First Day of School!

I'll be rather frank with you: currently, I'm pooped.  There is not much more that I feel like doing today than things involving absolutely minimal body movement.  I currently find myself in fear of how sore I'm going to be tomorrow morning.  I took a one and a half hour nap already today but actually didn't find my muscles to be in too much distress, so it might not end up being so terrible after all.

These first two weeks are essentially devoted to a wide variety of evaluation.  This morning we began with stretching with Deena at 9, and began with our "Physical Assessment" at 9:45.  During this time we attempted and recorded down our physical limits when it comes to many circus related strength tasks.  These included pull ups, push ups, legs-free fabric climbs, regular fabric climbs, length of time of a handstand against the wall, wall sits, hollow body on the ground, L-sits on the trapeze, and V-sits on the trapeze.   It got very tiring toward the end, resulting with many people crawling across the floor to record numbers on their sheets with their very shaky arm muscles.  It was quite funny actually.  :P  I'm not sure if there has been another time that I have done so many exercises where each one is to be held for as long as possible.  Usually things like that would be individual, or when in groups, simply to a certain amount or length of time.  I quickly found it an easy way to make your muscles not listen to you, which I've honestly found to be one of the strangest feelings.

Anyway, that lasted until noon, finishing up at the end with a perhaps 20 minute exercise regarding body awareness and posture.  Afterwards, we all went off to eat our lunches.  Privates and Members Only Open Studio Training started promptly after at 12:30p.  The rule was that for us to go on any sort of an aerial apparatus during this time, we had to have used it before with a NECCA coach.  I have, as I have been here before to practice aerials on numerous other occasions, but there were a bunch of other people who hadn't yet, so it only seemed fair that I'd stick with floor stuff for today.  It actually ended up working out great.  I stretched for longer and harder than I would normally, which is certainly something that I'm looking to be keeping up.  I mixed together a bit of yoga as well as other stretching techniques that I had learned at some places I have trained at.

I had my private with Bill at 1:30p today, which actually ended up exceeding my expectations greatly!  I had seen that with some of the other people who had private lessons with him beforehand that today was mostly devoted to discussion of skills, interests, and where you want to go with all of this.  He was already fairly familiar with many of my strengths and weaknesses, so that part went by rather quickly.  He asked about my splits, which admittedly have almost always been somewhat of a problem for me, and I then showed him what I had.  My right split, as it has been rather consistently for the past two or so years, was almost all the way down.  My middle split was a similar situation, though a teeney bit farther from the floor.  My left split, however, and pretty much as always, was a total disaster area. :P  When I would stretch myself when I was younger, I would always bias myself towards my right leg when piking forward, and my left leg when bending backwards.  My reasoning for this was that it would be the most efficient way to be able to achieve poses involving one leg to front bend, one leg to backbend, and or a front split.  Of course, now I am more familiar with the importance of stretching both sides of the body equally, but I still  have bad habits of starting with my right leg when bending forward, or the same with my left when bending backward, as that usually means it's the side that you're going to end up having had stretched for a longer amount of time, or the only one at all if you get interrupted for some reason.

Anyway, let me get back to what happened at my private. I had always thought in the back of my head that, for 180 degree splits at least, the majority of the flexibility came from the hamstrings in the forward leg. With my recent endeavors with Bikram Yoga, I have been trying very hard to improve my straight leg forward bending with both sides, with which I have seen improvement. I can very easily touch my head to my straight leg's knee, as we do a lot in Bikram Yoga, with my right leg, and do so with a bit of discomfort in my hamstrings and upper back/neck muscles with the left. Even so, I hadn't seen quite as much improvement in my splits, which struck me as somewhat odd. My rather mathematically based intuition would tell me that if you are able to add such and such amount of an angle going forward in a pike, then you should be able to add that same amount of an angle to your split. As I am finding out, due to the way that muscles and tendons are organized in the body, the mechanics of flexibility aren't quite as simple and intuitive as I had always thought.

When I did my splits, Bill pointed out my hip flexors, which are of the muscles that let your hip joints swing your legs backwards, which can be very advantageous to splits as well as backbending, as they allow someone to sometimes almost double their "back" flexibility. I knew this already, but it never occurred to me that it was primarily because of those muscles that I had always had such difficulty with my splits. So he took me to a table where I lied down on my back and let one of my legs hang down off of the edge at the hip, so he could see the extent of my flexibility resulting solely from gravity. Not only did my left leg go lower than the right one, as was to be expected, he was able to determine two more bits of information: 1. that my quad muscles weren't the issue, and rather specifically the hip flexors (my quad flexibility I attribute greatly to Bikram Yoga, fixed firm pose) and 2. that my IT bands were tight. If you were like me, then you have no idea what an IT band is. In full, they're known as iliotibial bands, and run across the outsides of your thighs. Since my leg, when hanging off the edge naturally, let the knee lean towards the outside, he was able to determine those as tight sections. Pretty cool, huh?

He proceeded with stretching my hip flexors, as well as PNFing those muscles by me pushing upwards with my knee, and he resisting from above. PNF is another technical term which stands for proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation, which basically is a method of stretching where one pushes in a direction opposite the stretch (along with resistance against that movement) to tighten and engage the muscles that are to be stretched. Once released, the fatigued muscles have a much easier time relaxing further into a stretch. It's a surprisingly effective technique.

He also did this interesting massagey/ouchey thing for my IT bands in order to loosen them up. I attempted my splits another time afterwards, and they both were significantly lower. My right split was all the way down, and my left one was definitely much further. I was incredibly surprised at how effective these little things really were.

We finished up with some straddle PNF stretching, as well as some handbalancing instruction. He gave me some great additional advice as for which muscles to engage and which to not in order to create a solid handstand. The information he provided was more specific and fascinating than any other advice I had received from another instructor before. It's so incredible how much one can be done in just a half hour.

I finished up the rest of Open Studio with more floor stretching/yogaish stuff. Today was a very long day for my muscles, and have been trying my best this evening to give them the appropriate break that they deserve. It's been a long while since I've trained so much in one day, the last time I can remember I've trained as such was at Smirkus Camp last year, as well as the same year's NECCA Aerial Skills Workshop. It's been quite a wakeup for my body.

Tomorrow I have my orientation for the Outer Limits Gym at 10, and plan on doing some more Open Studio training following that at around 11:30. I will definitely need to stretch out the soreness I am bound to accumulate for tomorrow morning. There are no official group classes or privates tomorrow, but the studio is open from 10 to 5:45p, so there's a lot of ways that you can spend your Wednesdays. Thursday is another assessment day with a similar schedule as today, and Friday is a running/gymnastics day. I'll be sure to keep you guys up to date on how both of those go.

Anyway, that's the gist of what's been up now. It's been a wonderful day today, as I have now at least been acquainted with the majority of the people here in the program. Everyone is very nice and there is a wide variety of talents to be shared. It is all oh so very exciting.

Trevor