Ep 41: When Over Correcting Leads To Under Training

In this episode, we unpack a surprising truth many teachers and coaches overlook: sometimes, giving more corrections actually leads to less progress.

Recorded as we prepare for an upcoming live event in Orlando, this conversation dives into why dancers can feel stuck despite constant feedback and effort. The answer is not about working harder. It is about working smarter.

If your students feel like they are trying everything but not improving at the level you expect, this episode will help you shift from overwhelming corrections to intentional, effective training that actually sticks. 

What You’ll Learn

• Why over-correcting can overwhelm dancers and slow progress
• The difference between giving corrections vs building real understanding
• How dancers can appear engaged but still lack access to the correction
• Why repeated feedback sometimes feels like a “treadmill of progress”
• The key shift from telling to training
• How to turn corrections into clear physical connections
• Why focusing on fundamentals (input) improves all technique (output)

Practical Tips You Can Apply

1. Focus on One Correction
 Choose one key concept and reinforce it across all classes.
 Depth beats volume.

2. Prep Before Rep
 Give dancers something to actively work on while waiting their turn.
 Use that time to reinforce technique intentionally.

3. Replace Corrections with Questions
 Instead of:

• “Tighten your core”
   Try: “What is supporting you right now?”

This builds awareness and deeper learning.

---

Your dancers are not stuck because they are not trying hard enough.
And you are not falling short as a teacher.

Sometimes, the missing piece is not effort.
It is connection.

When corrections become clear, trainable, and felt in the body,
progress stops feeling like a struggle and starts feeling inevitable.

—
Connect with us! 🎧

Relative Motion: https://www.instagram.com/relativemotiondance/
Youtube Relative Motion: https://www.youtube.com/@relative_motion

