ACRO FAILS and FINDING BALANCE...

With so much teaching in a short amount of time it’s becoming obvious which important training tips we keep highlighting.

So I thought I’ll share two of them in an email for it to hopefully help your practice too!

The first insight is about balance in acro.

In a lot of skills the topic of ‘who balances’ is relevant.

We like to teach in a non-dogmatic way and in most skills we say that different things are possible.

It’s possible for the base to completely control the balance, but the same for the flyer or a combination can also work.

This often comes down to personal preferences, what works best in a partnership taking into account people's abilities, experiences and skill level and also how people like to practice acro.

But here comes the insight and our tip that is often overlooked:

When weight is distributed directly over the point of contact, the result is balance.

At the start of a workshop we sometimes ask people: ‘when you’re standing on the ground, why are you in balance? What makes it so that you’re not constantly falling over?’

Answers are often mixed, for example; because we’re engaging our muscles when we’re standing - yeah but it’s not like we’re super engaged and working hard to keep ourselves up.

But actually, here's our take, all of us are so practiced in standing that we’ve mastered distributing our weight exactly over our feet and the result is that we’re in balance.

We don’t need to overly engage our feet, we don’t need to stand super rigid and stiff, we don’t constantly have the sensation of falling and are actively trying to balance ourselves back into the stack.

The same principle counts for acro, for inversions and handstands, but any pose really; when you distribute your mass exactly over the point of contact - the result is balance.

And yes sure, because we’re not perfect upside down, in acro skills or on our hands someone needs to actively do a bit of balancing,

But our main tip for flyers or handstanders is: Focus on distributing your weight in a way that makes you in balance rather than constantly trying to balance.

In that case the corrections to balance are micro movements, instead of big adjustments that are needed when the weight is not completely stacked and leaning you out of balance.

And you can still decide with your partner who will do those little corrections; what we often refer to as ‘who balances’.

And that makes me want to highlight one more thing: if balancing feels hard and you feel big adjustments are needed, this is your cue that the weight distribution needs to be improved.

Let’s take an L-base hand to hand as an example.

Often we feel a lot of pressure in one part of the hands (knuckles or base of the palm), which is likely the result of the line being slightly off and the flyer leaning a bit in a direction.

Sometimes this gives the flyer more sense and orientation of where they are in space.

Because that extra pressure gives a better reference point and it requires the flyer to work harder to stay in the hand to hand.

Versus when the line is super on point, it might feel like you’re floating in space.

Being exactly on the point can feel strange and disorientating at first, because the weight is pouring straight down and the flyer doesn’t have to work as hard.

So it might take some getting used to in the beginning, but we definitely recommend you trying this tip and see how it works for you to be truly in balance!

The second tip of the day, is about how failing is great, haha! But only if you fail in all different ways!

I’ll explain:

When skills are not working we often see that it’s failing or falling repeatedly in exactly the same way/pattern, which makes sense, but is not the most helpful for the learning process.

When this happens it’s often your indication that something in your technique needs changing, because something is going wrong making it fail the same every time.

When figuring out what is the cue or tip that you need to change the technique is hard, it’s often more accessible to simply try failing the other way.

Not aiming for perfect, but just making a different mistake.

This gives your body so much information to learn from and gives you a much bigger range in your abilities and body awareness.

And it often helps fixing the problem in the first place!

I once read about this study a long time ago that examined if pro athletes always had the exact same movement pattern.

Let’s say high level gymnasts performing flips on the floor.

And you know what they found out? The movement pattern is rarely identical.

Every jump and spin is the tiniest bit different in power, speed and rotation for example.

Just because we’re humans and always adjust to different circumstances and things that impact our skill.

Obviously when we’re just looking at skills it looks super similar, but that’s because they have trained it to that level.

The reason high level athletes are so good is because they have done skills so many times and through such a range of motion and a range of success rate, that their bodies have such a broad understanding of the movement.

This is actually what the body does: each and every time you do a skill your body learns and performing it in a broad range allows your body to calculate and adjust the movement each time.

Which is such a cool thing when you think about it and it really helped me approach my learning and practice through this insight.

To give you an example: two years ago, after practicing arabians (a twisting front tuck skill), my regular front tuck started twisting to the left.

Instead of trying to fix it by aiming for a straight fronttuck, which didn’t help at all, I tried twisting to the right. This helped gain a better understanding of the skill.

So hopefully, this insight also helps you to understand why failing in different ways is so helpful and actually desirable.

The last thing I would share about that is the counterside, which is that if you don’t do this it might lead to a bad habit that is even harder to break over a longer period of time.

Because when the body is so used to a certain movement pattern, like failing the same way every time, it’s harder to change or break.

There you go; our two training tips that we’ve been sharing a lot recently during our Europe tour!

If this brings up any thoughts for you or you have some experiences in your practice we are always happy to read about it so feel free to reply.

We always find it super enjoyable to be in contact with ya’ll! :)

Hug from the UK!

Laura