How to drill (hip-hop) and how much time to dedicate

[quinton77]

Hello,

I've recently ended school and one of my main goals for the summer is to become better at hip hop dance (I'm basically starting from scratch). So far I've been stretching and doing popping and body isolation drills every morning for at least an hour, sometimes two. I'm really motivated to learn, and feel like I'd like to dedicate even more time to dancing. For example, on top of the things I mentioned, I might wanna carve out more time to drill footwork as well.

However, my concern is that drilling for more than an hour or two any given day will just be getting me diminishing returns and waste my time (i.e. my brain will be so saturated from practice that I won't gain anything in terms of muscle memory that day).

So my question has multiple parts:

1. Do any of y'all have advice on how much drilling is enough for a particular move (e.g. the arm wave)? That is, are there clear stopping points (maybe physical exhaustion, mental exhaustion, or just a certain time quota)?

2. Is there a cap on the number of moves you should drill in any particular session? How do you know you've reached that cap?

3. Does taking taking a couple of hours of rest between sessions help clear the "brain-saturation" feeling?

Let me know if my questions aren't clear. All advice or anecdotes are welcome. Lmk what has worked for you!

[alison]

Welcome to the forum, quinton77.  I've moved your query into Doing Dance, where I think you're more likely to find someone who can help.  I'm not sure how many hip-hop practitioners we have on here, although (as with several esteemed dance critics) you may find there are some unexpected enthusiasts.  Plus I suspect that principles of dance training may be transferrable between dance forms anyway!

[Picturesinthefirelight]

Do you have a teacher who is checking that what you are doing is correct as it would be pointless doing all those repetitions and gaining the wrong muscle memory?

[Anna C]

8 hours ago, Picturesinthefirelight said:

Do you have a teacher who is checking that what you are doing is correct as it would be pointless doing all those repetitions and gaining the wrong muscle memory?

 

Good advice.  Practice doesn’t always make “perfect”, it makes “permanent” in terms of muscle memory - so as Pictures says, make sure you’re practicing correctly!