I have been obsessed recently with — wait for it — armpits! In my quest for a better embrace, everyone’s shoulders look too tight, too high, and blocking flow in the dance. How can we find a better way to connect our arms to our body, and our body to our partners? Armpits!
Functional lines of fascia
There are three functional lines of fascia that wrap the outsides of our bodies from the arm muscles through the armpits to the knee area, through our core, pelvis, and upper thighs. As Tom Myers writes in Anatomy Trains, “[these lines] come into play during athletic or other activity where one appendicular complex is stabilized, counterbalanced, or powered by its contralateral complement.” In other words, for tango, when you need to balance and stabilize limbs on the other side of your body (or your partner).
Why are these important? I often see people “leading” with their arms instead of their body, or following by connecting their embrace to the leader, but disconnecting it from their own body to “follow” better. If you connect your arms/embrace into your body better, your connection to your partner will make both leading and following much less effort.
Also, as these lines help you stabilize your own body, they also help with balance in all moves; especially when you need to twist, have a leg free for something like a boleo, or any other activity not connected to just walking around. Look at them online, and trace how they wrap your body on the front, sides and back, crossing from side to side of your body.
Put your thumbs in your armpits
Take a moment and feel how many muscles connect under your arms into your ribs and core! Even if you feel you are not strong, there is still a lot going on in your armpit region. Notice how your shoulders relax if you take your arms down just a half inch towards your armpits. This means you can connect to your partner with much less muscular work!
Sit on a chair and twist. Notice that the work you have been doing to “disassociate” is really association of the lower and upper bodies. When you spiral around your core all the way to your armpits, it eases the hips-to-ribs effort and allows for more rotation simply by spreading the twist a little further.
Your armpits stabilize your hips
I have had success helping leaders stabilize their hips through an added awareness of these functional lines and the connections through the armpits to the embrace. For following technique, any move that requires you to free your leg instead of collapsing at the waist (linear boleos, colgadas, etc.) also needs this support. I have seen great strides in technique improvement in a short time. In addition to improving my tango, this work has strengthened my tennis game to the point where I finally have a strong serve :-)
Do you want to make tango have more stretch AND more ease? Do you want to free up your legs and stay on balance? Come to class and work on your functional lines!