Your counts must start only when the body starts moving forward, and must stop when the foot takes weight. Do this exercise for forward steps, back steps, forward steps from toes (TH), and back steps from toes.
#3. Poise and body shaping tend to be more subtle contributors, but their effects are still significant enough to bear mentioning. You may have heard the saying "Forward poise for backward movement and backward poise for forward movement". That's not to say that you should literally lean backwards or forward visibly. It's more a matter of projecting your thighs in the direction of the movement, and very [i]very[/i] subtly shifting the relationship of your low center to high center accordingly. Also, this shift is rarely straight forward or back, but usually taken through a diagonal.
Take, for example, step 3 of a Foxtrot basic reverse turn. Lady is moving forward and man bakcwards. Typically you will see the man seem to get "knocked back" onto a very short stride, due to poor foot pressure and poise. Shifting the poise forward allows him to stay to the foot longer and use better foot pressure to allow him to move the leg out ahead of the body. And again, counting inches (as in the exercise above) can help you to determine whether you've shifted your poise enough to make a difference.
The lady, likewise, needs to project her thighs forward into the movement almost immediately after the feet have closed. Very picked-up thighs will help to get her leg and foot out ahead of the body, and prevent her from pitching forward onto the man.
I find that students, social dancers in particular, tend to push at their partners with their chest when moving forward. Attention to the projection of thighs and movement off of the standing foot tend to eliminate this problem over time. Remember, your partner won't respond to your moving foot (unless you kick them), they respond to the movement of your body off of your standing foot. Your thighs go first, not your chest.
That's a lot to chew on. I hope it helps. Good luck!
Regards,
Jonathan Atkinson
www.ballroomdancers.com
