That is actually one of the most favourite ‘aerial’ activities I’ve ever tried! And I did spend quite some time doing Aerial Silks classes (I was doing these in London at Southwark gymnastics club). It just looks awesome visually, a lot of fun to learn, and is quite an unusual activity to do.
It is not easy, of course: requires a lot of upper body and grip strength, looks much better if you are flexible, often quite painful leaving lots of bruises on the body… Good news – as someone who has learned from scratch I can guarantee that it’s ‘learnable’ and quite fast 🙂 No initial skills/strength required.
It’s very surprising how fast you can get the upper body strength by just attending the classes regularly! Flexibility seems more difficult but you can get it just by stretching regularly. I have to say that I’m quite flexible, especially after I’ve started doing gymnastics; so I did have a bit of a handicap 😀
I found it one of the most satisfying in terms of ‘result/time spent trying’. There are many things you can learn straight away even without building that strength and as you train, you become stronger and stronger doing much ‘cooler’ things 🙂
The classes I attended in London would usually start with a general warm-up (like running around a bit, some stretching), then we would usually move to some basics like climbing up and down in different styles, and after it, we would move to learning different wraps and drops 🙂
You would start with some simple stuff moving on as you’re building your strength and confidence…
It is also a very ‘social’ activity – you usually try/learn/fail/succeed the same thing as the other people in your group, so, there’s lots of cheering, having fun together… You can of course always just do your thing, but for me personally having fun with other people is quite important 😀
I totally recommend it for everyone to try 🙂 By the way, some people do the same skills using the rope instead of silks. Mad people 🙂 We had the rope at Southwark gymnastics but it was sooooooo painful!!! Silks are painful enough, lol, but pain and bruises go away eventually, the body adjusts. Probably the same with rope but I don’t wanna explore it 😀
I stopped these classes when I moved away from London… Miss them a lot, would definitely like to do it again when I have some time… It’s a disadvantage to love trying new stuff – never enough time 🙂
By the way, I’ve tried it once in summer in Uppsala, where they have Silks classes at Uppsala Danscenter. Those classes are pretty nice. A was mostly doing aerial hoop (it was a joint class) but had a go at trying to remember my silks skills 😉
