Engage your abdominal muscles. Initiating movement from the center will help you relax your shoulders, maintain your balance and make sudden weight changes. Complementary methods to help you engage your abdominals such as yoga and Pilates can help you maintain the feeling of a strong abdominal center. These methods include moves for the floor as well as standing exercises. Performing the standing exercises of these methods will help you to directly correlate the feeling of an engaged abdominal center with the upright dance position.
Keep in sync with your partner. In all ballroom dance forms, the man leads and the woman follows. As ballroom dance is an improvisational dance form, you must learn to communicate which moves are coming next without speaking. The frame of the upper body won't change as much as that of the lower body, and the shoulders must remain relaxed and still. You must keep in contact with the upper body of your partner so when he directs you forward, back, to the right or left or to do turns, you will feel the initiation from his upper body. You will learn several methods to develop this type of upper body awareness in a group class for beginners.
Pay attention to the feet. Choosing the appropriate footwear for your style of ballroom dance will help you stay in alignment. Women's ballroom dance footwear will require you to put more weight on the balls of your feet, which will facilitate the correct alignment and frame of the legs and hips. The appropriate shoes will help the alignment and overall technique when dancing. Men should also dance in shoes specific to the ballroom style, as they will allow for flexibility of the feet and not stick to the floor as you are trying to turn.