Grace doesn't have to wait: we’ve normalized beginner chaos without questioning the instruction

What if beginners looking like a lizard on a stick isn’t inevitable?

In aerial, we often expect too much and too little from beginners at the same time. We give them complex skills that demand strength, coordination, memory, and courage, without teaching real body awareness, then attribute their chaotic, disorganized movement to being new.

But what happens when we reduce the complexity enough for students to actually pay attention to how they’re moving, and teach them how to organize - not just survive the skill?

In this episode, we’re challenging the assumption that grace is something you earn once you become advanced. We’ll talk about why body awareness and technical detail is a missing layer in so much aerial instruction, and why struggle and messy movement absolutely belong in training without needing to define the entire beginner experience.

Grace isn’t an advanced skill. With appropriately scaled tasks and detailed instruction, every aerialist can experience intentional, beautiful movement from the beginning.

⚡ Want to put this into practice?

Cleaner Lines: 7 Days to More Intentional Aerial Movement breaks down the fundamentals of body awareness and engagement details behind cleaner, more organized movement without needing an apparatus.

It’s for aerialists who want to better understand and organize their own bodies and aerial teachers who want practical tools and language to help their students feel and look graceful from DAY 1, and develop body awareness instead of simply telling them to “point their toes."

Join the 7 Days to Cleaner Lines Challenge waitlist to get it for $27 - goes up to $97 on Sept 2

Submit an idea or guest pitch
www.embodiedaerial.com/podcast

BLOOM Aerial Teacher Training
www.embodiedaerial.com/aerial-teacher-training

Aerial Silks Online Tutorial Library: www.embodiedaerial.com/aerial-silks-online
Strength Programs - www.embodiedaerial.com/strength
Cello Intro & Outro Music by Shaun Diaz