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Welcome to It's All Relative, the podcast where dance technique meets purpose, progress becomes visible, and passion fuels the path forward. I'm Kara Dixon, co-founder of Relative Motion, and our team is made up of professional dancers, teachers, and choreographers here to make high-level training feel doable, measurable, and exciting again. Whether you're a teacher searching for fresh cues, a dancer craving more clarity, or a studio owner chasing a bigger vision, this space is for you. Each week, we'll break down complex technique, dive into real studio strategy, and share tools that spark transformation from the inside out. Because in this community, we train with intention, we lead with love, and we know that better dancers start with better teachers. So let's grow, let's move, and let's rise together. Because at the end of the day, it's all relative. Hey friends, welcome to a new episode of It's All Relative. I am so excited to be here with you today. And today's really awesome because we are about three months out from our live event in Orlando, Florida. It's gonna be July 17th through 19th. So we're about three months prior to that. We are ramping up our prep, getting our teachers in line with what they're gonna be teaching throughout the course of the event, what the event's gonna look like, how it's gonna feel for people joining us. And man, every single day we just get more and more excited. We just know the high energy. We know the teachers so far who are attending and the caliber of technique and knowledge that they bring. Our community is so vast, but also they're just bringing such a magnetic energy from the teachers we know are gonna be there, different backgrounds, but also just energetically, what incredible, amazing people are coming, and how the ones that don't know each other yet are gonna be so impactful to each other and how fast they're just gonna love each other. So we just get so excited for this event. And it's just a really fun time of prep. So we're three months out, we're really excited. Today, our topic is going to be really fun. We are talking today about over-correcting versus under training. And so sometimes over-correcting and under-training are going hand in hand. And so we feel in the studio that if we're giving these corrections and we're on top of it, that we're not just giving class, we're teaching class. We're right in it with our dancers and we're giving them these like really high-level corrections and we're telling them different things from different angles and all the things that they should be just flying to that higher technical level, right? That's how it feels as a teacher, that the more we give, the more our dancers will receive and the more that they will see the results from it. But sometimes, and this is what we want to talk about today, sometimes overcorrecting and under-training unfortunately go hand in hand. We talk about this a lot in our teacher certification. And we're gonna be talking about this a ton in our live event because a lot of our training is built around this concept of the fact that we are in the studio all the time and we're giving correction after correction after correction. And a lot of times our dancers are getting overwhelmed by that. And sometimes they're trying to take all the corrections in at once and they're trying to work at the super high level intellectually and physically, but the overcorrections are playing into the fact that they're under training, even though they're at the studio all the time, even though they're trying 110% constantly, and why are they not getting to a higher level at the rate that we expect would line up with the corrections that we're giving, right? We're giving them all these things from high-level cues to muscles to this and that. And so, why are they almost on this treadmill of progress, right? And we get to the end of the season and we did see growth, but we get to the end of the season, and we're like, for the amount of time they were in the studio and what we consistently gave them energetically and knowledge-wise, why are they not where we can picture them getting, knowing their potential, knowing what the dancers are capable of? How are they falling short? And so this episode reframes the idea that fixing technique isn't about saying more, but it's about giving our dancers better information to work with. And what does that mean? Why would saying more not give them more information and better information? Sometimes saying more is almost like over informing the dancer, right? And so, one example of this, and we talk about this a lot in our trainings, but we definitely go way deeper than I'm gonna be able to in our quick podcast. But one example of this is say a dancer doing Sinead turns across the floor. And it's so easy as a teacher to think of 35 corrections to give a dancer. Now they're going across the floor, they might do 30 sinee turns across the floor, right? But we could also give them 30 corrections. I mean, we could give them a significant amount of corrections in a short period of time. You know, hug the rib cage towards the midline of the body, rotate the shoulders back and down, make sure you're spotting effectively, make sure you're reaching the crown of the head towards the ceiling, make sure your hips are square, take smaller steps, lengthen the back of the knees, press into a higher releve, make sure you're accessing your turnout, your pelvic alignment, all the things, right? We can throw these concepts out at the dancers. Now, each one of these concepts, if we think about it, really think about it as teachers, each one of these concepts takes a significant portion of time to fix. Like even as adults, as educators, if somebody gave me one of those corrections, maybe I could actually apply it pretty quickly. But I have decades of experience dancing. I would just have to remind myself, oh yeah, okay, shoulders back and down. I've done this a billion times before. So I can fix that in a moment. I might have just forgotten to do it. But dancers, if they have not actually found that placement before, if they've never really understood shoulders back and down, that correction itself needs an entire class to break down for that dancer. They might not actually understand where that alignment is at all yet. And so while we as teachers are thinking at a higher level and processing at a higher level, and we can do it quicker, the dancers, they might not actually have access to that. They might not actually be able to just rotate their shoulders back and down and understand it in a quick moment and go on to the next correction. So sometimes part of this is that we're speaking at this level as teachers that yeah, we've trained and trained and trained and trained. So all we need is a reminder of the correction. We don't need the actual information of the correction. We don't need the actual training of the correction. We don't need the actual breakdown. And so sometimes we get into our teacher head, and even if they're high-level teens, we're just giving them information at the level that we could receive the information at. We're not giving them the information at the level that they are actually training the information at. We're not giving them that training. We're at that point when we are giving it to them quickly, we're just giving them a reminder of training they already need to have. And so this is where the overcorrection actually becomes an under-training because if we say pelvic alignment, that dancer actually doesn't understand. They can't actually refer to and quickly fix pelvic alignment because they haven't understood that training before. Then we're throwing a correction out at them, but we're not throwing the training out at them. We haven't gotten them to that training portion. If I was doing Chinees across the floor and somebody said, Oh, you're doing an