What Learning My Straight-Arm Invert (Again) Actually Taught Me

I've learned the straight-arm invert three times in my life. Once as a child in a travelling circus school, once as an adult jamming with friends in a warehouse, and once more after the pandemic, in a body that had changed. Each time taught me something different about how this skill works, and each time taught me the same thing about progress: it starts long before you land the full move.

Learning it as a child, between surgeries

I started circus at 8, in a small circus school for kids that travelled and put on shows. I trained for those shows at 11 and again at 13, and in between I was having surgery on both legs. I still prepared for the show while I was recovering. I learned the lines, the movement, the outline of the whole piece, but I couldn't practise my own part. By the time we were training the show properly, I was mostly recovered. One of those years I did aerial. The other year I didn't, because I couldn't train enough for it.

The technique I was taught back then wasn't explained in any way that told me what my body was meant to be doing. The same was true of the pullover. Nobody broke it down in terms of anatomy, so I could copy a shape without understanding why it worked, or why, on a given day, it didn't.

Fifteen, and the end of it for a while

At 15, I started dislocating my knees, more than once. My acrobatics teacher told me I probably shouldn't take the risk anymore, and my surgeon confirmed it. That was the part that frustrated me most. I wasn't ready to let go of something I loved, and I was being told to.

What I did instead turned out to matter later. At 16 I started lifting weights, and I joined small dance classes in my hometown. Nothing that felt dangerous, but enough to fill my creative cup. I danced for three years before I left for university, and I kept dancing while I was there. Aerial, though, stayed on hold for more than a decade.

Coming back at 28, with no classes to go to

I didn't return to aerial until 2013, when I was 28 and living full-time in London. Even then, it wasn't through classes. It was friends meeting in a warehouse or a hall, showing each other things and jamming. Accessible aerial classes barely existed at that point. There was no studio hire like there is now and no aerial fitness culture, only a few expensive specialist schools that weren't an option for me. So I learned what I could from the people around me.

What made it click

The straight-arm invert made sense only once I became a coach in 2015 and started studying anatomy properly. Strength was never the missing piece. I'd been lifting since I was 16. What was missing was knowing how to connect that strength to the skill: what should be happening at the shoulder, the hip and through the core, rather than copying a shape or lifting heavier. Once I started building cross-training programmes that fed into specific aerial skills, the invert I'd first attempted as a child finally clicked.

Coming back after the pandemic

The most recent rebuild was after COVID. It took me a year and a half to two years to get back to a straight-arm invert I was happy with. I'd put on some weight over that period, and perimenopause has added a little more since. Not a huge amount, but enough to change how the skill feels to hold.

Coming back after time away carries a particular fear: the assumption that everything you built has gone, and that the only way forward is to relearn it all from scratch. That assumption is mostly wrong, and I want to say so clearly, because I believe it stops more people from coming back than the physical reality does.

What I found, after the pandemic and every other time I've rebuilt, is that the underlying strength and body awareness didn't disappear. What had gone quiet was the specific coordination and confidence for that exact position, and that comes back faster than people expect when you train it directly.

The fundamentals that mattered every time

Across every version of learning this skill, the same small set of things mattered. Shoulder position and control under load. Hip flexion strength, because a huge amount of what makes an invert work happens at the hip, not only in the arms. Core compression, holding the connection between ribcage and pelvis under load, which lets the shoulder and hip work do their job without the position collapsing. And consistent, honest practice of the position itself, rather than an ever-growing list of accessory drills that never get enough focus to transfer.

Research on gymnastics still rings, the closest studied cousin of our straight-arm hold work, points the same way. A systematic review of 37 studies found that strength and hold elements carry a high training load, that specific preconditioning exercises help prepare for them, and that the main focus of strength work should be muscular coordination, not raw strength alone [1]. That matches what I lived: the strength was there for years before the coordination joined it up.

Not sure which link in your chain is the weak one? My free Kinetic Chain Assessment takes a few minutes and shows you where your invert is breaking down.

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What my students are teaching me right now

For the last two months, my aerial hoop classes have followed one theme: something I call the shot put spin. It's a low spin where you hold the bar from the top and spin the hoop around you. It looks like a shot put, almost as if you want to throw the hoop. It asks for a lot of skill, spin, resilience and adaptation, and because you climb sideways into it, it's a big oblique workout.

Most of my students haven't landed the full move yet. Every one of them is progressing. I keep the theme consistent for six to eight weeks and change the flow around it, so each class builds a version of the move that's accessible to everyone in the room. The people who come regularly can feel themselves getting closer, even when the finished shape isn't there yet.

That's the same lesson the invert taught me three times over. The partial versions are not a waiting room before the real thing. They are the training.

Progress before the full move

There's a version of aerial culture that only counts the moment you land it. I've stopped measuring that way, for myself and for the people I coach. Growth has many aspects: control you didn't have last month, a position that no longer scares you, a body that recovers better between sessions. None of that shows up in a highlight reel, and all of it is progress.

If you're standing at the edge of the straight-arm invert right now, wondering whether you have to start from nothing, you don't. You need the right few things, understood properly, done consistently.

Where SAIL fits

This is why I built the Straight Arm Invert Lab (SAIL) around this exact process, the one I wish someone had taught me in that travelling circus school. It isn't a sprawling programme with dozens of drills competing for your attention. It's built around the handful of fundamentals that make the straight-arm invert work, explained properly, whether you're learning it for the first time or coming back to it the way I have, more than once.

Explore SAIL, the Straight Arm Invert Lab

References

[1] Malíř, R., Chrudimský, J., Šteffl, M., & Stastny, P. (2023). A Systematic Review of Dynamic, Kinematic, and Muscle Activity during Gymnastic Still Rings Elements. Sports (Basel), 11(3), 50. https://doi.org/10.3390/sports11030050