How Acrobatics helps a Dancer

Acrobatics is beautiful, dynamic and spectacular, for boys and girls. It develops courage, strength, stamina, coordination, flexibility, jumping abilities, and discipline. Acrobatics unites its power and poise, with grace and beauty to create an intriguing artform.

Give your child the right start in life. Let them experience acrobatics and share in the joy and challenge of this exciting artform that combines athleticism and artistry.

Acrobatics creates major benefits for both your body and mind. It's a great way to stay fit, build mental focus, and prevent injury. Read on to learn about the top health benefits of gymnastics and how it can help improve your child's overall life.

1. Builds strength and flexibility for challenge in life

In Acro, you develop strength and increase flexibility that lasts a lifetime. Not only can this benefit you while you dance or do aerial, but it also protects you so that you can reduce the risk of injuries. It also gives you more control over your body during your routines. As you dance, you'll obviously be toning and building muscle. Because you have to use your muscles to such a large degree while doing acrobatics, it will definitely make you stronger.

You will notice that your muscles begin to gain more definition and that you find it easier to do movements that were hard when you were just starting out. This strength benefits you outside of the studio, too.

2. Enhances balance, coordination and agility

Acrobatics requires a certain amount of balance and coordination to help you perform the moves properly and without risk of injury. As you continue with dance, gymnastics or aerial, you will likely notice that your natural coordination improves as you learn new skills and techniques in Acro.

Acro spends a significant time developing posture and confident body movement. This gives our students the ability to be agile, centered, and to land safely

3. Prevents Injury

A risk of injury is created when rushing through important foundational skills and moving straight to the tricks you want to showcase onstage. In acro, muscle memory is everything. We instill in our students the correct muscle memory by performing a lot of drills, and by only executing tricks that are safe and manageable for their age and level. This way, they will progress properly, and when they enter the world of dance and aerial, we can be confident that they will maintain proper technique while airborne. Not instilling this muscle memory is a recipe for injury when students begin to do acrobatic tricks in their routines.

4. Helps To Strengthen Bones and Prevent Disease

Weight-bearing exercise in acrobatics benefits your bones because it helps them stay in shape and prevents brittleness. Women in particular experience a loss of bone mass as they get older, so engaging in weight-bearing moves from a young age can help preserve bone density and keep women from developing the bone disorders that sometimes come with age.

Because acrobatics helps promote a healthy body, adding it to your routine can help ward off a range of diseases, such as metabolic conditions like diabetes. A regular and consistent routine is the best way to reap the rewards that acro and dance has to offer.

5. Builds Personal Discipline

By nature, an activity like acro, dance or aerial requires a lot of self-discipline because it isn't always an easy endeavor. You will have to be diligent about getting to class, practicing consistently, and sometimes persevering through frustration or discomfort.

We want our students to reach their goals but, most importantly, we want them to be safe and go through the progressions of each trick through their own self discipline. This will help them take ownership of their bodies as they grow into mature dancers AND when they become adults.

6. Challenges the mind and body to reach new goals

Acrobatics cultivates the ability to concentrate and focus on one single task at a time. Put simply, you can't be reading a text and talking with friends and also listening to music as you prepare for a back handspring. This practice requires focus and dedication, a skill you can build on over time.

Acro is progressive. A cartwheel progresses to a side aerial, which progresses to a front aerial. A bridge kick-over progresses to a back walkover, which progresses to a back handspring.

If you gloss over foundational tricks in a student's acro education, there will be inevitable holes that will become apparent later in their training. For example, I met one talented dancer who had many exceptional tricks in her repertoire. However, she never learned how to do a backward roll in her younger years, so, even though she had all the strength and power necessary, she was never able to achieve a round-off back tuck during her peak training years. She was missing a part of her foundation, which resulted in not achieving a high-level trick down the road.

7. It brings students together and has a lifelong impact

Acrobatics is very individual as students progress through their skills. Some students perfect limbering quickly, while other perfect jumps or hand balancing. No matter the stage in their training, students are very supportive of each other. Whenever a student achieves a new skill in their class, they get to ring the bell and the class stops to observe and celebrate the moment. It's the way we build teamwork and respect for each other. And it builds friendships for life.

The skills learned in Acrobatics carry forward into all styles of dance and aerial. As our teams compete they applaud these skills and demonstrate their unique strengths and personalities.

We, as dance teachers, want our students to reach their goals. Our students are keen to be their very best and want to progress as far as they can in Acro, Dance, and Aerial. At South Coast Conservatory, we always encourage our students and group them according to ability. Student evaluations are used to see what level students are at, and where they should be placed. Students understand and respect their Acro class placement and they take ownership of what they need to learn.

Create a strong foundation for your child by enrolling in our acrobatics classes at South Coast Conservatory. We know that your child's development is your top priority. It's ours too. Join our award winning school, voted Best Studio for 15 years in a row, and CHANGE YOUR CHILD'S LIFE THROUGH ACRO and DANCE!