anterior tilt of your pelvis, neutralize your pelvic alignment, I could do that in half a second, right? But I also have that training. So I'm just referring back to a correction and maybe I hadn't activated it, or maybe I just forgot because I was thinking about something else, or whatever it happens to be, that quick reminder would get me there. But if our dancer has not done that training yet, or they've done the training and haven't really understood the training, or it's new to them, and we've seen them get it a couple of times, but it's not muscle memory for them yet. Throwing out the correction is not going to allow them access to the training that we need them to have in order to apply the correction. And so this is where we are saying corrections that are great and amazing and high level, but we're under training in the fact that the dancers don't actually have access quite in that moment to the correction. So this makes us feel like we're on a treadmill as teachers. I've said that a million times, right? I've told them straighten their knees a million times. I've told them higher releve a million times. But let me tell you, if you get a dancer to the bar and they're not pressing to their full releve naturally, and you have to do strength training exercise and mobility exercise after exercise after exercise for them to get into that alignment in the first place. They don't have the training yet to just take in that correction going across the floor. So we want to give our dancers better information to work with. We want their body to have more information. When dancers understand the movement, where it initiates from, what muscles need to engage, how does that feel? How can I spark that quickly? Where is my energy headed? I'm not just gonna grip my hip flexors. If I want to use my hip flexors and I grip them, my mobility is off in my hips, right? So I need to like be able to engage my hip flexors and extend them energetically in a direction that is required for that technique. And it's gonna be different for different techniques. So, this, if we can start to get our dancers to understand this and we can start to get them into a flow of this, corrections start sticking faster and we get less burnout for ourselves as teachers, but also for the dancers. And so that's what we want to talk about today. That's where we want to align our information today and get like that ball rolling. We want to get that momentum going. So why are corrections not sticking? One is we're repeating the same corrections, but the dancer doesn't physically have access to that change yet, right? They don't like we just went into the dancer, is hearing the correction and we're repeating the correction, but they don't physically have access to changing it yet. And this isn't about effort from the dancer, and this isn't about effort from us as teachers. And so sometimes this treadmill, like this thing that we're on where we're not progressing as fast as we want, and our dancers aren't getting there like we know they have the potential to. This feels frustrating, right? But it's not about our effort and it's not about their effort. It's about missing those connections. It's about us talking at a level that we can understand. And we sometimes think that our dancers are right there with us, right? Because they are giving 14% and they're nodding and they sort of get it. And so we're like, oh my goodness, we're all on the same page. But what we're saying isn't what they're hearing or what that we're saying isn't what they can yet apply. And what that where we see that in relative motion is whenever we put our apparel on dancers, it's so interesting because we give them concepts that they've heard. And I know that because the teachers that are watching these classes are like, I say that all the time. But now the dancers have the apparel on. And so I'm like, okay, where do you feel that? And if it's something like external rotation and we want them to feel it in the green panel of their inner thigh, and they point to the purple panel of their quads, I'm like, ding, ding, ding. Now we have our answer. If you feel that exercise in your quads, the quads are overpowering your external rotation. So now, yes, it's hip flexion, but your quads are overdoing the inner thigh. And so now you can't do that hip flexion or bottom onto the front with external rotation because yes, you're using hip flexion, but you also need to use rotation, right? And so as soon as we can get those dancers to target the green panel, as soon as we can get them to feel it there and utilize that, it connects them to the muscular engagement and the initiation and the activation that they need in order to actually do that concept. Now, this washes out months, sometimes years, but months of work and effort that we would put in as teachers or that their teachers have put in, because the teachers look at us and they say, We've said this a million times, but now in one class they get it. And we had to make this progress work, process work because we do go in sometimes to studios quite often and just teach one single masterclass. And so, in an hour and a half, we need those dancers to understand the concepts that the teachers have told us that they're working on and don't yet get. So we custom curate these classes around what studio owners are telling us we're struggling to get our dancers to understand this concept. So now we're taking a concept we know they're working on, we know they're struggling to understand, and we're like, they have to understand this within an hour and a half with us. How do we do it? How do we make sure it's a no-brainer that they're gonna get it? And so the studio owners, the teachers are saying, Yeah, we say this stuff all the time, we say this all the time. But as soon as they have the panels and they actually see and feel what their teachers have been cueing, they get it. And it's such a relief for everybody involved because this is giving them that amazing thing where it's not just a correction, we're actually taking these missing connections and we're bringing them to light and we're making almost bridging what's being said to what the dancer actually understands. And so now a correction becomes a connection. And it's amazing. So that's number one. We want to like figure out why corrections aren't sticking, and then we need to make the correction a connection. How do we do that? Right? How do we do that quickly? Now we need to go into the difference between telling versus training. If we say lift your chest, that's different than training ribcage placement, right? Saying lift your chest can be a totally different number of things. Saying this, okay, let's figure out during this class where your ribcage is, what it wants to do, what it should try to do, what it needs to feel, where it needs to be, what the alignment is. You're gonna get two totally different dancers, right? Two totally different outcomes within the same class. We see this all the time when teachers say shoulders down. Dancers have in these internally rotated shoulders a lot of times. When they bring the arms up, the shoulders lift up. They push down on the shoulders as hard as they can, the shoulders don't budge. But the second they externally rotate, then the arms can go wherever and the shoulders stay rotated back and down. It's the same, similar right concept is externally rotating the legs. And when the leg goes up, the hips stay square. When the leg internally rotates or goes parallel, the hip bones want to adjust, they want to lift up. And similarly, though obviously these are different joints and they function differently, it has a similar idea with the shoulders where if the arms are internally rotated and you lift, the shoulders lift. And you feel that in the dancers are trying to push their shoulders down. They're trying to like rough through it, right? But it just doesn't happen. And so, what is the difference