Our Back to Basics Pedagogy
Back to Basics is more than a series —it’s a training philosophy built around one simple truth:
Wearing a heel fundamentally changes how your body moves.
The way you find balance, engage your muscles, transfer weight, and generate power all shifts the moment you step into a heel, and your risk of injury increases. That’s why our curriculum is structured around six pillars that specifically train these elements for heels — not just dance in general.
Our method doesn’t treat heels as just another style layered on top of dance technique, it treats dancing in a heel as it’s own skill, with its own set of foundational demands.
Body Awareness
Strengthening the mind-muscle connection, understanding what muscles drive each movement, and learning how to control engagement for your desired result. Also builds proprioception — knowing exactly where your body is in space and how to stabilize your joints in motion.
Lower Body Conditioning
Targets the ankles, calves, hamstrings, glutes, inner thighs, pelvis and core — building the strength needed to support heel work. Also emphasizes joint health and alignment, especially through the feet and knees.
Weight Transfers
Mastering how your weight shifts side to side, forward and back, and learning to evenly distribute it along the shank of your foot. This keeps you stable and protects your knees and ankles, especially under the unique load heels create.
Single Leg Stability
Goes beyond turns and balances — it’s the skill that underpins even your walking. Focuses on stacking joints and activating the right muscles to keep you aligned and supported, so you can move with ease and confidence.
3D Movement /
Oppositional Force
Training the push and pull needed to fill your whole kinesphere with energy. In heels, this means pulling strength through your back and side body to balance your shifted center of gravity, so you don’t overload your front body on your toes.
Momentum & Rotation
Because heels change your shock absorption and stopping power, you have to generate and control momentum differently. This pillar trains how to start, stop and redirect force safely; whether turning, shifting weight in choreography, or traveling through space.
How we approach “levels”
In Back to Basics, “basics” doesn’t mean easy, it means essential.
We define levels not by how flashy your movement looks, but instead by how many skills and pillars you can stack at once without losing the foundation underneath.
No matter your experience, it’s all about building upward from a stable base, so your movement stays powerful, supported, and sustainable.
Beginner Basics:
Break things down into slow, intentional exercises that isolate each of the six pillars one at a time.
Intermediate Basics:
Start to combine multiple pillars together, challenging your body to maintain alignment and control as the demands increase.
Advanced Basics:
Integrate all six pillars at once, while adding extra layers like performance quality, musicality, and artistry skills — all still grounded in the same core technique.
Ready to train differently?
This is the work that transforms your heels from a style into a true skill.
Whether you’re stepping into your first pair or redefining your artistry at an advanced level, Back to Basics gives you the tools to move powerfully, safely, and sustainably — for as long as you choose to dance.
Ready to see where this foundation can take you?