We have been blessed to have many great acroyoga teachers around for our recent Festival!
And we have recently picked up a lot of great acroyoga tips from some of them, so we wanted to share these with YOU!
I’ve listed three of them out for you in hopes that it also helps your practice!
Let’s dive right in:
1. More compression in the flyers arms in Icarian tempos.
This tip comes from Pauli and we picked it up in the workshop of her and Nacho before the festival in which they taught Icarian front tuck.
Our fronttuck has been decent since the summer, but my rotation was often very wonky and on top of that I mostly went too early making the rotation very low and therefore the skill not ideal.
We use my arm movement in the timing/charge of the skill.
When Caspian initiates by squeezing my feet we both inhale while at the same time I raise my arms up (1).
Once I reach the top I bend my elbows to the side in the same timing as Caspian bends his knees to charge (2).
As he pops I explode my arms up aiming to reach up before I snap into my tuck (3).
Two things happened in this move that I struggled to correct: I would charge my arms behind my head (in phase 2) and this extra unnecessary charge would be unhelpful.
Plus my arm movement in the pop (3) would be not enough up and uneven.
We were able to fix this thanks to Pauli’s tip: think consciously more about compressing when bending the arms in the charge (2).
This makes the movement of the arms more connected to the body, I find it easier to charge in the right line, I’m able to explode more up and it’s easier to do my movement straighter.
On top of that Caspian even feels a difference as a base; so it was a great win that we then also implemented in our other icarians like cascade and it works! Thanks Pauli!
2. The 5 minute rule.
Credits to Caitlin and Dane (Duo Die) for this takeaway! They explained this is something they do regularly in their practice.
You know all the things that suck to practice, because it’s so draining and you feel you’re so far off?
The stuff that takes a long time to embody and learn?
They recommend doing those kind of drills for just 5 minutes each session.
Not more, just 5 minutes.
They’re all about getting 1% better than yesterday and being in it for the long run. Building and growing over time.
When they were teaching the prefest it came up several time that they said ‘if this feels like a valuable drill for you, maybe include this for just 5 minutes in every training’.
And we started recognizing which drill we wanted to make into a 5 minute drill for our training.
This means that every training it takes us 40 minutes to do all of our 5 minutes because we picked so many haha, but in the first session we tried we already tasted the benefits.
It seems way more doable to commit to such a short amount of time, it limits the amount of frustration and the clear boundary automatically makes you focus on just doing it; not refining or nerding too much. Just getting it done.
We can totally see how this overtime will grow your skill in a very sustainable way so here you go; which drill would you want to do for 5 minutes each session?
3. Popping legs and arms at the same time
During a jam we were training fronttucks and we asked Mati to have a look because something felt off.
He spotted the main difference in basing between his technique and what Caspian was doing; which was that he pops with legs and arms at almost the same time and Caspian was popping first the legs and after a delay the arms (more like our icarian straight throw technique).
When I tried with Mati it went great and it felt like I could much clearer tell when the pop was happening and therefore; when I should do my movement.
Our main takeaway was for Caspian to also pop at the same time, because it felt much better when we tried it this way!
So cool to see how quickly Caspian can always integrate new cues; he can translate and embody small changes so well and I feel so proud to be his partner!
These were three of our main takeaways.
It always feels so exciting to see small steps, experience more understanding, feel a different way and stay open and curious in how many ways skills can be done and how we can make it work and feel even better each time.
Every time we get the opportunity to learn from great teachers we recognise our appreciation for their expertise, their experience, their knowledge and their ability to show us a next step.
It’s inspiring, because we realize how many hours of training, fails and attempts are behind all of these tips which feel like a shortcut to our practice.
Hopefully these insights are helpful to your practice too!
If you have a tip or takeaway you want to share with us we would be happy to know.
Feel free to write us an email to share about it and we can all learn from each other.
Catch you in the next one!
Laura
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