Anti-Gravity Yoga: Hanging Out With The Aerial Yogis

No-one knows exactly how old yoga is. It’s probably older than the Hindu religion, and its roots seem to go back at least 2500 years.

How many new yoga schools started during that time is also not known.

From hot yoga and power yoga to flow yoga by way of hybrids like yogalates and cardioga, it’s an ever-growing field.

What's Anti-Gravity Yoga?

The most recent to find fame is aerial yoga, or anti-gravity yoga. Aerial yoga is a form of yoga performed in a sling, and it’s really a fusion of yoga and a form of acrobatics, aerial silk or aerial ribbons. This is a form of acrobatics built around a broad, hammock-like sling. Aerial yoga uses a sling derived from that used in aerial silk and combines it with yoga poses and a yoga-like outlook on the training. Its inventor, Christopher Harrison, is a former aerial performer and Broadway choreographer, and aerial yoga also draws on Pilates and calisthenics.

In many ways, aerial yoga classes are no surprise to those who have attended a traditional yoga class. They tend to be about an hour to an hour and a half long and to begin and end with short periods of meditation, often performed in the hammock. The hammocks are usually securely suspended from the ceiling, using the same kind of hook that heavy bags or gymnastic rings are suspended from.

What follows is a mixture of yoga asanas and basic gymnastic movements, sometimes hard to distinguish from one another. Aerial straps lend themselves to movements like "skin-the-cats", turning yourself upside down, but they also permit people with less upper body strength or pre-existing injuries to perform some of the more radical inversions that yoga is famous for. If you can't stand upside down, maybe you can hang upside down, and aerial yoga is picking up a devoted following among people with pre-existing back injuries including arthritis and scoliosis, who find that being suspended lessens their symptoms.

The sling itself is a broad hammock, usually as broad as most participants are tall. Usually, it will be left rolled and treated as a kind of soft rope for much of the session, and some movements will be familiar to people who have used the TRX suspension system in their local gym. However, when it’s unrolled into its full glory the larger hammock can allow more complex or sophisticated poses and it obviously has some utility for people who want to develop more strength than traditional yoga necessarily tends to build.

See Also: Beginner's Guide To Yoga

Some experienced yogis who have tried aerial yoga report that there’s less emphasis on the breath than there is during a traditional yoga class, and aerial yoga can feel more like a workout, less like a trad yoga class. However, it does trade off and feed into traditional yoga practice — the strength, balance and mobility that come from yoga will help you get the most out of aerial yoga, and aerial yoga will help improve those attributes.

What Are The Benefits Of Aerial Yoga?

All styles of yoga are thought to offer similar benefits: it's about engaging with your body, relaxing, learning to focus and using your breathing to work into positions. It's associated with a wealth of benefits that have at least some scientific backing, from increased joint health through protection from osteoporosis and arthritis to mood enhancement. 

1: Better For People With Upper Back And Neck Problems

Yoga inversions, like headstands and variations, help improve blood flow to the upper body and can help with circulation and relaxation. But they also put immense pressure on the neck and upper back, especially if preexisting conditions mean the upper back and neck is less supple and more prone to new injuries as a result. Aerial yoga means it's possible to do inversions without weight on the upper back and neck. You can adapt the amount of force you're putting on your arms, moving slings and handles to achieve the right balance. The benefits of traditional yoga practice can be yours without the well-documented dangers of excessive inversions on an inflexible neck.

2: Pleasure

Yoga isn't meant to be a roller coaster. It's about running your attention inward, focusing on gradually allowing yourself to improve rather than pushing yourself or competing with others. But every yoga class has an outward form, and for some people it can be a little dull. Just as the 1970s stereotype of patchouli and cheesecloth put some people off, so the static postures of more traditional yoga don't suit everyone.

3: Strength

Aerial yoga is scaleable, just like ground-based yoga. On the ground, you might use blocks or slings, as well as adjusting the pose itself. In the air, you can adjust the pose — but you can also move the slings. Aerial poses including planks with support moving around your body puts more stress on your core than traditional ground-based yoga, meaning you're getting more of a core workout. "The more you play with the position of your feet, the more body weight you put into it, and that is what will shred your abs," says aerial yogi Samantha Chang.

Read More: A 10-Minute Yoga Workout for Beginners

4: Spinal Decompression

Our spinal bones are part of a system that also includes muscles and soft tissues, and the tough fibrous discs between our vertebrae. These discs are compressible and throughout the day and through our lives they get thinner: many of us are as much as two inches shorter when we go to bed than we are when we get up, largely thanks to compression of the spinal discs. Traditional yoga offers some decompression benefits, but there's nothing like hanging from the ceiling to stretch the spine and decompress the spinal discs, allowing the spine to relax and rejuvenate.