What Aerial Training Actually Does To Your Brain (And Why That Matters More Than You Think)

May 13

Every aerialist has experienced it. You walk into the studio carrying the weight of the day — the mental noise, the unfinished to-do list, the low-level hum of anxiety that follows you everywhere — and somewhere between the warm-up and the first climb, it goes quiet. Not because you decided to stop thinking. Because your brain simply did not have the bandwidth for anything else.

Most people attribute this to the physical demand of training. You are tired, so you stop ruminating. But that explanation undersells what is actually happening neurologically. Aerial training does not just distract your brain. It actively engages it in a way that very few other movement practices can replicate — and the mental health implications of that are significant, specific, and backed by research.

The Proprioceptive Demand Is Unlike Almost Anything Else

Proprioception is your body's ability to sense its own position in space without relying on vision. It is the internal GPS that tells you where your limbs are, how your joints are moving, and how your muscles are working — even when you cannot see them. In everyday life, this system operates largely in the background. In aerial training, it is front and centre.

When you are upside down, rotating, transitioning between positions mid-air, or holding a static shape against gravity, your nervous system is processing an enormous volume of positional information in real time. Your proprioceptors — the sensory receptors embedded in your muscles, tendons, and joints — are firing constantly, sending feedback to your brain about where you are and what adjustments need to be made. The brain, in turn, is sending signals back to your muscles to maintain control.

This feedback loop is not passive. It requires active, sustained neurological engagement. And that engagement is, by definition, incompatible with rumination. You cannot be simultaneously processing a complex proprioceptive environment and replaying an argument from three days ago. The brain does not have the capacity for both at once.

Research by Kosma and Erickson, published in the Journal of Dance Education in 2020, examined the embodied qualities of aerial practice and found that cognitive and sensory bodily awareness are central to all stages of skill acquisition in aerial arts. The study noted that overreliance on external cues — like mirror viewing — can actually diminish proprioceptive accuracy, reinforcing the idea that aerial training, at its best, is an internally-driven neurological practice.

Interoception: The System You Did Not Know Aerial Was Training

Proprioception is the more familiar concept, but interoception is arguably the more important one for mental health. Interoception refers to the process by which your nervous system senses, interprets, and integrates signals originating from within the body — your heartbeat, your breath, your gut, the subtle internal landscape of your physical state. It provides a moment-by-moment mapping of what is happening inside you, across both conscious and unconscious levels.

This matters enormously for mental health. A landmark review published in Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging by Khalsa and colleagues in 2018 established clear links between compromised interoceptive function and a range of psychiatric conditions, including depression, anxiety disorders, eating disorders, and addiction. The research suggests that the ability to accurately sense and interpret internal bodily signals is not just a nice-to-have — it is foundational to emotional regulation and psychological wellbeing.

More recently, Greenwood and Garfinkel's 2025 review in the Annual Review of Psychology confirmed that interoception is intricately linked with emotional experience, and that altered interoception is observed across anxiety, depression, PTSD, and other conditions characterised by emotional dysregulation.

Aerial training, by demanding constant internal body awareness — where is my pelvis, what is my shoulder doing, can I feel the connection between my hip flexors and my core — actively trains interoceptive accuracy. You are not just building physical skill. You are building the capacity to sense and interpret your own internal state with greater precision. And that capacity has direct implications for how you regulate your emotions, manage stress, and experience your own mental health.

The Research On Aerial Practice And Mental Health Is Specific

It is one thing to say that exercise is good for mental health. That is well-established and not particularly interesting. What is more interesting is research that looks specifically at aerial practice and its psychological effects — and that research exists.

A 2021 quasi-experimental study by Kosma, Erickson, Savoie and Gibson, published in Research in Dance Education, examined whether performative aerial practice — training that incorporated dancing, emotional expression, and storytelling alongside skill development — produced greater mental health benefits than skill-based training alone. The findings were notable. Depression and stress decreased over time across both groups, with a medium effect size for stress reduction (Cohen's d = 0.55). The researchers also found that the performative and expressive elements of aerial practice were key to sustaining engagement and love of movement — suggesting that the artistic dimension of what we do is not separate from the therapeutic dimension. It is part of it.

This aligns with the theoretical framework proposed by Payne, Levine and Crane-Godreau in their 2015 paper in Frontiers in Psychology on somatic experiencing. Their work argues that bottom-up processing — directing attention to internal bodily sensations rather than cognitive or emotional content — is a powerful mechanism for nervous system regulation. Aerial training, which requires exactly this kind of sustained internal attention, may function as a form of somatic regulation that most practitioners are engaging in without ever naming it as such.

Why Losing Access To Training Hits Differently

If you have ever been injured and found that the loss of training affected your mental health in a way that felt disproportionate to simply missing exercise, this is why. You were not just losing a physical outlet. You were losing a primary nervous system regulation tool — one that trained your interoceptive accuracy, demanded your full proprioceptive attention, and provided a reliable environment in which your brain could be fully present.

Understanding this distinction matters for how you manage those periods. It is not weakness to find injury or enforced rest psychologically difficult. It is an accurate response to losing something that was doing significant neurological work on your behalf. And it is a reason to take the return to training seriously — not just physically, but in terms of rebuilding that nervous system relationship with the apparatus.

What This Means For How You Train

The neurological benefits of aerial training are not automatic. They depend on the quality of internal attention you bring to the practice. Training that is rushed, distracted, or purely performance-focused — drilling a skill without attending to the internal experience of executing it — will produce less of the interoceptive and proprioceptive benefit than training that is deliberate, internally-focused, and attentive to what the body is actually doing and feeling.

This is one of the reasons that the Smarter, Not Harder philosophy is not just about injury prevention. It is about getting the full neurological return on the investment you are making every time you show up to train. Slower, more deliberate conditioning work. Ground-based practice that builds internal awareness before adding the complexity of the apparatus. Attention to what your body is telling you, not just what it is producing.

Your brain is not just along for the ride in aerial training. It is doing the work. And when you train in a way that honours that, you get back far more than physical skill.

References

Kosma, M., Erickson, N., Savoie, C.J. & Gibson, M. (2021). The effectiveness of performative aerial practice on mental health and the love of movement. Research in Dance Education, 22(2). DOI: 10.1080/14647893.2020.1784868
Kosma, M. & Erickson, N. (2020). The Embodiment of Aerial Practice: Body, Mind, Emotion. Journal of Dance Education, 20(4), 224-233. DOI: 10.1080/15290824.2019.1622706
Khalsa, S.S., Adolphs, R., Cameron, O.G., Critchley, H.D., Davenport, P.W., Feinstein, J.S. et al. (2018). Interoception and mental health: a roadmap. Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging, 3(6), 501-513.
Greenwood, B.M. & Garfinkel, S.N. (2025). Interoceptive Mechanisms and Emotional Processing. Annual Review of Psychology, 76, 59-86.
Payne, P., Levine, P.A. & Crane-Godreau, M.A. (2015). Somatic experiencing: using interoception and proprioception as core elements of trauma therapy. Frontiers in Psychology. DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00093