Stiff Upper Body? Simple Upper Body/Torso Moves For The Club - Torso Crunch Tutorial For Beginners

Hi and welcome to my tutorial. My name is Monika Matys and I'll be breaking down for you all the basics of club dancing and dancing in general. In today's video we'll stick to the theme of upper body movements and we'll learn a movement that's called a crunch. You don't need to have any dance experience in order to do this movement however it is useful that you know a little bit about rhythm and coordination so if you haven't seen the videos I've done before I will link them down below for you in the description box. What you're going to do is you're going to extend the arms by your sides and try to touch the knee on each side. So you're dropping low, you're dropping the arm, you're dropping the hand, you're dropping the shoulder and the torso follows. You want to be able to do it in full range of motion for now just so you can feel what muscles are moving and the muscles that are moving are obliques, those fellas on the sides. You're going to feel one side crunching, one side shortening and then the other one lengthens right so you feel the stretch. So try it a couple of times. Okay now we're going to do it only about halfway so go ahead and again reach for the knee with the hand but don't go so low okay and then have the arms by your sides bent. You don't need the hands but still keep the same motion down, straight enough, down, straight enough. Okay when you do the movement you don't need to do it in the full range of motion on the dance floor. Actually the smaller the moves the better, the more natural you will look doing it. Okay so we learned what the crunch is now let's see if we can put it to the beat so that it looks even better. Go ahead on every single snap lean to left or right side. In between you're just coming up to straight position before switching to another side. One, two, one, two. On two we're dropping the torso, bend both arms, you can snap with me if that helps. One, two, one, two. Second thing we're going to do in order to make this movement look looser we'll add the knee bend, we'll bend both knees at the same time on the snare, on the same beat. So go ahead make sure you're comfortable and we have one, two, one, two. Get the knee bend going, that's your little groove. One, two, one, two and at the same time drop, drop, drop. Good we're listening for the loudest beat it's going to sound like a snap or a clap usually in most songs. After identifying this beat we're just going to bend both knees. One, two, one, two. Keep the arms bent and then add the torso. One, two, one, two. At the same time keep the movement small. One, two, one, two. Feel the obliques working, don't go too low, make sure the movement is nice and small so it will look a little bit more natural. If you want to keep the beat a little bit better you can add a snap. This will loosen up your arms and the entire movement will look a little bit better. Alright you guys, that was a simple crunch with a single knee bend on the snare. Now let's speed things up a little bit, we're going to switch to another rhythm. So let's first bend the knees to the tempo of the song. Here we go, we're going to bend the knees on one, two, one, two. Every second beat it's our snare drum but we're going in between as well. One, two, bend, bend. Okay then keep the arms slightly bent. One, two, one, two and we're going to double up the crunch. So every single time you bend the knees you'll be leaning to the left or right side. One, two, one, two. Notice one thing, every single time you hear the snare drum or my snap in this case, you're leaning in the same direction. So in my case right now it's right side, this is our marker. Please notice that because we're doing exactly twice as much as before, in the same amount of time we have to make sure the movements are smaller and that we're adding more energy to keep up with the rhythm. We no longer have the luxury of making the movement a little bit deeper like we did with the single crunch on the snare drum because now we have more to do. So go ahead and keep the movement smaller, you literally need to just drop the shoulder an inch or two and the torso will follow. All right let's try it with a song. Let's find the tempo, we're going on every beat. One, two, one, two, one, two, one. Keep the knee bent smaller. One, two, one, two. Go ahead and bend the arms nice and loose by your sides and then add the crunch. Down, down, down, down. One, two, one, two. To keep things a little bit challenging you can try and mix rhythms. Let's see if we can do a single knee bend but we'll keep the crunch twice as fast. This is the tempo. One, two, one, two, one, two, one, two. Let's go ahead and on that snare drum we'll crunch to the left. One, two, one, two. Rebound to the right. One, two, one, two. Keep the movement small because it is pretty fast. One, two, one, two. And once you have it, even out the sides. Bend the arms, keep them bent by your sides. One, two, and add single knee bend. At the same time as you're leaning to the left. I know it's a lot going on. Okay guys so keep in mind this is a little bit more advanced so be patient with it. It does require a little bit of coordination. If you don't know what coordination is please watch one of my previous videos. I will put the link down below in the description box for you. We can also switch it up. So we're going to do a knee bend on every single beat and we'll crunch only on every other beat. So let's go ahead and get our tempo going. One, two, one, two, one, two. And on two crunch first to the right then to the left or the other way around. But essentially we're skipping one knee bend, one beat and we're going only on the second one with the torso. One, two, one, two. And there you have it. This is our tempo. One, two, one, two. Go ahead and bend the knees first. One, two. Give yourself a little bit of time to get used to that rhythm. One, two, one, two. Then bend the arms. Keep them loose by your sides. Find the snare. Identify the sound that's the loudest, that's more regular. And on that beat, on the snare, just lean to the right, lean to the left. One, two, one, two. One, two, one, two. And there you have it. Another rhythm variation for your crunch. Alright you guys, that is it for today. If you have any questions, please leave them in the comments below and I'll try to answer them in my future videos. I don't know what that was. If you found this video helpful or if you'd like me to create more videos like that, please give this video a thumbs up, like it, share it with your two left feet friends, subscribe to my channel and hit the notifications bell so you don't miss any of my videos which I'll be posting every week. Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one. Like me right now, in this tutorial.