Relation between Driving and Dancing

While teaching salsa, I've come to use quite a few driving techniques and terminology for analogies.

They are quite fitting too. (some of these .... were taught to me by Justin)

1) Power steering vs Autopilot
For the followers, we want POWER STEERING -> Feel where the lead(driver) wants u to go, and assist by moving in that direction!! The result? You will feel VERY light to him!
Do NOT AUTOPILOT, that is.... move on you own against the wishes of the lead. This will result in 2 people dancing on their own rather than together.

2) Braking technique - smooth. Squeeze hard at start, release the force slow and reduce it gradually towards a stop

Mathematically, this is the relationship: As Speed-->zero, BrakingForce --> zero
Or... Dy2/Dx2 = zero, rate of change of acceleration = zero,

Now if that don't make sense to you (e.g. if you hate maths), the idea is to CUSHION the force such that your follow do not feel the brunt of the impact when you need to change directions, stop, quickly, etc. etc.

This is very important when executing bastard moves (moves with quick and fast direction changes).

One other example to illustrate this is... imagine if you hare holding a swinging pendulum. You want the Pendulum to stop PRECISELY at a particular point. How do you do it? If you use too much force, it will swing back, if you use too little, it will continue moving! Thus you need to ADJUST the amount of force such that it is JUST enough at the RIGHT time to stop the movement.