July 26, 2024 / by Mark / In programmes

The Aerial Edge 4 essential mobility principles

Wanna be your best circus self? Course you do! Then you need to know about the four mobility principles that we consider to be essential. We embed these practices into the Aerial Edge full-time courses because we’ve seen over time how they develop our professional students’ circus abilities, and help to protect them from injuries.

Anyone can use these four principles to make the most of their talents and skills. The goal is not just to achieve general flexibility but to meet the specific and varied demands of circus disciplines, such as aerial arts, contortion, acrobatics, and flow arts.

Improving mobility for circus arts is a multi-faceted approach, given the diversity and physical demands involved. This is definitely true for our full-time students, because our courses offer a broad range of arts, and it’s true for anyone even if you’re focused on one art. Here are the four key objectives that we have found to be essential to improve your ability for circus arts.

Increase Range of Motion (ROM)

Improving the Range of Motion in major joints such as shoulders, hips, knees, and ankles, and specific muscle groups, is necessary to perform many of the actions required for circus arts.

Increasing ROM is also the most obvious objective in flexibility. By improving hamstring or hip adductor range of motion, you move towards a split. Improving shoulder range of motion means you get better at the building blocks of aerial technique, such as skinning the cat, handstands, bridges or walkovers.

These are often why people come to flexibility training in the first place. The most effective types of exercise to improve range of motion is passive flexibility or PNF (contract/release) stretching.

Strengthen the end ranges

The importance of end-range strength cannot be overstated! There is a big difference in strength between holding a split on the floor where your hips are fully supported, and maintaining a split in the air on silks, for example. In that situation, the muscles and connective tissue near the end of your range of motion may have to support forces well in excess of your own body weight.

If you focus only on stretching and lengthening your muscles, they won’t be strong enough to maintain the posture or move. You could easily drop into extended splits and injure yourself.

End-range strength is a specialised form of conditioning that focuses on enhancing muscular strength at the extreme limits of your range of motion. That’s where most injuries of this type occur.

During tumbling, the impact forces applied to a performer’s body have been recorded at 5 to 14 times body weight. Many of these movements, such as a back handspring, apply force at or near the end ranges of motion.

By fortifying the muscles and connective tissues at their most vulnerable points of extension or flexion, you can better safeguard against the overstretching injuries that are common in high-mobility disciplines.

Build agonist strength

Agonist and antagonist muscles work in pairs to create movement around a joint, and maintain the joint’s stability. Agonist muscles are the prime mover of an action. They contract (shorten) and the antagonist muscle on the other side responds by relaxing and lengthening (ie stretching) to allow the movement to occur.

When you flex your arm with a bicep curl, for instance, the bicep contracts and shortens, making it the agonist muscle, and the tricep relaxes and lengthens, and is therefore the antagonist.

Then, when you bring your arm back to a natural position, your bicep is relaxed (the antagonist muscle), and the tricep is contracted (the agonist). The key thing is to make sure that the muscle that’s lengthening/stretching is fully supported by the contracting muscle. That means the contracting muscle needs to be strong enough.

So if you want to lift your leg into a standing split or high kick, the agonist would need to be strong enough to pull the leg into that position, and to keep the antagonist muscle safe by being strong enough to support it while it’s stretched to its full extent.

Train across all angles

If you only train your flexibility in one line, you will be prone to injury whenever you move off that line. As much as we’d all like to perform our moves with perfect lines every time, the fact is that any number of factors can throw us off that line.

Hips and shoulders can move through multiple angles, so it is important to train all of the angles of rotation effectively. The shoulders are a good example of how force is applied across multiple angles, in techniques such as dislocations, or skinning the cat.

Be your best self

An effective mobility programme should include all four of these elements to ensure longevity in training, to reduce injuries, and, more importantly, to increase your individual capability. You’ll also notice that only one out of four of these principles would normally be considered “flexibility” training, in circus we need a to look at building strength in partnership with flexibility.

If you want to set up a personalised programme, we can certainly walk you through that. Ask info@aerialedge.co.uk, come to flexibility or conditioning class, or chat to Mark in the space.