Download Subtitles for 140 Soft Acrobatics Moves Tutorial

If you want to learn new skills, use this video for inspiration and I guarantee there'll be something perfect for your current [music] level. I've been teaching adult acrobatics for over 12 years and mapped out 140 skills for you in this video that anyone can learn. And if you really want to make progress and [music] not just be inspired for a hot minute, download this poster using the link below. Circle the key skills you want to learn. All skills are numbered so you can easily find the right one here inside this video. Then cross out the ones you've mastered because I want you to win, but you will get stuck somewhere. I also have two workbooks for you. One for complete beginners, one for intermediate. So that you know exactly how to get unstuck. Beginner skills are split into six different categories. Cartwheels, [music] handstands, aerials, rolls, macacos, and elbow levers. Cartwheels but mini. All the flow, none of the fear. Try step. Starts like a mini cartwheel except that hands and feet are switched. Make a triangle between both feet and a hand and step through. The half cartwheel is [music] exactly what it sounds like. Half a cartwheel. And it combos perfectly with a mini cartwheel. Next, the spinning half cartwheel front side. Sounds complicated but is really just a half cartwheel with a small spin. And that means you know what the spinning half cartwheel back side is. Same thing but in reverse. Spinning to the back side. You see, I try to name all the skills not creatively but literally so that it's easiest to understand just from reading. Same thing with a 90° cartwheel across a 90° corner. And if this is scary, you can scale it back by using an elevated surface. But this is a skill list, not a tutorial. So let's wrap it up and move on to the low bend arm cartwheel. It's exactly what it sounds like but a lot of people find it easier than cartwheels in the [music] beginning because you stay close to the ground. The low headstand cartwheel is slightly trickier because you have to control placing your head on the ground gently. Otherwise, it's uncomfortable. The square cartwheel follows the same foot hand hand foot pattern of a regular cartwheel but you don't have to go straight or all the way upside down. Moving on from cartwheels to handstands. As you'll [music] see, I keep the categories quite loose actually. A handstand for me is just an inverted balance so that we can have an easy starting point. And what about the difficulty? Are they really all ranked in order? Well, that of course depends on your body and your skill set. But generally speak, the earlier skills are going to be easier than the later skills for most people and most body types that is. Of course, there always exceptions and the categories can have different skill levels as well. Rolls tend to be easier than aerials for example. But I didn't want to mash everything up like crazy, so we follow the charm skill categories. Cow is handstands, aerials, rolls, macacos, elbow levers in order. Finishing the beginner handstands with a crow. Beginner aerials start with the upright butterfly kick. That's the first of three aerial branches. Next, we have the rise, which is the backwards leaning branch. And then we have the aerial itself, which is the most inverted one of the skills. The tornado kick has great transfer and utility for the rise later. I love it as a beginner skill. Everyone can start that can look amazing when perfect. The touch star jump teaches a low chest take off position important for the rise later on. And to improve the slanted jumping cartwheel, you try to get more frames in the air every jump. And the side view shows how we're not completely inverted. That's different for the straight jumping cartwheel that has much more of a gymnastics aesthetic to it and we completely invert as you can see from this back view. This could also be called a classic dive [music] cartwheel. Beginner rolls starting with a fisherman hip roll. I've taught this to 80-year-olds as well as to 5-year-olds. It's super fun to warm up just like the belly roll is. Everyone can do it on their first try. The seated backwards shoulder roll is already a little bit more difficult though. But start on a soft ground, warm up your neck, take it slowly and you should have this down in a session or so. And when you do, you already have a learned the next skill, the kneeling forward shoulder roll because you can literally reverse the backwards shoulder roll. Next, the sideways arching roll. Looks easy, can be deceptively tricky. The square roll is a typical gymnastics roll. Great for tight tuck, good to practice on soft ground and not recommended for parkour. The half invert roll starts like [music] a backwards square roll. You cross over your feet and then, well, you flip the other way around. This is the full invert roll, also sometimes called a neck roll or suitcase roll. I know a bunch of BJJ clubs who have this in their standard warm-up. Backward square roll, please warm up your neck for this one. The single leg backward arching roll. Isn't it beautiful? It's like its own little contained flow that you can do super slowly and control. I just love it. You'll figure it out. Beginner macacos, macacos, macacos. That's right, the mini one-arm macaco is the starting place for almost everyone, except for the very flexible people who might prefer the mini sweeping macaco. High wall walkovers are not macacos at all. They are if you abide by my categories and just think of them as super flexible bendy person macacos. That's right, we want to get better at bridging and arching in general. So, yes, the high support walkover is also a form of macaco [music] practice at the very least. A great skill in its own right when you use it to teach yourself how to stay stable across shoulders and hips while maintaining the arching shape. The high support two-arm macaco starts on one arm but transitions through two and is often the first way that people get fully inverted. The high sweeping macaco is great to train the far side hip