Fortunately, these past few weeks haven’t been all sick and no play. We wrapped up our 6-week silks intro class toward the end of January. Trying something new, and active, together was a great experience.
Matthew made it all the way to the top on the night of our last class.
From here, we could have moved on to the Silks 1 class. Many people choose to repeat the Silks Intro & Strength Building. We opted to continue building our strength and practicing what we learned in the intro class by going to the open aerial sessions (essentially an open gym to practice on your own). Unfortunately, “open” does NOT equal free, but we bought a punch card, which brings down the cost a bit.
We skipped a week between our final class and our first open aerial. At first, I felt like I’d lost a lot in those two weeks, but then I warmed up and got in the swing of things.
Matthew pulled off this move at open aerials. He was the only male in our intro class, and I think all of the females envied the muscle-building benefits of testosterone. Unfair advantage!
We’ve been taking advantage of playground equipment to sneak in extra upper body work, and we just bought a pull-up bar so we can continue some strength building at home.
Aerials are a lot of fun, and you get a great work-out (you build strength quickly when lifting your own body weight!) without the monotony of a traditional gym (something I don’t really mind, but Matthew hates).
The open aerial punch card will take us up to the start of gardening season, when Matthew’s time will be a lot more limited. I’m not sure what we’ll do after that. We’d both like to continue, but, in addition to making the time, it’s not a cheap hobby. Eventually, we’d like to be in a place where we can have our own small rigging (a rigging is what the aerial apparatus — whether silk, lyra, rope, or trapeze — hangs from), so we can practice without the gym fees, and at times that are most convenient for us.
Her Green Life 
Look out Cirque du Soleil! This sort of thing would probably scare the pants off of me – I’m not terribly fond of heights, nor do I like activities that require one to trust one’s equipment. But it certainly does look like an upper body workout!