🦶 Our Feet

Say hello to the most underappreciated stars of ballroom dancing: your feet. They are literally the foundation of your dancing and comprise your COS.

They don’t just carry you — they sense, balance, and initiate. Your feet are your interface with the floor, your shock absorbers, your rudders, and your launchpads. And if we keep our Center of Gravity inside our foot we don't fall over!

You've heard the term Center of Support, well your foot and more specifically your shoe is your COS.

🦴 The Structure Beneath You

Each foot contains:

• 26 bones
• 33 joints
• Over 100 muscles, tendons, and ligaments

...all working together to support your body’s weight and respond to movement.

And yet in ballroom, we often don't give them the consideration they deserve.

👣 Dancing Starts with Contact

In dance, how your foot touches the floor matters:

• Heel leads allow for longer stride lengths and greater power
• Ball-of-foot pressure helps you push off or control
• Toes and toe tips refine poise and allow redirection
• Skin contact with the floor gives you micro-feedback to adjust balance

🎯 Direction, Drive, and Discipline

Your feet define your bodies:

• direction,
• Speed, power and flight
• Foot Rise
• Turns and Spins They also help manage your poise zone — the part of the foot you’re over when you’re balanced. (More on that later…)

No surprise that there is a lot going on

Maintaining balance is something that you have been doing intuitively ever since you started walking. It's built into your brain and you don't forget how to do it :)

But from a Dancers perspective the foot has different 'zones' that help us with balance.

This is a simple view of 'poise zones' which are of the utmost important for all of your dancing:

You will see Front, Middle and Back Poise mentioned over and over again in these documents.

These three Poise Zones are further spit into:

Each foot has 6 zones:

• Front Inner
• Front Outer
• Middle Inner
• Middle Outer
• Back Inner
• Back Outer

The Green, Pink and Blue line running through the foot indicates the 'power line' where we have the most strength and stability. As you can see it's split into three zones

👣 What those Zones Actually Mean for Dancers

Knowing the zones is useful — but what really matters is what they do.

Each zone gives you different qualities of support, power, and control. Here's a quick guide:

👉 So lets step into the wonderful world of poise!