Dancing.

aka - all of the above. just keep doing it. --R

Post hypnotic suggestion tapes and frim fram sauce with every meal

There is no substitute for experience. Keep at it; remember that there is a steep learning curve from "doing the moves" to a point where you can improvise. You'll have to obtain four times the muscle memory than your followers will.

Dance with as many different people as you can; tall, short, thin, stocky, experienced, and newbies. DON'T dance with the same person all the time.

This is pretty important.

Listen to as many different types of music as you can -- hot jazz, jump blues, classic big-band swing, lounge, rockabilly, even (ugh!) neo-swing and you'll be able to pick out music breaks and suss out different themes and how they are put together.

Add classes in different kinds of dance -- there are approximately 112 different kinds of swing, some of which are minor variations of others (i.e., the difference between single swing, double swing, and triple swing are quite small). Build up your muscle memory with different dance styles.

The Lindy Hop is the original dance developed and made popular around the world in the 1920s in the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem, NYC; the dance got the name Lindy Hop from Lucky LINDBERGH, the first pilot to fly over the Atlantic Ocean in 1927. What makes the Lindy Hop unique from other Swing dances besides being the original, is the techniques developed by some of the greatest swing dancers in history, which can be corroborated by viewing some of the vintage films of the Swing Dancers competing at the Annual Harvest Moon Ball in NYC's Madison Square Garden during the 1930s; all the winners of those Harvest Moon Contests were African Americans from Harlem..right up until 1957.

During WW II the dancers from NYC spread the dance all over the world. After the War, dance studios began to teach Swing commercially, and they began to simplify the dance and eliminated most of the techniques. There is a statement made by Arthur Murray to his Dance Supervisors that was told to me in person by my long time friend, the late Laure' Hale who wrote the infinitive teaching manual for the Arthur Murray Chain Studios, "Do not bother teaching your students techniques, just teach them step patterns." Arthur Murray.

Unfortunately, in the WW II movies, the Arthur Murray Swing style of dancing caught on without the Savoy techniques that were developed at the Savoy Ballroom, and the Lindy Hop devolved into a non-discript style called West Coast Swing (WCS).

Fortunately, the East Coast dancers, because of their nearness to NYC today do dance the nearest style Swing to the Original Lindy Hop and they call it the East Coast Swing. Inexplicably the ECS is the most popular style of Swing in San Francisco also.