Fluid Moves 4: for Belly, Latin, Jazz & Ballroom Dancers | A belly dance long island dancer reviews!

This week’s theme topic covers a favorite subject of this belly dance long island dancer ….DVDS!!!!!! I love DVDs especially ones that relate to belly dance and boy do I have a lot of them. This post will be quickie reviewing/talking about “Fluid Moves 4: For belly dance, Belly, Latin, Jazz & Ballroom Dancers” by Debbie Ashton. I was introduced to this DVD by Aziza while at Dreamcamp (http://www.azizadreamcamp.com/) this past summer. It has quickly become a go to resource for me. 

               One of the downsides of being a dancer is that it is likely you are going to possibly become hurt and/or injured. There are all sorts of injuries a dancer can obtain. This particular dancer is home to several injuries (as are many) with many more to come I am sure. I won’t go into details but in regards to this post, I have an injury involving my lumbar spine area. This means that I tend to have a lot of pain and tightness in my lower back. While mostly healed, it can still flair up and make it hard to walk let alone shimmy!! Please note before I go any further: I am NOT a medical doctor, I am not giving you medical advice. I am just sharing my thoughts on a DVD that helped me in addition to medical stuff.

                My thoughts ping pong on the best way to talk about this DVD, so I have decided to just follow them ( hold on J). Let me be upfront, this DVD is very homemade. I love that her cats make appearances throughout the video. However I do wish that she had been able to create two paths on the DVD: one with the broken down explanations (which were super helpful) and one with either chapters or fast tracking through the exercises with the extra dialogue cut out.  I really liked her taking the time to explain and really talk about the why and how of the stretches but when using the dvd often it can become very frustrating as you can’t skip to the next part.  That is all I have to say on the more negative side of the spectrum.  So the “negatives” really aren’t even that negative. Now for the fun stuff!!

                This video is FULL of great low impact and gentle stretches/exercise that were completely new to me using a method called the Feldenkrais method. She breaks it down into two main sections:  One standing involving a chair and one laying down on the floor.  These aren’t normal run of the mill activities either. She uses very simple movement with very few repetitions. I rarely feel strained while doing the movements and find it highly effective.

                These movements get into areas of my lower back that I had been struggling to reach & some I didn’t even know existed.  In addition, I can feel the loosening up of the back and sides of my legs as I perform these stretches. A lot of her floor series causes a release in the compression of the legs & spine causing them to feel longer and lower to the floor. I don’t always realize how tight and compressed my body has become until after I use the DVD  and then I’m astounded by the difference.  I also appreciate that the exercises can be used by themselves if you are on a time crunch as they are super short.    

All in all I would highly recommend this DvD to both dancers and non dancer! Love it!

To learn more about this video and others like it, please visit Debbie Ashton's website at: http://www.wellmats.net/page/page/3329239.htm or email her at
dashton05@comcast.net . I found her to be quite helpful and super nice!

To learn more about Kirah please visit: http://www.intrinsicbellydance.com/about.html

To chime in please comment below!
(Original post 8/23/13)
All this time typing has made this belly dance long island dancer stiff, so off I go use Fluid Moves 4!!