Congratulations on restarting your aerial practice. You’re working through some rustiness or perhaps you’ve been on a rig in your backyard but now you’re with classmates again post-pandemic. The second is to begin rebuilding your confidence in the air. One of the biggest component of being safe in the air is being confident. Confidence comes from a number of things aligning.
Restore grip strength
People are always surprised at how much grip strength they’ve lost after time away. I always start a training session with a series of warm-ups all with two wraps around the wrists. This way, I’m not asking my hands to fully hold my weight until twenty to thirty minutes in. With the double wrap supporting my grip, I can focus on using more of the pinky side of my hand. When doing incline pull ups with the feet on the floor and the body planked out at forty-five degrees, I’ll release my thumbs and index finger so that I’m only holding on with three fingers on each hand. The pinky side of your hand is where more than fifty percent of your grip comes from and this is a great way to train it.
I climb the fabric after about twenty minutes of warm-ups the first being a foot lock climb. It’s the best for me because it feels very supported in my feet so my hands aren’t doing all of the work
Resuscitate your inversion
Ever since I had my C-section I feel like I’ve been on a long-term rehab process with my lowest abs. My daughter is now twenty months old and I’ve decided to keep conditioning my inversions with lower weight and higher reps which boils down to egg ups and straddles in a knot or a hammock. With that assistance, I can focus on the small range of motion of my pelvis curling up. When I want to condition the lower abs, pelvic range of motion AND my pull up, I come up to the short arm and come up out of the loop as I come upright. In other words, I use less of the assistance that the hammock can provide.
Your inversion is in there somewhere. The muscle memory is there, we just have to wake up the neuromuscular system and build the muscle fibers back up.
Renew height tolerance
If ten feet up suddenly feels really high to you now, try some height training. Start with what I call the “Sit In It” exercise. Climb about half way to three quarters up, tie a regular foot lock, separate the poles and take a comfortable seat. Wrap your arms around the poles to prevent you from falling forward or backwards and take measure of what is around you. Acknowledge what is at your eye line and make friends with it. As you take five deep and slow breaths, look down, up and to both sides. If you’re not Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible, that might be intimidating but we need look down to execute some skills, so getting comfortable is the only option.
Transfer the “Sit in It” exercise to your simplest skills that you know like the back of your hand. Practice the same skill at five, ten then fifteen feet (and higher) and take notice of how the difference in height changes the feeling of the skill and your ability to execute it. If you are fine at ten feet but at fifteen you start to panic, backtrack and train at smaller intervals until the emotions subside. This exercise will help you avoid potential shock to your system because you won’t be training at five feet then twenty in one training session.
Refresh base wraps
For almost every skill and trick there is a base wrap. Functionally the base wrap is the foundation and is usually at the beginning of the wrap. For example, the base wrap for any hip key drop is simply a hip key and for single star it’s a catchers wrap (same side hook plus tail over the opposite side with the wrap supporting the lower back) plus a belly wrap.
If you get overwhelmed with all the tricks you’ve learned in the past, don’t worry about all the fancy modifications, just focus on the base wraps. If you concentrate on those, you’ll automatically have the root of most tricks. After that, adding on to those skills or practicing them with a spin will feel like a manageable step up.
Revive your endurance
Getting your endurance back can feel daunting. It’s the marathon aspect of our practice and just the thought of getting up there for an entire routine can be enough to keep us on the ground. I am to a runner, but from what I gather from watching my long-distance runner friends, no one actually starts out by running twenty-six miles and some change on the first day of training. If you think of it that way, it kind of sounds silly saying, “Ugh, I used to be able to stay up there for so long!” You did once and you will again.
Like marathon runners, our training should be progressive with two different components: skill difficulty and sequence length. When you begin your endurance training, chose a sequence that is relatively easy for you and couple it with a short song. If the first endurance session is two minutes, perhaps your next one is two and a half. And so on and so forth. Switch up foot lock combos for small drops or skills that begin with an inversion to level up.
Rebuilding confidence in the air is a formula unique to you. The key is to figure out what the components of that formula are and how to support where you have weaknesses. What’s the most challenging part of a restart for you? Maybe it’s your grip strength and inversion or you struggle to remember something as basic as a foot lock. Everyone’s strengths and weaknesses are different which means that coming back will look distinct on every aerialist, even at the highest levels.