“Straighten your leg and point your toes!”
“Elvis your pelvis – tuck that tailbone!”
“Squeeze your tushie!”
“Connect your ribs and your hips!”
“THUTT muscles engaged!”
That, friends, is the sound of technique being taught. For our purposes today, the term technique refers to a way of correctly, safely, and efficiently performing an activity. When should you start cuing your students for technique? Yesterday, friends. Yesterday.
Why Teach Technique from the Get-Go?
There’s a lot more to teaching than just showing someone a handful of moves and hoping they complete them without dying. We want our students to be able to dish up what they’re serving with a dash of flair, a drizzle of autonomy, and a big ole heaping helping of useful placement, engagement, and lines. We’re looking for the primary elements of technique:
- Correct body placement – what the body is doing in space. (“Reach your right hand towards the ceiling and grasp the fabric. Your other right.”) This is where a lot of new instructors want to stop. Do not stop here.
- Appropriate muscle engagement – it’s great to squeeze things, but we want to be squeezing the appropriate things. This becomes wildly important in everything from injury prevention to efficiently executing that triple swirly plummeting zoom drop (“Squeeze your tush and brace your abs as if I were going to poke you in the stomach. I probably won’t, but it’s good to be prepared.”)
- Lines & maintaining essential tension – lengthening limbs, stabilizing the core, and discouraging your students from flopping around and gasping like goldfish out of the bowl (“Viagra-vate your legs and feet! Reeeeeach with your toes and pretend you don’t have knees.“)
“But it’s just a bent knee – is it really that big a deal?”
Yes, it is. Technique and tension are foundations of circus arts. A bent knee tells me a lot about what muscles my student is (not) engaging, and that laxity often travels right up the kinetic chain (floppy foot -> slightly bent knee -> core disengaged = a poor foundation). That poor foundation may just mean the student is working way harder than they need to, OR, it could put them at risk of significant injury.
New teachers often feel that muscle engagement & lines are best left until a student has “gotten” a move – kind of like the icing on the cake. Problem is, once a student – particularly an adult – has gotten used to working with crappy lines and zero tension, you have a way of working that isn’t going to yield a particularly good cake. In fact, it’s going to be a hot mess. A cake made without baking powder won’t rise, and an aerial foundation built on ignoring technique and rushing them on to trick after trick means your student won’t rise either. Literally. I think I’ve beaten (get it? beaten?) this metaphor to death, let’s wrap it up.
When should you begin cuing for technique and lines? YESTERDAY, friends. First time in splits? Straighten your knees and engage your whole leg. First time sitting on trapeze? Lengthen your back and viagra-vate your legs and feet. First handstand? Push the floor away. Do not wait, do not pass go, do not collect $200. Cue for technique and lines today, this hour, this minute. Once you are sure a student is secure, check their technique. Students may have to hear you repeat your cues for YEARS before they connect the dots and actually engage whatever it is, or straighten whatever you’ve been hollering at them to straighten. That’s OK. It will happen eventually, and they know what they’re aiming for, even if it takes a bazillion tries. Make like a broken record and TEACH THAT TECHNIQUE. Love and pull-ups, Laura