Aerial Silk Exercises: A Fun and Challenging Way to Get Fit
Maybe you’ve seen the experts swinging from silks in the Cirque Du Soleil shows. Maybe you’ve just seen photos in a magazine and wondered if you could hang from aerial silks and look as glamorous. Or, maybe you have a daughter, like mine, who begs you to try just one class with her and you finally relent. Whatever the case may be, if you’ve ever wanted to try a class of aerial silks, I highly recommend finding a class in your area and giving it a go…for me, north of Atlanta, it’s North Georgia Aerials.
My daughter and I intended to take a beginner class, which the instructor offers every Sunday for $25. We couldn’t get our schedules to sync, so we ended up jumping in on a class on another night, with some teens who ended up being really good. I must admit, we were not. My daughter did better than I did, but I had no idea how tough this would be. It’s hard, y’all. Hard.
Don’t get me wrong. The instructor was great. But my first clue that maybe this wasn’t such a great idea was during the warmup stretches. I struggled through some of the stretches that the rest of the group mastered easily. That said, I was not in the beginner class, so I told myself it wasn’t a big deal.
What was a big deal was the fact that you have to have a certain amount of upper body strength to pull your body up on the silks, which are like soft ropes you wrap your feet around to use for leverage. The instructor showed us a trick or two to get us climbing, and then another trick or two to get us flipping over and holding on by our legs.
Overall, I’m really glad we gave it a try. I’m not sure we’ll be back for regular lessons any time soon, but you never know. At least we gave it a whirl, and had some good laughs doing it.
(Note to readers: No, I wasn’t sponsored or compensated to try this and share it with you–I know it’s something friends have mentioned doing and I thought it would be helpful for them to see my experience.)
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