Anonymous. Fall means. Move from a higher level to a lower level without control. If you have control you are not falling. As I said. A bad choice of words which to the inexpeienced will convey the wrong message completly.
My weight moves from the over the heel to the ball. Wouldn't you call that moving. When I get there I am ready to step.
Another mistake. Both in dancing and walking we project from a straight leg to a straight leg. Dancing is a exagerated walk. The main difference is the compession on the collection points.

"Anonymous. Fall means. Move from a higher level to a lower level without control. If you have control you are not falling."

Try convincing an olympic diver about that... or soemoen writing control software for a robot which walks on two legs like a human.

The control you have over falling is in your choice of when you begin falling, if you still have an off-center support during the fall (a supporting leg, but one over which you are not balanced), and how you terminate the fall - hopefully by blending it into a drive. But a fall it still is.

"My weight moves from the over the heel to the ball. Wouldn't you call that moving. When I get there I am ready to step."

You aren't moving it far enough. When you knee passes beyond your toe, your weight must as well. Otherwise you have "sat down" rather than lowered to initiate movement. This projection of the body weight beyond the toe is the detail clearly displayed in forward walk picture two - the detail you have been obstinately ignoring for months.

"Another mistake. Both in dancing and walking we project from a straight leg to a straight leg."

Only if you excessively delay the projection, as we have already established that you personal do, to the detriment of your quality of movement. If instead you dance as shown in picture two, you would begi projecting your body beyond balanced even as the standing knee is bending. As it straightens you would simply be projecting it even more. You are of course right that one is off balance when between straight legs and the receiving leg has not yet accepted weight - but you should be off balance long before that.

Anonymous. First strike sitting from the vocabulary it does not exist when giving instructions. It should be possible to lower through the knees and ankles and continue to bend through the knees afer the heel has touched the floor. According to a lecture given by Richard Cleave,my teacher at that time asked how low should we go. The answere was there is no limit, but you must be able to comforably rise at the end of your next step. The further I bend, the knees the further the knees go to the front I dont think I can send my body
forward beyond my feet and at the same time bend my knees without falling forward . My knees would be behind me.

""I dont think I can send my body
forward beyond my feet and at the same time bend my knees without falling forward . My knees would be behind me.
"""
You don't fall forward -you control the transfer of your weight onto the (new) supporting foot. Dancing involves doing this all the time.
Of course you can't stop with your body weight in front of your supporting leg, whether it's bent or not

Phil. Are you another who believes that as we lower we move forward from an elevated position and do not lower first. I would suggest,as is
suggested on another posting go to the learning centre and study. Then come back and tell what you have discovered. It would help if you guys would put which dance you are referring to.

"Phil. Are you another who believes that as we lower we move forward from an elevated position and do not lower first."

Regardless if Phil believes it, it's obviously true.

Now some steps start out with a steeper path of lowring than others. For example, in a basic waltz lowering the path is initially almost vertical, gradually becoming horizontal as the heel touches down, and becoming seriously horizontal the more the standing knee bends to project the body - after all, you have to smoothly transition from downswing into the next upswing, you cant' just kneel all the way into the ground.

On the other hand, foot-apart type lowering actions clearly travel even from the start.

You might say the waltz type lowering adds travel in as the fall progresses. In contrast the foot apart lowering adds fall in as the travel progresses.

"Anonymous. First strike sitting from the vocabulary it does not exist when giving instructions."

It is exactly what happens when you bend your standing knee without keeping your center over that knee. Perhaps you would not recognize it as sitting unless a dismebodied arm inserted a chair at the appropriate time, but that is what is happening.

"It should be possible to lower through the knees and ankles and continue to bend through the knees afer the heel has touched the floor."

Yes, it is possible.

"The further I bend, the knees the further the knees go to the front"

For a step of the left foot, that is fine. For a step into CBMP, that is fine. For a step to the outside with the right foot that is fine. But for an inline step with CBM of the right foot, you will need to keep you body over your advancing knee, otherwise your knee/thigh will force your hips visibly apart from your partner's. You might be able to keep contact in the belly, but only be arching your lower back to make this extra space in the hips which your missequenced lowering action requires.

"I dont think I can send my body forward beyond my feet and at the same time bend my knees without falling forward."

Exactly - you will fall forwards when you do this action properly. Which means that you should not commence this part of the lowering until such time as you intend to continue through the off balance time into a following step - so that instead of simply "falling" you fall in order to start a full and elegant step.

"My knees would be behind me."

