I'm not a natural athlete, though I've known a few. I met another just the other day.
I spent a few years kayaking and the basic skill there is the eskimo roll. It took me months and months of pool practice to learn this, and when I tried it on the river it fell apart again and I had to rebuild it. Now I've got one of the most reliable, versatile, powerful, dependable rolls of almost anybody I know; I can do either side, with or without a paddle, even after bouncing over a rocky bottom on my helmet, in adverse currents, whatever.
In Colorado, I once had my paddle knocked out of my hands underwater, so I hands-rolled up, and went about an hour of class II-III water without my paddle, never worrying about getting back up on top of my boat (I even found my paddle in an eddy at the take out - it was a very good day...). One of my paddling buddies used to joke that I was more comfortable under the water than on top of it, and my girlfriend at the time used to call me "speaker to trout". They weren't entirely wrong.
So, awesome roll, but getting it there took a lot of learning, thinking-through, and practice. Most of the people in my college kayaking class seemed similar, though several did learn much faster than me. I thought that's just how it was.
One night I was teaching someone a roll at a pool session at the local whitewater club, and this dude with the weirdest collection of yard-sale boating gear you ever saw paddled up, said his name was Ed, and asked if I could show him how to roll. I started in on my standard disclaimer how this takes a while, you gotta practice, you won't get it tonight, it takes time, blah blah blah - I didn't want him to be discouraged. He interrupted me and said "just show me". Well, I'm describing what to do while I'm demonstrating with my boat, paddle, body position, etc. Halfway through that, he took a big breath and dived underneath his boat and started trying it. He fumbled around a bit, tried once and failed, and then he just ripped off one of the nicest rolls I'd ever seen, on his second try. Five minutes later he was rolling on the other side. We ended up boating together for years. Predictably, he rapidly became better than me. I watched him learning - he'd just see someone do something he wanted to learn and his eyes seemed to pour it right into his muscles without the long, distracting stop in his brain.
I know dancers like that, and they amaze me just like Ed did, but I don't seem to learn that way. You have to point out to me that I'm not turning my foot out, and that if I do, it's more stable. I need to have a conversation about that, I need the words to intellectualize around. I spend some time noticing that I'm still not turning out my foot, and I have to periodically abandon all my other dancing while I focus on turning my foot out. (ladies, if your leader goes blank, he may be having a similar challenge). Then I need to practice that a lot while thinking about it - at first it takes nearly all my attention, then this fades to where it's only moderately consuming, and finally it's automatic and I can worry about something else. Most of my time on the dance floor I'm like a time-sharing computer, switching my attention and the conversation in my head between body mechanics, footwork, lead, planning for future figures, navigation, seeing what's going on around me, and floorcraft. Only after quite a bit of that does it become automatic. Shortly thereafter, it gets boring (which means I need to start attending to my partner....)
As I build up a larger repertoire of learned tidbits in dance, I am learning faster, but I'm still going through this process, I'm just relating it back to something similar I've already learned. I still don't seem to go straight from seeing something to doing it, I just have a shorter conversation in my head that goes something like "Remember the waltz box? Well, same thing here in rumba, except....".
At least I figured out how I learn, and how to speed that process along:
1. I'm verbal and language oriented. Talk about dancing details with my dance nerd friends, read books and blogs and watch youtubes.
2. Go ahead and have the conversation in your head. Try not to get too wrapped up in it while you're actually dancing.
3. Go to lots of classes and private lessons. Once you get bored, find more challenging classes.
4. Lots of practice.
5. Try to focus on just a few dances for a while, so you can build rather than just skipping around.
6. Argentine Tango
7. Ex-russian ballet dancer instructors
More about those last two soon.
