The “Big 3” You Must Do To Get Good At Salsa or Bachata

What if you could compress years of learning into months? 🔥

Taking a strategic approach to your salsa and bachata educational journey will do exactly that 🎯

The big 3️⃣ activities you must do to get good at salsa or bachata are the following:

💃 Take classes (1. the RIGHT classes, 2. with the right frequency)

🧠 Practice outside of class (1. the RIGHT material, 2. with the RIGHT strategies)

🕺 Social dance (1. with purpose-driven intention, 2. focusing on the RIGHT skills)

If you do just the bold text, EVENTUALLY you’ll become a great dancer ✨

If you embrace the text in parentheses, you’ll become a great salsero or bachatero faster than all the students around you, and they’ll look up to you in amazement ✨

🧩 So let’s plan our strategy!

Taking salsa or bachata classes

The RIGHT classes

Structure

💡 If you are starting from zero, you need STRUCTURE.

If you “grew up dancing” with your family, friends, relatives, but it’s your first time taking class, you need STRUCTURE.

Look for a dance program in your area with the LONGEST structured timeline possible.

For example:

🚫 Drop-in classes (timeline = 1 class. No progressive structure. Not good for beginners.)

⚠️ 5-week programs (some structure, but nobody becomes decent at dancing in 5 weeks)

✅ 10-week programs (getting better)

🎯 6-month programs, or longer (jackpot. Go there)

🔍 So why don’t we run 6-month programs at Movers and Shakers?!

Our curriculum actually extends over a year — it’s just cut into smaller 10-week pieces to help students break for travel etc. and come back right where they left off.

Drop-in Salsa / Bachata Classes

Trying to learn salsa or bachata from the ground up with drop-in classes (classes that any students may join, or not, at any time), is simply a ❌ terrible approach.

Even if the drop-in classes are taught by the world’s greatest dancer, who is also the world’s best instructor, that instructor’s ability to help you is severely limited by the lack of structure in drop-in classes 📉

❌ Piecing together the details from unstructured drop-in classes means extending your learning time dramatically and missing hundreds of key foundational details that you need to become a great dancer.

Drop-In Classes At Salsa / Bachata Clubs

I used to teach the drop-in class at a salsa / bachata night club here in 📌 Los Angeles.

I did taught there for maybe a year or two.

Although I loved the management, my teaching partner, and the students, and was grateful for the opportunity, I always felt frustrated that I wasn’t able to serve the students better in that environment.

🔀 The biggest challenge was the mixed level of students in the classes.

🧑‍🎓 The beginner class students ranged from:

• First-time salsa or bachata dancers

• Students who had taken 10 classes elsewhere

• Students who joined my class weekly at the club

• Students who had taken 30 classes at various places

⚠️ Although they were all labeled as “beginners,” their needs were very different.

💡 Intermediate classes made more sense in that club context, but even those had a wide range of experience levels.

Drop-in classes at salsa / bachata clubs are really best suited for:

🎉 Fun, party night out with friends who just want to dip their toes and experience salsa or bachata once or twice (if it’s a super beginner class)

🌟 Experienced dancers who have great fundamentals (this is ❗ not most dancers)

The beauty of first locking in great FUNdamentals, is that you can then take drop-in salsa or bachata classes anywhere in the world 🌍 and truly benefit from them!

Fundamentals first. Everything else after.

Details

🔍 Look for details, details, details in the program you join.

Being an amazing dancer and an amazing instructor are ✨ different skills.

🌟 Try a class.

Make sure the instruction quality is excellent.

Quality Professionals

✅ Look for an instructor who has the dancing skills themselves! 💃🕺

Most instructors do, but some dance schools are built on training hobbyist dancers without much experience — just enough to stay a few steps ahead of the students (because it keeps costs down for the company) 💸

❌ This is typically not the best setup for student success.

Specializing in salsa / bachata SOCIAL dancing style

💃 Salsa / bachata for social dancing is DIFFERENT from ballroom salsa or bachata.

❌ If a ballroom dance instructor is teaching salsa / bachata alongside 5+ other ballroom dances, the style of salsa / bachata is NOT what will serve you best on the social dancing floor.

👑 Ballroom dancing (including Latin ballroom) is built on maximalist movement.

❌ Social dancing is not.

It’s built more on fluid movement 🌊

🤝 Ballroom is built on strong, consistent pressure to connect with the partner.

The leader 🕺 is expected to push the follower 💃 through entire movements.

🧘‍♀️ Social dancing is more relaxed — the leader initiates, and the follower finishes the movement.

This is a 🔑 BIG difference in how the connection feels, how your dance ultimately looks, and what’s possible (or not possible) to execute while freestyle dancing in a club.

🌟 Ballroom dancers are trained to create beautiful, polished movements that social dancers are not.

✨ But social dance specialists also move in incredible, fluid ways that ballroom dancers often do not.

🎯 So, in short: if social dancing at clubs or socials is your goal, learning from salsa / bachata social dancing specialists will serve you best 💯.

The RIGHT Frequency

📉 Too little class = forgetting material and wasting time catching up

📉 Too much class = never learning the material in the first place (also wasting time)

🎯 Take class at a pace that’s sustainable long-term AND helps build muscle memory.

🗓️ Class once per week = sustainable for most people.

Any less frequent than once per week becomes inefficient because students tend to forget what they learned before.