Yes, the body projects over the knee, and then as the knee starts to straighten the body ends up ahead of the knee. In cases where the the knee never bent, the body would get ahead of the knee even earler in its projection.

There are pictures of some walking phases on the site www.racewalk.com (/TECHNIQUE/Basic Technique).

Imagine on the pictures a vertical vector line drawn from the balance point of the body down on the floor.

If the line is in front of or behind the supporting point of the foot on the floor you are statically imbalanced and some horizontal dynamic force is needed on the height of the balance point of the body to push you for or backwards to maintain balance of the moments(m x g = m x a x h) and keep the mowing foot off the floor. The dynamic force is horizontally towards the balance point of the body on the side of the moving foot and must be produced by acceleration or deceleration and inertia of the body. Pushing of the supporting foot speeds up and landing on the supporting foot slows down the velocity of the body. Speeding up velocity is accelerating and slowing down velocity is decelerating.

Balance is static only at the instants the balance point of the body is exactly above the supporting point of the foot on the floor or between the two feet both supporting an equal weight which can be almost weightless. Race walkers should always have a foot on the grund but on mid-stride tend to have feet weightless off the grund.

Upward deceleration and downward acceleration do reduce the weight of a body.

Dance steps are different but obey the same laws of physics.

Dancing lady too should take care of her horizontal accelerations to carry her own weight.

Walkers and dancers instinctively control movements by forces produced by accelerations and inertia but it can be useful sometimes to learn, understand, think and concentrate to feel the forces. Google: mass inertia acceleration force

Very good points SQQ, though perhaps to mathematical for everyone to follow.

"If the line is in front of or behind the supporting point of the foot on the floor you are statically imbalanced

Balance is static only at the instants the balance point of the body is exactly above the supporting point of the foot on the floor or between the two feet"

Yes, this is the technical definition of imbalance. However, dancers tend to emotionally use the word only for situations in which they feel undesired movement. I've had complements of how I never put someone off balance throughout a challenging amaglamation - yet the fact is, I did. What I didn't do was impose any destabalizing forces or force their weight to move off their foot in innapopriate ways - we were off balance a lot of the time, but only in the ways necessary to move. There was nothing alarming.

"Race walkers should always have a foot on the grund but on mid-stride tend to have feet weightless off the grund."

And fully flighted dancers may tend at mid-stride to have both feet weightless, but either on the ground or so close to it that you can't tell they aren't.

"Walkers and dancers instinctively control movements by forces produced by accelerations and inertia but it can be useful sometimes to learn, understand, think and concentrate to feel the forces."

Most healthy adults ordinary down the street walk is actually an oustdancing dance action (though there are occasional exceptions). It makes perfect use of imbalance at the right point in the action. The problem is that two things tend to spoil this naturally perfect action.

The first is putting a partner in their path - people try to avoid stepping on the partner, thus breaking the natural continuity of their action in a way that actually increases the chances of stepping on their partner. If they just walked forward naturally, their partner would simply walk backward naturally.

The second problem is with lowering to move forward. Preserving the same natural weight progress would mean that the weight is moving during the lowering - and indeed, advanced dancers do it this way. The problem is that if you try to send your body weight forward while lowering, you can easily end up stumbling forward. Stumbling is not good, so your teacher will make you learn to lower with your weight in place over your foot. But that is only an introductory idea. To really dance, you must learn to send your weight forward, and when it is past your foot embrace the faling movement this creates. But to make it not a stumble, you have to keep your body vertical as you do it. stumbling would have your shoulders getting ahead of your hips - whears an aligned dance action would have them moving at the same speed, or maybe even the hips a tiny bit ahead of the shoulders (and that tiny bit may feel like a lot!)

And of course the backwards partner can't just charge off into movement - they have to establish connection first, so there's merit into compressing forwards towards the partner and against the movement briefly early in the lowering, before moving in the real direction together. But that compression is only a brief phase - if you compress forward throughout the lowering, you have not initiated a backwards step at all, instead simply droped the partnership into an awkward and comparatively immoblized limb tangle.

That racewalk site is indeed quite interesting.

The major difference from dancing seems to be their rule that the arriving leg must remain straight with an unflexed knee until the body is over the foot. In dancing, we would only do that to lead a heel turn, otherwise we would soften into the knee. And of course they have to lift a foot actually off the road to move it, wheras we can slide an unweighted foot across a dance floor.

But many other things are similar. Notice that they also get most of the stride behind the body with less leg swing ahead of the body, even though there is no partner for a forward reaching leg to hit. And see the warning on how trying to overstride and pull yourself onto the front heel is ineffiicient.