I am sure that all West Coast Swing dancers do whips. The question is, do they really “whip”, or are they just going through the motion.  Last night at our weekly class, we spent the entire class doing nothing but two whips and honestly almost everyone was struggling.it wasn’t that they weren’t going through the motion and footwork correctly, it was that they were missing a key ingredient that actually creates the whip itself.

To create an actual whipping motion, both leader and follower need to have compression in the connection of the followers right arm and the leaders left. I am not sure exactly how to explain a “feeling”, but done correctly there is actually a whipping motion. Once you have experienced a whip done properly you will never go back to just walking through a whip again!