More than once per week = great if it fits your schedule AND you're practicing outside class ✨

🛑 Plowing forward without mastering previous material = less effective

One of my favorite quotes:

If you’re not doing it, you haven’t learned it.

🛑 More is not better. 

Learning what you’ve already learned — better.

Which brings us to our next topic….

Practice Your Salsa / Bachata Skills Outside of Class

Practicing is different from social dancing.

🏡 Practice = at home, solo or with a partner, focused on what you recently learned in class.

Practice With the Right Frequency

📅 One practice after every class should be your minimum standard .

🗓️ Typically, that means one practice per week.

👥 Taking two classes in a week? It's fine to combine the material into one longer practice session.

🛑 What you should avoid: going back to class next week without practicing what you learned the week before.

That slippery slope leads to inefficient, much slower learning ⏳

Practice The Right Material

🎯 Focus on what you learned in class, not the new, exciting move from YouTube or the video that your friend sent you or wants to practice 🙅‍♂️🙅‍♀️

🔒 Once your fundamentals are rock solid, branching out to material online — and actually doing it well — becomes more realistic.

Until then, just stick to fundamentals first. Everything else after.

Practice With The Right Strategies

For gentlemen 🕺  (leaders), learning new patterns typically follows this flow:

🔁 Repeat until it's memorized and leadable

🧐 Clean, clean, clean. Review your recap video from class (you recorded one, right?. Do your best to embrace every detail that was taught.

🎯Isolate the details and repeat them again and again.

For ladies 💃 (followers):

👯‍♀️ Practice with a leader in your class who’s working on the same material

🎯 Focus on being the best follow you can for those patterns

🛠️ Isolate trouble spots and repeat them until smooth

Practice Solo As Well

🕺 Leads: Practice with a “ghost partner” — seriously, this works!

You can learn salsa or bachata patterns surprisingly fast this way.

💃 Follows: Practicing solo is 🔑 crucial for your progress.

Focus on spinning for salsa and body isolations for bachata — these are some of the most valuable skills to work on 💎

Practice at The Right Speed

🐢 Practice SLOWLY.

VERY slowly. 

Slower than you want to practice.

🧮 Start with counts

Then dance with SLOW music.

Save the medium speed music for… probably another practice session.

😅 When students say, “It’s easier faster!” — they usually mean:

“When I can move on quickly from the things I’m not doing well because the music is pushing me forward, I feel better about my dancing.”

Dancing slower indeed is harder in some ways. It requires control and attention to detail.

💡 Start slow.

Save the fast dancing for the clubs.

Social dancing

Time to shine! ✨

🕺💃 Social dancing is a great way to get exposure to a whole variety of movements, feelings, styles, patterns, dancing levels, music speeds, etc.

And it’s fun! 🥳

If you can sustain social dancing at least once per week, it will accelerate your learning in your dance journey 🚀

Social Dance With Purpose-Driven Intention

When I was deeply focused on my dance education, I would typically social dance with PURPOSE 🎯

🕺 I would commit to doing the same one or two new patterns EVERY dance that night

💡 The beauty of this strategy is that since I would typically do a single dance with a person in a night, the follows had no idea that I was repeating the same moves all night!

📱 Between dances I would routinely retreat to a corner, check the class recap videos on my phone, then go do those moves again, with more detail and improvement.

How lucky are we to have phones with cameras?! Let’s use them.

💃 For ladies (followers), you won’t be able to practice the exact movements from class unless you’re dancing with classmates.

I recommend dancing with both classmates and strangers.

What ladies CAN work on though — no matter who they’re dancing with — are fundamental skills for following.

Some examples:

For Salsa:

👁️ Spotting when spinning

🚶 Traveling less on traveling turns

🎯 Controlling momentum at the end of traveling turns to not fall

For Bachata:

💪 Holding yourself up (as opposed to hanging on the lead)

💫 Body isolations

🔁 Head rolls with complete movement, starting with the ear to the shoulder

For Salsa and Bachata:

👐 Relaxed arms during the basic

😌 Relaxing in general

🤝 Resistance when required

🎯 Following exactly what’s being asked for — nothing more, nothing less

👣 Smaller steps

🗒️ Details for basic step

 These are just a few examples. There are hundreds of things to work on.

Choose ONE or TWO skills and focus on cleaning those skills during every dance of the night.

The “Big 3” In the Right Order

1️⃣ Class

2️⃣ Practice

3️⃣ Social Dance

✅ If you’re able to set up your schedule in this order every week, you’ve done it perfectly 💯

If not, don’t sweat it! 

Just work with whatever schedule is feasible.

Conclusion

✅ Follow the strategies above to become an amazing salsa or bachata dancer in the quickest, most efficient way possible.

🚫 I see many dancers dancing for years not realizing that they could be making progress so much more quickly using the strategies above.

🎓 You’ve learned the strategies — now it’s up to you to use them 🔥

Salsa / Bachata Classes In Los Angeles

Step 1️⃣ is class.

If you’re in 📌 Los Angeles and ready to learn, join us at Movers and Shakers.

We’ve got you covered for the big 3:  

1️⃣ class (properly structured)

2️⃣ practice (community of students you’ll grow and practice with)

3️⃣ social dancing (we take you out and you’ll go out you’re your classmates)

👉 Check out the current salsa class schedule and bachata class schedule.

Excited to meet you!