Tuesday Conditioning

Tuesdays and Thursdays are my conditioning and stretching days. Lately I've been doing an hour or so of "movement play". Think yoga + playground + acrobatics training + whatever seems fun at the moment. Mostly influenced by what I see happening at Bodytribe Fitness. 

I somehow managed to pull a muscle just under my ribs during my private lesson Tuesday afternoon. It's a really strange injury, as it doesn't hurt unless I'm bending or twisting in odd fashions. My aerial lesson was with a 9-year old we'll call "Tigger". Because of his age I've created a series of "animal" warm-ups to start our lesson with. Duck-walks, gator craws, bear crawls, crab-walks, etc. They're extra fun to do when we make animal noises. We were doing Peter-Pan leaps when I pulled my muscle. No idea how it happened, but it doesn't seem to affect any of my strength or stability, so I'll work through it and be aware of it.

After my lesson I spent about thirty-minutes doing soft-tissue work. Foam-rolling and Lacross-ball massage. I've found my hamstrings don't feel anything from a foam rolling. Instead I take a stool, put the lacross ball on it and push my leg down as hard as I can. That really digs into the muscle. My hamstrings have a history of knots and cramping so I've been paying extra attention to them as of late. 

This was followed up by an hour of movement play. Started off with some tumbling. A few sets of 5 cartwheels (leading with both sides) and 5 somersaults (leading with both sides). Basic yoga followed after, then I started combining it with fun movements. Rolling across the floor, jumping on the the trapeze and going giant-rolls... somewhere in there I also did a bunch of sets of handstands against the wall, holding for 60s. I even played with one-handed handstand against the wall, though I didn't time them. The session was finished up with some yin-style long-hold yoga poses. Pigeon, Bound-Angle, etc. 

Later on that night Alison and I spent a lot of time running our Acrobatics routine. It's getting pretty awesome, if I do say so myself. We added in a one-handed back-lift. Not sure if it's going into the routine for this Sunday's show, but I'm really really really psyched about getting that lift down.