What Members Are Saying: Progress Without the Overwhelm

This month I've talked a lot about a belief I want to shift: that cross-training for aerialists has to be complicated to actually work. I could keep making that case in the abstract, but I think it lands better in the words of the people actually living it. So this post is mostly theirs, not mine.

Hands-On, Even Digitally

One piece of feedback I've had more than once recently, and one that genuinely means a great deal to me, is that coaching through an app can still feel hands-on. That's not a given. Remote coaching can easily become impersonal, a generic plan delivered at a distance with little real attention paid to the individual on the other end of it.

What that feedback tells me is that the structure I've built, regular check-ins, video review, programming that actually responds to where someone is rather than where a generic week-twelve template assumes they should be, is doing what I intended it to do. Distance doesn't have to mean disconnection. It just has to be built deliberately, rather than assumed to happen automatically.

It Never Felt Like It Was Built for an Elite Athlete

The second piece of feedback I want to highlight is about fit, not just delivery. A member told me recently that the reason a programme finally stuck, after several previous attempts hadn't, was that it never once felt like it assumed an athlete's schedule, an athlete's recovery capacity, or an athlete's freedom from the rest of life's demands.

That's deliberate. I don't build programmes for the aerialist with unlimited time and a fully kitted-out home gym, because that isn't who most of the people I coach actually are. I build them for people with jobs, families, caregiving responsibilities, and a genuinely full week, because that's the reality structure needs to work inside if it's going to last.

What Progress Without Overwhelm Actually Looks Like

It's worth being concrete about this, because simple training can sound vague from the outside. In practice, for the members giving this feedback, it tends to look like a handful of specific habits: a minimum viable session for chaotic weeks, ten minutes rather than nothing. A single weekly review question instead of daily tracking. A traffic-light approach to deciding whether to train, modify, or rest on a given day, rather than a rigid binary of did the full session or failed.

None of these are complicated ideas. That's rather the point. They're simple enough to actually stick, which is worth more, over a year, than an elaborate system that gets abandoned by week three.

The Thread Running Through August

If you've been following along this month, you'll recognise the theme by now. It started with an honest account of my own summer, training with almost nothing while caring for my mum, and the discovery that simple, consistent training held up far better than I expected. It continued through the case for pull and roll strength as a genuine foundation rather than an optional extra, and through the argument that busy people need a different kind of plan, not more hours in the day.

This feedback from members is really the proof of concept for all of it. Simple, well-sequenced, life-shaped training works. Not despite being simple, but because it is.

If You've Been on the Fence

Pull and Roll Lab and SAIL are both closing this week. Cart closes Sunday 30 August, and there are only 12 spots left in this round of PRL. If you've been sitting on the fence, reading along this month but not yet deciding, this is genuinely the week to make that call.

Neither programme asks you to overhaul your life to fit it. Both are built the way everything in this post has described: structured, foundational, and designed to work with the time you actually have, not the time a more idealised version of you might have.

What's Coming Next

I want to be honest about where Fitfrenchkiss is heading, because I think it matters for the people reading this.

You don't have to train like an Olympic athlete to have a meaningful, sustainable aerial practice. You never did. But a lot of what exists online assumes you do, or at least that you want to, and I think that quietly pushes a lot of people out of the conversation before they've even started. That's the thing I most want to change.

Skill-specific programmes are going to keep building here. There's a skin the cat programme in development that may land before the end of the year, possibly early 2027. Retreats are coming too, spaces where we work on foundational skills together, where the focus is on understanding your body and enjoying the process of learning, not on chasing the most advanced or athletic version of aerial possible. I want to create room for the aerialist who wants to train intelligently, sustainably, and with genuine enjoyment, not just the one who wants to collect tricks.

Aerial is for more people than the industry currently makes it look like. That's what I'm building toward, and September is where that work continues.

Thank you for reading this month. I'm glad you're here.