Flares in breakdancing are similar to the flares that you do on the saw horse in gymnastics.
The dancer puts one hand on the floor and rotates their legs around them, switching to
their other hand when their leg swings around them.
As with the Windmill, during a Flare a Breakdancer's feet swing outward. Since their feet are
attached to their legs which are in turn, attached to the body, when the dancer
swings his/her feet outward, the feet are forced to swing in rotation to the body because as
with Newton's 1st law of motion: The feet will remain in motion (a straight path) until acted
upon by an outside force (the .
A breaker uses their legs to drive their bodies in a circular motion.
During this movement the breaker is constantly accelerating as they spin. As the breaker
spins in a uniform circular motion, their legs act as their radius and their feet are
the points where velocity is tangent to the circle they are creating.
Flares require a lot of strength and speed to accomplish. But by increasing one of these
two aspects, the other can be decreased and the breaker will still be able to complete a
Flare. For example: If a person does a flare slowly, they will have to use more strength
to complete it, thus also decreasing their power but increasing the amount of work they
are doing. Or if they were to do a flare with a lot of speed, then they wouldn't
need to
use their strength very much; This means they are using a lot of power
and a little work.
The amount of work a person does during a flare depends on the speed in which they
complete them. As with the examples given for Power; The faster a person does flares,
the less work they do. The slower they do a flare, the more work they do.
A Breakdancer's worst enemy is gravity. Because of it, they must perform power moves
such as Flares either with a lot of speed or with a lot of strength. Because of this,
most Breakdancer's are very agile and/or well built.
When you are done reading the Flares and Windmills pages you can take a test to see just how much you know about your Mills and Flares.