Dance trend comes with a warning

Katie Fraser and her fiancé, Amandeep Sandhu, woke up the other day feeling sore and experiencing mild pain. They hadn’t exercised vigorously, though it felt that way. Rather, they had tried to recreate a move done by Danny Amendola on the ABC show “Dancing With the Stars.”

On an episode that aired Oct. 15, Amendola, 38, a former NFL player, and his partner, Witney Carson, a dancer and choreographer, performed a routine set to the song “Unsteady” by X Ambassadors. At one point, Amendola lifted Carson, who was lying on the ground, by pulling her up by her ankle.

The pair, who performed the move seamlessly, drew immediate cheers from the studio audience. They also unwittingly created a trend on TikTok. Others have tried to recreate the move, which is so difficult that TikTok added a disclaimer to some of the videos. “Participating in this activity could result in you or others getting hurt,” it reads.

“I had seen their dance posted online and I thought it was absolutely beautiful,” said Fraser, 28. “Then I saw the TikTok trend going around of other couples trying and begged my fiancé to try it with me.”

Like Johnny’s iconic lift of Baby in the movie “Dirty Dancing,” Amendola’s lift of Carson has proved appealing for many, but is considerably harder than it looks.

Even Amendola’s competitors on the show were intrigued, with Ilona Maher, an Olympic bronze medalist in rugby sevens, posting a TikTok of her attempt to recreate the move.

But neither Maher nor her dance partner, Alan Bersten, a professional ballroom dancer, could do it.

“I heard something click,” Bersten said when he tried to lift Maher off the ground. He didn’t know if it was in his back or her ankle.

Amendola and Carson expressed surprise at how the move has caught on online.

“I actually had to ask Witney,” Amendola said of the surge in videos. “I was, like, ‘Um, is my algorithm messed up, or is everybody trying our dance?’”

Carson said, “We finally did a tutorial, just to be like, ‘Let’s help everybody out so you don’t get hurt.’”

In the tutorial posted to Carson’s TikTok account, the two call the move “Operation Archer” and offer tips for each partner.

For the person doing the lifting, Amendola cautions: “Make sure they’re balanced coming up. And once you get them up, let go of their foot so they can have somewhere to land.”

For the one being lifted, “you want to make sure your bottom leg is straight and of counterweight and balance yourself with an arch,” Carson said.

Most importantly, adds Amendola, “make sure, ladies, that your foot is at the very base — bottom — of my foot.”

Madison Smellie and her husband, Austin, watched the tutorial and then pulled off the move smoothly. It also may have helped that Smellie was a cheerleader in high school and college.

As for Fraser and Sandhu, who live in Montreal, they launched into it without any prep.

The video Fraser posted to TikTok was “our third and final try because it was actually hurting my fiancé’s foot too much!” she wrote. “You think it would be painful for the person being lifted up. But by the sound of it, it was more painful for the lifter because all of your weight is on them.”

She added a bit of advice for anyone who wanted to participate in the trend.

“I would definitely suggest stretching before and after because we didn’t — and we felt it the next day.”