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

SPEAKER_00 0:06

Welcome to the Between the Lines Podcast. I'm your host, Zara Kaiser, and today we are talking about how we expect beginners to look like floppy noodles, baby giraffes, lizard on a stick, and how there may be a misconception about what beginners are capable of at the same time that we are giving them too much too fast. And as we dive into this topic, I want you to bring to mind that quintessential picture of an elite aerialist with their long, beautiful, crisp lines, their gorgeous movement quality, their ability to be consistently organized throughout their whole body as they move through the air. This is the image that inspires many people to start Ariel in the first place. And it is the image that serves as a kind of aspiration as somebody begins to take Ariel classes. And some people come to class already pretty much looking like that because they have trained that kind of body connection and integration in something like dance or gymnastics. It doesn't mean that just because somebody has trained in those things in the past, they will automatically be organized in the air, but there is very, very often a transference of that skill. Then there is the other version, and this was me, the student who was not elegant and graceful and looking like a ballerina in the air, but looking more akin to a baby giraffe, scrambling and looking like a jumble of legs and arms that have no clear place or purpose in any of the movements. Now, what's so interesting about the baby giraffe is that it can happen in somebody who is very flexible and very strong and very coordinated because I came to aerial all of those things. And I could do anything my teachers asked me, but it just never looked good. And it wasn't even that I was surviving through the skills because I had plenty of strength to give to the skills, but I had never been taught how to organize my body in the air. I'd been taught how to organize my body in the water, on the land, on a one-inch piece of webbing, but 360 degrees in the air was completely different. That's not the same baby giraffe situation as somebody who does not have strength or does not have motor control in the first place in really any athletic discipline. So you can come to the discipline of aerial arts with lots of athletic background and still have trouble organizing in the air, and you can also come with no athletic background and have trouble organizing in the air. But what both of these aerialists have in common is they need to develop aerial-specific body awareness and neuromuscular connection, the ability for the brain to connect to the right muscles with the right level of engagement to hold shapes. Then there's neuromuscular coordination, which involves organizing more complex movements together. So not just standing and lifting the leg nicely, but lifting the leg while expanding through the spine, while reaching up for the next hand placement on the pole and then rotating through the hips to make it all happen at once. That's neuromuscular coordination in an aerial-specific context. And then there's neuromuscular connection, which is just getting the brain and the muscles to connect more simply in the first place. Now here's the paradox. We expect beginners to look jumbled and disorganized in the air. We don't expect them to be able to control their limbs and remember to point their toes, and we say that's just how beginners are. Without looking closer at the teaching methodology. What if the reason that beginners always look messy and jumbled, if they didn't have prior training in how to hold and organize their body, was not because they're not capable of doing that, but because the skills they are offered are too complex and too challenging to be able to do well. So here's my thesis. We are simultaneously underestimating and overestimating beginners. And that is the paradox. We're underestimating them because we don't believe they can be smooth and graceful and organized. And we are overestimating them by giving them skills that are challenging and complex without giving them training in how to hold their bodies, without giving them a very accessible progression, essentially perfectly setting them up to struggle and be the baby giraffe, to be the floppy noodle. But then we look at them and we just say, well, that's how beginners are. Self-fulfilling prophecy. I would argue that it's more a reflection on the teaching than the student. No, I do not expect a beginner to look like a performer who has been training for years or decades. And I don't expect an elite performer to also always look perfectly organized in the air. The disorganization that we see is a percentage of our training. It happens at the edges of our capacity. It happens when we are fatigued, we start to see form fall apart. That is normal, that is expected, and the goal is definitely not to be perfect. But I do not think that having it be the majority of the students' movement is necessary or inevitable. I think that there is a tendency to give students too much, too fast, not teach the deeper body awareness, the alignment, the engagement that they need to understand what they're doing. So how do you connect your ribs and your pelvis? How do you set your shoulders before climbing? What tiny accessible drills can we do really, really, really well before adding more physical demands to the picture? Many teachers don't know how to break skills down into smaller, more accessible parts. And I have been there myself. I have given too much too fast. I have missed opportunities to make something simpler or easier. And if I could go back to day one of me being an instructor and make one change, this would be the change. We would be doing less and we would be doing it really, really well. Again, because I know there are so many perfectionists in my audience, and I am with you. It is not about perfection. It's not about not letting the student progress until this particular thing is perfectly dialed in, but it's about being cognizant of the fundamentals of aerial movement and getting those established early and making a point of offering the student tasks that they have a really good chance of doing well. And then watching the student see how they respond to that task and adapting as needed. If they were able to move through in a really organized way, then we can add complexity and challenge. If they're starting to struggle, they're over-gripping, they're becoming overwhelmed, then we can find a simpler variation. When I started to teach in this way and bring a lot more care and attention to the details of body position and engagement and offering these simple tasks, it was incredible what I was seeing students do on day one. And it proved that I had been both underestimating and overestimating students. Now I want to respond to the devil on your shoulder, the trick chaser, or the coach who feels pressure to give lots of cool, flashy tricks quickly so that students are excited and inspired and stick around. I've talked about this on the podcast before, and it's a central topic in our Bloom Aerial teacher training because it so significantly impacts our classroom environment, the mindset and mentality of the teachers and the students. It affects safety and it also affects students' ability to become graceful, especially those who don't come in with prior training of how to organize their body. We can't keep letting that trick-chasing anxiety run the show because it is compromising the results that our students are getting. And what I observed in my studio was that when I brought the right framing to the student and I told them how excited I was to teach them deeper technique, and I explained why we were taking our time in certain foundations and fundamentals, the response that I got was appreciation. The student knew that I was looking out for them and I had their best interests at heart. And slowing down and going deeper into technique and body awareness does not mean that we can't show our students cool, fun tricks, but that we're scaling more progressively and more appropriately. So we're not jumping the gun, but we're offering skills that are fun and cool at an appropriate level for the student where they can still do it well, not lose their shoulder and core organization, and also have the foundations