Micro Practices: Quickies Are OK!

"Two or three minutes? That's not even one song!" he said when I told him I did a series of quick practices over the day. “That doesn’t sound like enough to me.”

He’s missing the point. I call them “micro-practices” (MP) and everybody should integrate them into their daily routines. They could work for partnering, but as a rule they are for upgrading your individual dancing skills like spinning, footwork, Cuban motion, posture, and other body control exercises.

When you’re a pro, you get up each day and can practice for hours, refining your dancing on the way to the next level. You're paid to dance, and practicing is a way of life. However, if you’re working for a living and want to advance your social dancing, sometimes it's hard to carve out chunks of time for practice. That’s where micro-practices (quickies) can be a winner for you. Like your love life, they shouldn't be all you do, but in balance they keep things moving in the right direction.

It may be counter-intuitive, but a set of quickie practices often beats longer sessions, assuming you do enough of them. Often they're gold, where the combined effort of a dozen one to five-minute practices gets you further than one forty-five minute session. Some techniques require longer practices, but the micro-practice beats the heck out of "I didn't practice today because I couldn’t find a twenty or thirty minute block of time”.

There is magic in repeating something over and over, every hour or so, for a couple minutes throughout the day. Time management gurus always say when you’re interrupted from a task, it takes you time to restart. Micro-practices use that principle to your advantage, because the start-up time is reduced if you repeat an action often enough.

The series of little practices gets you to the point where you can hit the move immediately, rather than after 10 minutes of warm up. It’s amazing how much you can advance with micro-practices alone, although you can gain even more when combining them with intermittent longer rehearsals.

Edie the Salsa Freak is famous for learning to spin in the bathroom at work before she turned pro. The floor is tile, there is a great mirror, and she would spin a couple times to the right, a couple times to the left each time she used the restroom. If nobody was around she might sneak in a few extras, but most of those practices lasted 60 seconds or less. With just 10 extra spins per day, she had over 300 spins each month BEFORE doing any extended practicing. Over time, it adds up to thousands of extra spins, giving her the experience she needed to get to the next level.

Most work days I’m at the computer all day, and each time I need a break I practice a shine, a spinning combination and/or a new part of a "pattern in progress." It may be just a tiny fragment, but doing it repeatedly over a couple days (or weeks) makes a huge difference when I get to a block of time for an extended practice.

Before starting work, I often sneak in a two-minute practice before sitting at my desk. Nobody cares if I start two minutes later, and it reinforces the new materials I’m working on. Some days the quickies are the only practice I get; sometimes it’s part of a bigger practice day, where I combine micro-practices with much longer sessions or classes.

I’ve stood in line at Sam’s Club or the bank, doing footwork practice, knowing that may be my only practice for the day. In previous articles I've mentioned I practice head/shoulder exercises in my car. (Shines and partnering are highly discouraged while driving.) When you hit the dance floor, your partners don’t care if you practiced at a dance studio, in your bathroom or in line at the grocery store; they simply notice your improvements.

Some days when I haven’t had much practice, I’ll sneak in a few minutes before bed. It may not be much, but again, it’s my way to move myself forward. It takes about as much time as brushing my teeth, so I have little excuse to skip it. I'd love to practice more some days, but that just isn't my reality at points.

You don’t have to tell anybody you’re sneaking practices around your bathroom breaks. That really falls into the “TMI” category (“too much information”). Keep this little secret between us and they’ll just think you are improving using the traditional extended practices. If you can do regular practices, that's great, but I want to grow even when I’m timed starved (the story of my life).

Try it yourself; sneak in a few micro-practices, multiple times per day, especially on those days when you can’t get to a complete session. You’ll see it makes a substantial difference if you keep it up. Once you're in the habit, you'll find little slivers of time and use them to your advantage, even if it's just working a body roll twice or an extra couple of spins per day.

Let me know how you are getting the most from limited practice time; I’m always looking to accelerate my growth and I’m sure some of you have your own best practices. Please share!

Indecision may or may not be my problem.
-- Jimmy Buffett