extension, which is a form of learning through constraints. Don't jump off both feet in a bridge walkover if you lack explosiveness. Use your flexibility and do a single leg walkover instead. Beginner elbow levers. I love them because you can just move from six point to five point side elbow lever. It's a super safe and encouraging way to put more [music] weight on your hands and learn to balance. You ready move on to the different four-point elbow lever variations. For the front elbow levers, your elbow is pointing towards the front of your belly or your hip. And for the side elbow lever variations, of course, it's placed towards the side. The four-point balances are stable but fun to figure out. How many variations can you come up with? Next up, a baby freeze. That's how it's called in b-boying or breaking. [music] But, as you know, I like to name things literally so that even someone who's a complete beginner can kind of guess what we mean when we say three-point knee plus hip elbow lever. The front elbow lever is sometimes called a croc in the circus and hand balancing world. And with three points, we can get almost as creative or maybe even more creative than with the four-point positions. Be creative and play around. Side elbow levers are usually called QDRs in Capoeira, which stand for queda de rins. And I've no idea how to pronounce that correctly. But as you know, I'm inspired by all the arts and I cannot get enough from these interesting acrobatic variations. Like the near side elbow lever spin, which obviously needs to be followed by the far side elbow lever [music] spin. Add a foot switch in between and you can already make your very own little flow out of these two moves. By the way, if you're a beginner and you want to learn these skills with ease in just 15 minutes a day, [music] then check out the AcroBody community. Link is in the description. All right, let's jump back in. Intermediate skills. That dramatic pause felt absolutely necessary for our 180 cartwheel. That's right, in my book, these are already intermediate skills. Not too easy for the average adult. And if you can master them with ease, then well, I invite you to try out these contra ipsi cartwheel variations. The skill ceiling is nearly infinite when it comes to cows. If you think you're done, you can just start improving [music] them, making them cleaner, and sooner or later a completely new door will open to you. Like the forward cartwheel. This is one of my absolute favorite skills. It has [music] the elegance of a front walkover and the ease of a regular cartwheel if you can do it well. And it gets you straight to the slanted front handspring, which of course is just a teaser for what's to come later. A Gumby has the signature arching shape right in [music] the middle. Let's jump into our intermediate handstand starting with our forearm stand followed by the crane. Now, we'll spend more time balancing on two hands and raise our center of mass with the back to wall split handstand hold. Avoid using your feet to push off the wall and instead shift your center of mass slowly. The same holds true for the chest to wall split handstand hold. Keep midline tension and use fingertip pressure to continuously rebalance yourself. Handstand walking on the other hand is continuously falling forward and catching yourself and you're building confidence without a wall, which is essential for the free standing split handstand hold, which now also requires that you know how to kick up and catch yourself. Starting intermediate aerials with our horizontal butter fly kick followed by the far hand support aerial, which teaches you how to invert and jump while giving you the safety of the second hand. Our mini aerials are progressing by kicking each foot higher than the level of the hips and in general, we're now collecting more and more airtime and aerial awareness. In the all fours rise, you can try to spot the ground even while you're in the air and the two-handed cart flip teaches you how to be springy and snap both feet together to the ground quickly. While the far hand cart flip is ideal to teach you a low chest take off with a powerful kick that's needed for the far hand webster variation. Topping off the intermediate aerials with a late touchdown [music] rise. You take off more or less upright, but invert at the last moment. So hands and feet touch the ground at the same time. The intermediate rolls will now require more momentum to work out. That's what makes them challenging and why I recommend to learn those on softer ground, including the straddle bent arm 180 roll. And if you're up for a random side quest, then combine the side elbow levers with a straddle 180 roll to learn your windmills. The backward arching roll is now done entirely without foot support. The bridge rotation roll can actually be done both as a square [music] roll and as a shoulder roll. And the unique flow and momentum of these last two makes them my favorite in [music] the intermediate rolling category. Back to macacos. The unique thing about momentum start is that we elevate the hip before the hand is planted on the ground. Even though that's just one two or three frames, it already prepares us for more advanced variations like the fisherman's squat ipsy macaco. Ipsy just means same side, which means we're pushing off the right foot and right hand at the same time. Whereas for the pistol seat contra macaco, we're pushing off the right foot and the left hand at the same [music] time. As always, if you want to build a truly robust skill set, you want to include all of them in your training. By the way, as a rule of thumb for soft acro skills, all of them are solvable through either flexibility, strength, or momentum. And all of them are scalable like the head bridge walkovers I'm demoing here. The perfectly square macaco is a true crown skill because by default we all macaco a little bit to the side. Whereas for the perfectly square macaco, we want to exit at the exact same angle we started. And this is another one of my favorites, the backward cartwheel. In part because you can chain