Actor's Gym - Circus Day 2

Yesterday was the second week of Circus class.  We had the same basic set up: warm-up, floor work, one major floor art and one major aerial art.  The Sylvia's (instructor) warm-ups and floor work has been really good for my body.  It's been a while since I've worked my body like this, and I'm happy to get going again.  Especially with gymnastics.  I've always wanted to learn how to do handstands, cartwheels, and rolls properly, but with everything that is "wrong" with my body (scoliosis, odd bone structure in my feet, terrible flexibility) I have never really had the chance to.  Sylvia and Nate are really good at explaining exactly what you're doing wrong, and they are so matter-of-fact about it.  I was able to work a lot more with Sylvia yesterday and she can be scary, but she will fix you.  One of my goals for the end of the class is to be able to do a handstand.  It sounds simple, but my spine is shaped like an "S" rather than being relatively straight and also has a small rotation, kind of like if someone had one hand gripping my spine and twisted it in one direction a little bit.  Without a straight spine my back and my core are weaker that the average person's, and it makes it incredibly difficult to balance, especially while standing on your hands.  Sylvia said handstands will be really good for my back and has been helping me straighten myself up during handstands.  I'm really excited to be close to doing them by myself.

The floor art we worked on yesterday is called the Rolling Globe.

This is a Rolling Globe routine:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nB6ZGzH_Sk

Rolling Globe is kind of scary, but I feel like I was getting the hang of it pretty well for my first time.  We got on top of it, walked in a circle on top of it, and then practiced walking the ball forward and backward.  It's kind of exhilarating.  I was more scared watching other people do it than I was doing it myself.  That section was a lot of fun.

We worked on Spanish Web in this class as well.

Here is a Spanish Web routine:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INXhaNwTIiE

In Aerial two days ago we did two different routines, a basic hand routine and an 8-loop routine.  The hand routine is just where you hang by one hand and use the other hand to hold the rope to one side of you.  An 8-loop is a loop you make around your foot (shown in the beginning of the video above) so you have a foot and a wrist strapped in.  In Circus yesterday we just did the same hand routine we did in Aerial, except at the end of class we worked on a simple invert where you hold the rope with both hand near your chest and you kick up your legs over your head.  Like this:

This is very hard for people like me with no upper body strength and little core strength.  We ended the day with these.  Chris was able to do 3 and 1/2 in a row.  I was able to do 1/2 in a row.

Until next week.