between telling and training? Sometimes we give these corrections, and for the dancers, it just lies flat, and that's landing as if we're just telling them a correction. What we need to do is we need to stop and we need to say, I'm saying this correction over and over and over again. It feels like I'm telling you this correction versus training this in you. Now, this is gonna have the outcomes are gonna be wildly different. One will be temporary. Maybe they can fix it for that class, but say they were going across the floor and you need it fixed fast. They have to re-figure out, okay, what was it that I did last time? It didn't really feel right. How did I get it to happen? So one is temporary and one rewires your dancer's movement. One completely trains your dancers to feel something differently, to understand it differently. And the second they understand it, they can call on it again. And so now the next time you need them to lift their chest while the rib cage is engaged or get bring their shoulders down, it's a whole new understanding, it's a whole new feeling, it's a whole new expectation the dancers have of what their body is going to be doing in that moment. And the third thing is input versus output. This is the real technique shortcut. When you change the input, alignment, muscular engagement, like initiation, the output, like your turns, your jumps, your leaps, your extensions, they improve instantly and consistently. So a lot of times we'll hear, oh, yeah, we have a jumps and turns class, and it's the standard warm-up. And then the dancers do a bunch of really cool jumps and turns across the floor for the iterum of the class. Here's a jump-turn combo. We're gonna do this, we're gonna try to get you this technique, whatever. And so the focus is technique in the sense of this is our pirouette, these are our fouates, these are our leaps, this is our soda sha, you know, all the themes. What technique are you working on? We're working on this, we're working on this, we're working on this, but we're not thinking of technique as like a desired technical skill. Like I need my dancers to understand straightening their knees, not just as a supporting leg in an all of a concern. I need them to understand straightening their knees when they're pushing off in that back leg of the soda shot. I need them to understand straightening the knees and their straddle jobs. I need them to understand straightening the knees in their tilt extension when they want to soften that working leg and not really bring that energy all the way through the back of the knee and out of that foot. And so if we're thinking about something like straightening the knees, that's gonna go from everything from coming up from a plie through a tondu, through botmont, through their turns, through their leaps, or everything. But the technique will be okay, we need to really focus on getting our knees straight. How can we get our dancers to understand that concept? Because that concept is gonna now be a cross-functional skill that they're gonna bring into all of their technique. It's gonna fix their turns whenever they have this issue. It's gonna fix their jumps whenever they have this issue. So instead of thinking like, okay, our output is going to be turns, turn, we need to think about the technique instead of being these huge technical elements, the technique needs to be the fundamentals that go into all these technical elements. The fundamentals are gonna change everything else that the dancer is able to do. And when they understand those fundamentals on that very consistent level one, right feeling, then they can do these crazy advanced things without having to get those basic corrections. Stretch your feet, use your plie, make sure you spot. When they have those across the board, they instantly apply them in to those higher levels of technique. So when we change the input of like alignment, muscle engagement, all those things, your output, which is those high-level technical things that you want your dancers to do, the turns, the jumps, the leaps, the extension, they're gonna improve. They're gonna improve fast, and they're gonna consistently stay that way. So we won't have to train and then train again. And why isn't this correction sticking and why are we redoing this? So before we jump off, I want to give a couple of just quick tips. One, change one thing this week. Instead of correcting a full movement, pick one correction, pick one desired technical skill. Is it straining the backs of the knees? Is it engaging the rib cage? Is it activating the lower abdominals? What do you want that one theme to be this week? And try to work on it in every single one of your classes so your dancers hear one correction a billion times versus hearing a billion corrections each just one time. Number two, I want you to figure out a prep before rep that you're gonna do. So if you're about to do something across the floor, give the dancers something to prep on the side while they're waiting. So if you're working feet and they're about to do a combo across the floor, have them standing on the side in line waiting, just articulating through the feet, rolling through the forced arch onto the ball of the foot, pressing off to a really stretched foot, going back to the ball of the foot and lowering the heel. Something simple like that. Maybe it's something different, which just build it around what you're about to do across the floor. Prep before wrap. Have them stand there and have them work on it. So we're not wasting that time and they're actually integrating the correction you've been doing throughout the course of the class while they are waiting. And number three, replace three common corrections with questions. So if you said something like pull up, instead say, where do you feel that initiating? If you're saying something like, tighten your core, where what is supporting you right now? Fix your arms. What's your rib cage doing in this moment? Think of three common corrections and how can you replace those with questions? The more we can get our dancers thinking and going deeper for themselves, like, okay, instead of it being a yes or a no, let's get a why. Where do I feel this? Why do I feel it there? How do I engage it like this? Get them going deeper for themselves. So they're also more engaged in class and everything that they do becomes something just a little bit deeper. They're going deeper, they're thinking about things differently. And then while you're doing all of this, the more you can make it measurable and visual for your dancers, the better it's going to be. So just keep all Of that in mind, we're gonna shift our dancers from guessing what these corrections are to understanding. We are gonna shift from over-correcting and under-training to giving them intentional training in the same amount of time that makes a correction become a connection. I am so excited for you guys. I would love to dive deeper with you. Please check out our live event. It's gonna happen in Orlando. It's super easy to get to pretty much from anywhere you're coming from, even internationally. But it's the relative motion experience.com slash RM Live2026 to find all the information and to get in the room. We are gonna have such an incredible time, and I cannot wait for the opportunity to be there with you. See you next week. That's a wrap on today's episode of It's All Relative. Thank you for spending your time with us. We believe what you bring to the dance world matters, and we're honored to support the way you teach, lead, and inspire. If this episode moved you, made you think, or gave you something new to try, hit that subscribe button so you don't miss what's next. You can connect with us anytime at Relative Motion Dance on Instagram or visit relativemotiondance.com for more tools and training. Until next time, keep growing, keep leading, and keep dancing with purpose. Because remember, it's all relative.