Learn how to do popping dance style: How to Hit or Pop


Learn How to do Popping Hit

What up YouTube? This is El Tiro from the All-Star dance troop, The Body Poets out of San Diego, California. I’ve had more than a few requests from a lot of you subscribers on how to hit or how to pop. Before we go into this tutorial, I really want to make it clear, is that everything you see and learn here from this video is subjective. Meaning, the people that I’m going to use as examples and the way that I’m going to teach to you does not mean that that’s exactly how you hit or that’s the only way you pop. In essence, there’s no right or wrong here. I’m just going to teach you how I know how to do it. Let’s begin… Learning how to do popping hit or the pop is the fundamental of the dance style called popping. At the end of the day, you can have the craziest tuts, the craziest waves, the craziest tricks but if you are not doing the hit or hitting when you dance, or doing dimestops which are also considered hits, then you are not popping. I recently just took a workshop in Chicago, from one of my favorite dancers of all time. His name is Tempo. Tempo has a lot of knowledge in all styles of dance including some fighting and martial arts. So what he told me start doing when you pop or hit is to actually take a breath like a boxer does when he fights. So especially if this is the first time you’re trying to pop, I want you to actually take that breath, that exhale when you hit. What I’m going to teach you today is how to hit. Let’s start with our arms. What I want you to do is take your left arm out, and lock it. Then bring it in just a little bit, so you have a little room to contract your muscles and flex your whole entire arm. You want to flex everything, from hand, your fingers, your wrist, your forearm, your biceps, your triceps, your shoulder. For now, I only want you to use that one arm and kind of move wherever you like to go and practice that hit on a song with a very slow but loud clap. For example… It may feel silly, but what you want to start doing right now is building muscle memory and the ability to contract and flex and control every single muscle in your body. Once you’ve finished with your left arm, move on over to the right and do the exact same thing. Don’t forget to exhale. Hitting is not discriminatory. And what I mean by that is anyone can do it. You don’t have to flex like Arnold Schwarzenegger to pop or hit. It’s time for your chest. Go in front of your bathroom mirror. Take a deep breath and let your chest expand. Put your hands on your stomach like you got a really bad stomachache and take a deep breath, pushing your chest (stomach) in as your chest expands. Now we’re going to try a faster one. In order to focus on your chest, I want you to put your hands to the side, clench your fist really tight and try expanding and flexing your chest at the same time. Don’t forget to breathe. Let’s give you some details. A real detail that actually has a lot of effect on your hit is your neck. You want to naturally start flexing your neck while you flex the rest of your body. Don’t want to describe it as being loose because I don’t want you to be floppy. I want to describe it as tensing, tensing up. The next body part that I want you to work on is traps and shoulders, the hardest part. Putting it all together, you want to use every single muscle in your body when you pop. In this tutorial, I only worked on a couple parts on your upper body. Other poppers will tell you to use your legs, your quads and break down your body even more into parts than I did. Some poppers will even tell you to flex your butt. Now in your typical standard hitting tutorial, an instructor will give a form to kind of practice in popping. I’m not going to do that because I want you to paint in an open canvas. The beauty of popping is that you can do anything. There’s no rules, it’s your own style. Move as you want freely but remember it’s not popping unless you hit.