The glide step or roll step is a form of movement used by marching bands to minimize upper body movement, enabling musicians to play their instruments and march without air-stream interruptions.
Sometimes special shoes are worn with a curved heel that facilitates rolling the foot.
Glide stepping is used by many high school and college marching bands, and by many drum corps.
The important aspects of attention for marching are having a tall, straight posture with hips shifted slightly back, keeping weight distributed slightly forward and off the heels, and general relaxation of all major muscles.
A call and response is commonly used by bands that follow George N. Parks' training examples to standardize posture: "Feet!
At "check", the leg is bent slightly, the heel is approximately 1-2 inches off the ground, and the toes are in line with each other.
Important aspects of marking time are that the hips should not shift as the legs are lifted and that the weight is kept forward on the balls of the feet.
While the body itself should be moving smoothly along, this motion should be very snappy, emphasizing that the toes are stuck in the air so that the bottom of the extended foot is exposed.
In order to correctly march these sizes, a performer generally uses muscle memory to execute these steps.
Other skills utilized in glide-step marching are facings, sliding (keeping the upper body facing a different direction than the lower body), adjusting stride length, back-marching, and matching all of these motions to a specific tempo.