🧭 A Fully Defined Timing Model for Leader Response in Swing Dances

While the follower’s movement is governed by detection and reaction, the leader’s responsibility is initiation followed by synchronization.

🪞 Core Principle

The Leader must wait to see what the Follower has done before completing their own weight transfer.

Why? Because the Follower's foot placement creates the new Center of Support (COS) - and the Leader cannot predict with certainty where that COS will be until it exists.

🧠 Why This is a Law — Not Just a Rule

This is not just a stylistic choice or teaching preference. It’s a mechanical and neurological truth:

  • Biomechanically, until the Follower’s foot has made contact and formed a stable COS, there is no known destination for the Leader's matching foot.
  • Neurologically, the Leader has zero feedback about the final position of the Follower’s foot until they feel it — either through frame, pressure, or timing. And that only happens when the Follower has put weight on the foot.

Therefore, if the Leader completes their own weight transfer before the Follower’s COS exists, it is an act of pure guesswork — violating the fundamental biomechanical contract between partners.

This is not an opinion. It’s physics.

đź•“ Timing Summary

Phase Duration (ms) Description
Lowering Initiation -50 to 0 Leader lowers to signal intent.
Impulse & Cue 0 to ~150 Follower begins interpreting signal and moving foot.
Follower Commits ~150 to 300 Follower locks in decision and moves foot toward new COS.
Leader Observes ~300 to 350 Leader reads where the Follower's foot is going.
Leader Synchronizes ~350 to 667 Leader shifts weight only after the Follower’s foot has landed.

🔄 Motion Loop: Leader Strategy

  1. Instigate movement with lowering or change in torso position.
  2. Allow the Follower to choose a trajectory within the biomechanical range.
  3. Observe and synchronize once the foot is down.
  4. Transfer weight to new COS only after confirmation of contact.

This ensures:

  • No stepping onto a non-existent foot
  • No overtravel or anticipation
  • Maximum information flow through Connection

🔬 Leader’s Simplified Math

Let:

  • T_f = Time when Follower commits (~300ms)
  • T_l = Time when Leader finalizes weight transfer

Then:

T_l > T_f

Always. Otherwise: 🚨 collision risk or false leading.

🧠 Teaching Insight

"You don’t move together.
The Leader instigate first,
the Follower moves next,
the Leader synchronizes with Followers new position, the Leader finishes last."

đź’¬ Quote of the Day

"The Leader is not in charge. The Leader is in sync."