Clothesline & Fang

Silks won out over lyra last night. I knew I wanted to do aerials, just wasn't sure which, until the last minute. I'm glad I went to silks. The heater was fixed (it was super cold Monday night). Aerials is no fun when it's cold. And I usually like cold. Hello! I used to be an ice skater.

Class went well, actually. I've had a couple rough classes recently. Even working on sideways middle split (#3)...which I wholly cannot do. I can't even get into position. It feels like I'll never get it, that feeling. Because it's so comically bad. I dislike any pose with the word "splits" in it.

My bad side for climbs seems to have switched. Teacher always says start with your bad side. So I did. It felt strong. My good side, not so much. Same with every round. I also saw marked improvement on hipkeys. The first couple rounds were a struggle. But something sorta clicked, and I ended up higher on the silks, with nice leg position, and that hipkey felt very solid. I wish I'd gotten video.

Straddle...I hate straddle. But my teacher showed me a trick to work on my stack. Spiderman pose. Invert back but catch both feet on the "pole" (that's what it's called in silks, don't ask me why). Then from there, I can work on pushing out the right muscles to get a good stack. It's a lot harder to get a stack on a pole. Then bring one leg out and eventually the other. Once I brought out the second leg, I came right out of it. But progress.

My videos are not great. The angle was bad. And I don't look as good in clothesline as I thought I did. Oh well. And my hand slipped off my foot, but not to worry, my knee cinch is well trained from lyra. All that slipped was my hand. But my teacher says this is a hard one and that it's impressive I was able to do it my first try. It's probably the knee cinch. This is called clothesline #2. Added bonus, a badass footlock from the air, yay!

This is called fang. My teacher wasn't even sure at first if I should try, she said it's a bit advanced. But we had just worked on a move called birdcage, which is just like bird's nest in lyra, so she said, watch me demo for the others, and if it looks like a lyra equivalent, you can try. And it's bent arrow. Which I was just working on to the top the night before. The video I got is of my bad side, and the angle isn't good for a nice screen capture. But I could do it. Well, with a double wrist wrap. It's fundamentals...we were all sporting double wrist wraps, even the more advanced students.