in the first place to know how to do that. There is more detail here than most aerial instructors know because they haven't been trained on it or exposed to it. There is a tendency to describe the rap or the shape of the skill and maybe break it down in a couple of ways, but not to get really granular about how we create those shapes and how we transition into and out of it. This is why I consistently have aerialists coming to me when there's something they're stuck on, or telling me that something I said helped them finally get a breakthrough, or that I explained it in a way that actually made sense to them or offered a progression that was actually achievable. It's also one of the reasons that teachers choose to train with me specifically. They've seen my breakdowns, they've seen the difference between the way I teach and the approach that tends to just describe movement, and they say, I want that. I want to understand how the skill works, I want to be able to teach my student how to be present in their body and connected and integrated and actually develop real aerial intelligence, not just replicate what the teacher shows them. They know how much more meaningful that is. I've seen so many intermediate and advanced students out there in the wild internet world who are doing really complex, challenging tricks, but they are not able to locate their body in space, and I can see that. Their proprioception hasn't been trained to the level that they can move through the air with efficiency and intention and beauty. And one of the most concerning areas that shows up in is in drops. Because just because you can do the drop does not mean you are able to control your body throughout the pathway. And that is a fast track to getting injured, is to proceed with drops that you can wrap them and you can get to the bottom, but there's something missing in the in-between in your ability to stabilize and work with the forces working on you. And that was me. I could get any trick. I would deliberately go out of my way and find the hardest tricks I could possibly find to prove to myself that I could do them. That was my mindset in my early days of Ariel, and I was very excited about how advanced of skills I could do. But not only did that put me at risk of injury, not only did that make me a very poor candidate for performance, which was something I really wanted to do, but it also deprived me of one of the greatest opportunities I've ever had in my life, which is through Arial to connect with my body in a deeper way than I ever knew possible. I wouldn't trade the aerial intelligence that I have cultivated in my body for the most sensational, hardest trick known to humankind. The gift of being able to organize my body intelligently and creatively and intuitively in the air simply goes beyond whatever pride or accolades I could have for executing a really hard, challenging skill. And this is an Ouroboros, a snake with a tail in its mouth. Because you can't do the hardest tricks without deep body awareness, without being able to learn how to organize your body in the air. You can get to a certain point, but then you're going to run into skills that stay out of reach no matter how hard you work on them because you are missing fundamentals that could have been started on day one. To be the best teacher I can be for somebody means inviting them into that curriculum right away, not delaying it, not letting my own anxiety about keeping them around run the show, but teach them what has made the biggest change in my own aerial movement and give them the opportunity to feel connected and graceful in their body. We don't have to wait for grace, but we do have to be willing to start smaller and simpler. And as coaches, we have to be willing to learn how to actually organize our bodies ourselves if we haven't reached that yet, and how to communicate that to students. And that's a combination of being able to describe movement in the body well, to work with individual students, to know the basic anatomy that's underlying the engagement and alignment, and being willing to slow down. If you decide to ignore this layer of aerial learning, then you are putting your students in a position to be more at risk for injury, to be more reliant on demonstrations and cues rather than learning how to self-organize and self-correct, and to progress to more and more complex and advanced skills without the ability to do them beautifully, efficiently, and in their own style. If you are new to Arial and you want to make sure you establish these fundamentals, or you're not new, but you feel that you weren't given this curriculum, or you are an instructor and you want to be able to guide students in this way, help them be safer, learn grace, connect in with their body, then my seven days to cleaner aerial lines challenge is for you. This program is not me telling you to point your toes and straighten your knees. It is a step-by-step mapping of the body to develop the neuromuscular connection you need to organize well in the air and develop the elegance and lines that you are dreaming of. We do this through tiny, simple floor-based practices, accessible lessons in anatomy to help make sense of what's actually happening beneath the surface. And I provide guidance for how it maps to Ariel, regardless of what apparatus you train. At the time that I'm recording this podcast episode, it is available for $27, marked down from $97 as part of the pre-launch pre-order sale. And on September 2nd, it is going back up to 97. So if you want to get this for the absolute minimum investment, then check out the show notes as I've included the link down below. Take it from a hyper-mobile girly who had no dance background, who had all the strength and all the flexibility, and spent years developing and refining the techniques to develop this body awareness and to communicate it to other aerialists. And let's bring this all full circle by returning to this idea that there will always be struggle and limbs all over the place. There will be moments of total disorganization anytime that we are learning something complex and challenging. We're going upside down, we're spinning around, there are going to be moments. But the disorganized jumble is not an identity that belongs to beginners or belongs to people who don't have a dance background. It is simply a reflection that the task assigned is beyond the capacity of the individual. That should be a percentage of the practice, not the default state. If we are teaching well and responsibly, then we are guiding the students in how to connect their ribs and their pelvis, in exactly how to position and organize the shoulders, in how to hold their legs, specifically what rotation, how do we use eversion of the foot? When do we use internal rotation? And scaling the complexity and the challenge appropriately. So the students aren't in over their head, thinking that they're a disorganized lizard on a stick, which by the way is my favorite new phrase that I got from one of my Bloom teacher trainees. But instead, the student gets to experience a version of themselves that is an analog to the beautiful performer that might have inspired them to start in the first place. And when we teach this well, we will see students being organized in their bodies even when they're not familiar with a skill. Because aerial movement is aerial movement. Those principles can be taught very early on. If you're a teacher, my challenge to you is to stop underestimating how graceful your beginner students can be, or perhaps it's your intermediate students, or even your advanced, but also to stop overestimating what their brain-body system can organize well. And to challenge yourself to get really, really comfortable spending time on foundations, spending time on transitional movements, the details of technique. Because when we are comfortable with that, we decrease that trick-chasing mentality throughout our student body. Then we can begin to really have fun with some of the more hidden layers of Ariel. If you'd like to join us in the Seven Days to Cleaner Arial Nines challenge, the link is below, and this is your chance to get it for 27 bucks. I hope this episode about what we expect of beginners has been insightful for you. Thanks for listening, and I'll catch you on the next episode of Between the Lines.