Anyone who’s started an aerial practice knows that aerial is harder than it looks!
It takes a special kind of dedication to keep at it sometimes, when things get tough. Fortunately, aerial is also a creative art form. That means there’s always room to go deeper and explore material, no matter what level of skills or moves you are working on. And that creative process is satisfying on so many levels. Keep reading to see how we incorporate creativity into our classes at Aerial Fit.
We consider our curriculum to be very wide. That means that instead of leaving a student stuck because they can’t achieve a “gateway” skill yet, we have a large variety of material at each level for students to work on. We never want a student to feel stuck and like they can’t progress because of a physical limitation, and since aerial is a creative art form there’s no reason to ever be stuck!
One of our favorite jobs as teachers is finding ways to break skills down into manageable components, and to find or invent smaller goals or stopping points along the way. This is a creative teaching process, and we teach our students to think this way as well so they can be creative learners and troubleshooters.
Let’s say for example we have a student who is feeling stuck because they can’t invert yet. We’re going to make sure that student is fully exploring the moves that don’t require an inversion, while they build up their strength over time.
There are so many questions you can ask to do this. Here are a few examples:
Within each skill that we teach our students, there are a lot of different ways to challenge students’ mastery of it in a fun and creative way.
If you’re an advanced aerialist, or a teacher who teaches advanced levels, our challenge to you is to go back to basic material for a class or a training session, and dive deep into it. See what you can discover and how you might change it up to make it something truly unique to you!
We often find that students who take longer to build the physical strength for the higher level moves actually become more well rounded aerialists. That’s because spending more time with the fundamentals and fully exploring possibilities within limitations, is a great way to really understand how aerial apparatuses work. And that makes you a master of whatever material you’re working on!
Looking for new ideas to keep you creative and inspired? Our online library has hundreds of videos for serious students, new teachers, and experienced instructors. Join Aerial Fit online here, or try out the free membership for free new lessons every month.
