For the first two weeks of September Fern was visiting me in Kigali. We decided to take advantage of us being in the same place and picked Acroyoga as our Broadener for the month. It was me that suggested this, but admittedly this was because I knew Fern really wanted to do it, not because I was very keen. I’m not flexible at all and my hamstrings are in a pretty bad way: a few years ago I tore my hamstring and glute apart in a snowboarding accident, a year after I’d destroyed them dislocating my hip wakeboarding; they’ve been problematic ever since. I don’t like looking silly and I’m even worse at being bad at things, neither of which bode well for the challenge! We’d tried to do Acroyoga once or twice before, but never really had much success. We also tried to go to my first yoga class at Lululemon’s Sweatlife Festival in London, but we were both enjoying it so little we left before it was halfway through. I believed we’d have fun doing this broadener, and probably learn a few things, but I didn’t think we’d actually achieve much.
Fern had diligently and enthusiastically done some research and had us warming up with me pressing her up and down with my feet on her hips as she pivoted around her feet, which were firmly on the floor. This seemed surprisingly easy, we were going to nail it!
Next Fern had us doing something called “box”. I would try and explain this, but I didn’t understand it when Fern explained it to me using words so I won’t even attempt to, check out the video below. As you can see, we were a little wobbly, but we did it. I found it fairly hard work, and suspected we looked a little silly, but was pretty excited we’d achieved our first pose-thing.
Next came “Throne”. This is when I started to suspect that this whole Acroyoga thing was just an elaborate excuse for Fern to get me to hold her up in a variety of different ways like some kind of Egyptian pharaoh. I wasn’t wrong. I mean, look at the photo below.
Once we’d got the “Throne” down our confidence was growing. Fern had somehow convinced me that I wasn’t just acting as a slave/human chair for her to pose on top of and I was pretty chuffed that I hadn’t yet dropped her on her head. Then we returned to me letting Fern walk all over me. Literally. I don’t even know what this one was called, but it basically just involved Fern standing on my shins. My suspicions that I was going to spend the next week and a half being trodden on and climbed over were quickly forgotten as we managed our first sequence. We went from throne to the shin-standing-thing. At this point I was unashamedly excited. I’d entered into this Broadener mainly to humour Fern, and I didn’t think we’d actually manage to do anything like a sequence! It wasn’t pretty, it wasn’t smooth, but it actually felt really good.
This acroyoga thing was pretty easy. We’d only done 2 sessions and we’d already nailed a full sequence! I was ready to have Fern doing flips on my feet by the end of the week! I enthusiastically asked Fern “What’s next?” and she told me we were ready to try “flying”. This is the basic move that pretty much every acroyoga video we’d looked at seemed to involve. It looked dead-easy. People could do it with just one leg and no arms from the “base” (read: chair/carpet/slave/muppet that agreed to be on the bottom/me). It turns out not to be as easy as everyone on the internet makes it look. We were rubbish at it. Really rubbish. We kept having a go, failing, stopping, watching the video of ourselves, coming up with some kind of excuse or reason for failing, and then repeating the process. Rainy season was starting to rear its head in Rwanda, and this was pretty symbolic of our mood as we hid from the weather in the concrete-floored living room getting frustrated. This culminated in me throwing Fern onto her head on the floor. It was horrible. I was really uncomfortable with the fact that I’d hurt her and we were both frustrated at how useless we were.
Although we didn’t realise it at the time, this crash was a pretty important step in our learning process. After the crash we deciding to stop over-analysing the videos each time we failed and just keep trying. Turns out that was a very good decision and we started to make progress again. The next thing we learnt was a shoulder stand thingy. I like this one. It took a bit of getting used to and was sore on my wrists at first (until I figured out how to place my hands a bit better) but it’s relatively easy for me. Importantly, for building our confidence back up, I feel like there’s a pretty low chance that I’ll drop Fern on her head doing it. I also think it looks pretty cool. We did it quite a lot, we did some variations of it, we even did it on top of a volcano.
With our re-growing confidence and the new approach of trying stuff and not over-analysing videos we returned to trying to “fly”. This time it started to work! It was a great feeling. We managed to create some more sequences and move in and out of it. We were nailing it again!
It was time to try something Fern had been desperate to try: “straddle bat”. Again, it looked dead-easy on the videos on the internet. Again, we were rubbish at it. We failed a lot. This time it was different though. We’d identified that this painful stage of failing and feeling useless was just a part of the process and we needed to be persistent. We continued to fail but we got better. Eventually we managed to get it. Then we managed to incorporate it into a sequence. This time we really were nailing it! I’d set out with the expectations that we might manage one or two poses and now we were coming up with our own sequences moving between multiple poses!
This Broadener was the first one where we really learnt a new skill together. It was much much more fun than I expected. Acroyoga isn’t something that it’s very easy to continue to do together when you live in different hemispheres but I’m sure we’ll continue to do the odd bit when we are together. I really enjoyed going through the learning process together, failing together and then succeeding together. It was a bit of a roller-coaster at times but that made it all the more rewarding. I apologise in advance for all the future photos of us doing poses in silly places on adventures!
Have you tried acroyoga, what were your experiences? Got any tips for us, what should we try next?