them so beautifully together and in part because they're a perfect mirror image of the forward cartwheel. The two-point front elbow lever. Same base of support as a handstand, much easier to balance. Followed by a hop into a knee and hip elbow lever. Right, our baby freeze. If you can now include those dynamic switches, it means you're now at a different level of skill. The sweep into a knee and hip elbow lever is also called a coffee grinder to baby freeze. I absolutely respect the origins and traditions of all of these beautiful variations, just like the mini cartwheel to two-point elbow lever is a role to queda de rins in capoeira. Just one moment. Are you a mover over 35 and you've hit your intermediate plateau, but you know in the depth of your heart that you still want to learn advanced skills? [music] Then check out the Movement Freedom Game Plan. The link is in the description. There I give you the full breakdown how I teach my students to progress every single practice year after year for decades to come. I think you'll celebrate that video. Now, let's jump back into advanced skills. The inside lunge cartwheel is an advanced a lateral pattern to coordinate [music] that includes a leg switch that is easily missed if you don't observe closely. The hever sao or just reverse sao [music] is a spinning arching cartwheel. Superseded in difficulty by the one-arm reverse sal and now we're getting more dynamic with a front handspring [music] step out followed by the helicoputero, my absolute favorite arching cartwheel skill. For our advanced handstands, we're getting into more challenging holds including the tuck handstand hold and the straight handstand hold. Of course, there are always exceptions for who will find what most challenging, but the general direction still holds. The headstand press is easier than a bent arm press which is easier than a side press to handstand [music] which are still easier than a pike press to handstand. And when you can fluidly change shapes while you're balancing the handstand, then of course your handstand control is at a next level which is needed to be able to cartwheel into a straight handstand or finally macaco straight into a handstand. I do want to make one thing clear here. There is no skill ceiling. You could learn a back handspring and catch yourself in a handstand. You can learn a one-arm handstand. The ceiling expands infinitely high, but these 140 skills right here in this video, they're all attainable for the average adult with a regular person schedule. You don't have to become a circus artist or a full-time performer [music] or a master instructor in order to learn these. You can be a parent or a police officer. You can be a high school teacher or a physiotherapist with a packed schedule. The point is that if you want to master movement and you want to move playfully for the coming not just years but decades with your kids and maybe grandkids or at least your friends and you have been fascinated by mastering your movement in acrobatics. And you felt stuck or you didn't know where to start learning a new skill, then now you at least have a list of 140 skills that make it easy to map out the new path and get excited about all the different skills you can still learn. Just like I'm still learning the backward roll to handstand. At the end of a long day, that was my absolute best attempt. And the bridge walkover was my absolute nemesis after recovering from a disk hernia, but that is half the point of all these skills. I pursue them because in the process I show myself that I've become more capable, that even injury is nothing that can hold me back in the long run, and [music] that movement freedom is truly a lifelong pursuit. And these are two things all my students have in common. Number one, they see movement as one of their top three priorities in life. Of course, there's family, there's our career, but then there's [music] our physical well-being and our health. And finding a fun way to engage with it and not one [music] that is full of shoulds and musts is what turns it from an obligation into the adventure of a lifetime. As you can tell, I'm drifting from the practical into the philosophical, which for me is a sign that maybe I've said enough [music] so far. If, however, you want help with these intermediate and advanced skills, and you want to learn with a little bit more ease, more structure, more playfulness, and more camaraderie, [music] then watch the Movement Freedom Game Plan video I linked in the description. There, I'm giving you my full run-through of the system that took 12 years, thousands of teaching hours, and studying sports science to put together in its final form. All right, I'll see some of you in that video, in the Movement Freedom Game Plan. Link is in the description. And I'll leave you with the last advanced elbow lever variations. By the way, this is the one skill that made arching acrobatics fun and achievable for me from the start. What is that one skill that unlocks all the others for you? I'll let you ponder that for the rest of the video. I'm I'm one last time for the final closing words, which is of course that all these individual skills that really unfold and expand >> [music] >> when you start piecing them together. And that's where true movement mastery and beauty of movement [music] come together. You're you're still here even after watching 140 skills >> [music] >> and you're not yet moved. That means please please download the poster below. Just print it out once for fun. I mean what can happen? Worst case scenario you print out that poster, you stick it on the wall, you circle some of the skills that come easy to you. You find they're a little bit tricky and boom you get hooked for life learning an amazing movement art. I don't know of any cooler ways to stay fit, healthy and agile. Or or you still not convinced? Like what's the soft acro thing? Why does Aaron keep mentioning charm skills? In that case you might just want to check out this video next. That's that's it. I don't have any more. I'll see you there, okay? I'll see you there.