How Long does it Take to Learn Country Swing Dancing?
How Long does it Take to Learn Country Swing Dancing?
This question can vary from person to person. So, what I’m going to do is kind of give you a mathematical formula for how to calculate how long it would to take you to get a good foundation of Country Swing Dancing. What I would say is if you reference my list of dance moves page you will see there are about 100 moves listed. I would say that once you know the first 40 moves on that list that you would have a solid foundation of Country Swing Dancing and will be in the top 10 percent of Country Swing Dancers in the world. Now if you want to just be in the top 50 percent then you would be sitting around the first 10 moves on the list and probably the top 25 percent sit somewhere around the first 20 moves in the list.
Now I guess we can look at what it would take to learn first 10 moves on that list. Now I think normally a person could learn all 10 dance moves inside of about 3 to 5 lessons. They could do it in 3 lessons on condition that they took all these lessons within a 2-week period and did 2 lessons on back to back days. Now that I’ve said that you probably are wondering why “back to back days?”
Well if you take lessons on back to back days your memory retention is about 75% compared to if you wait a whole week you might be down to 5 or 10%. So what that means is that if you wait a week you might be taking everything you learned in the first lesson and having to do it all over again while the person who learned it yesterday will probably still have it fresh for the next day and not have to relearn everything he learned the day before. So in essence if you do “back to back days” of lessons you are not only saving yourself time but also money!
If you are looking to be in the top 25 percent of Country Swing Dancers in the world then learning about the first 20 moves would take a little long and I would say that between 5 and 15 lessons can get you there. Now generally I would not expect anyone to learn within 5 lessons how to do 20 moves. It takes a lot of work to learn that many moves that fast and usually the people who learn it that fast have a dancing background in other styles of dance and so it comes easier because they have the basics already down. Now around this time period you should have established some of the techniques associated with these moves.
Now if you are looking to establish your techniques it takes a lot longer to really fine tune your techniques and I didn’t really add in all the time to get good with your techniques in dancing but I’ve established a good list of techniques for you to consider when learning these dance moves. Doing a high number of dance moves without technique is detrimental to your journey in learning dance. You can get hurt or in general you just wear out quicker and don’t dance for long periods of time because you work harder than you’re supposed to, when you don’t have proper technique. So in general if you feel you are wearing out quickly after doing a few songs of dance and you feel like calling it a night it could be because you are not incorporating proper technique. So take a look at that list and see what you can learn from it to incorporate into each dance move you do. And if you don’t understand I will add some videos on how to do those techniques that you can click on in that list really soon.
Now to get into the top 10 percent of Country Swing Dancers in the world it doesn’t take to long to do that. I would say once you are there then it takes some time to figure out where to go from there and maybe that’s why I created this site. But I would say on average about 10 to 20 lessons should get you into that bracket of learning around the first 40 dance moves on that list I created. Once you have that many moves memorized and can do them, then you have enough moves to have a established a solid foundation of Country Swing Dancing.
So if you want to get an idea of how much time you would have to spend, I would say around 20 hours of practice and repetition of going over that list weekly and doing lessons at least once a week then you should be learning all moves within 20 hours. But let me emphasize again that you should get lessons on “back to back days” if you really want the most bang for your buck. If you can put more times than twice in a week you will be there sooner. Now it’s really up to you and your instructor on how far you want to go. If you want to increase your techniques, then it will take a lot more time and I don’t want to say another 20 hours because sometimes it can take 5 times longer than that.
Technique is what most judges focus on when judging competitive dancing so if you know a lot of moves but don’t have the technique then you might not win very many competitions. So if you are looking to do competitive dancing you need to invest a lot more time than just 20 hours of practice with an instructor.
I hope this is a good reference and I hope you enjoy your time learning how to Country Dance!
