Super Bird Flying Practice

Welcome back to Acro Yoga Family. I am here with Kai and Nikolai, and we are so, I'm excited, are you excited? Yeah. Okay, we are excited to share a little super bird sequence with you, and so today Kai will be flying Nikolai, but you could also do this with adults and each other, and maybe older kids and each other. Sound good? All right, the warm-up today is Kai is going to come onto this mat and Nikolai, nope, Kai's going to be on that mat, Nikolai's going to be on this mat facing towards each other, and they're going to lower onto their bellies. There we go, all the way down. I like it. And from here, hands by the sides, push your hands into the ground, and just reach your shoulders and your toes off. So that is our basic locus pose. Breathing here, right everybody? And lower all the way on down. So you would usually see that in a good old regular yoga class, which I highly recommend. And next up, you're going to reach one arm forward and keep the other arm back and behind you. And now let's lift up one more time. So this is our super bird locus, and you can give your partner a high five. One more high five, lift up a little higher, point through your toes. Are you breathing? Okay, lower on down. Nice job. Yeah, keep breathing, no matter what else you're doing. Let's switch to the other side. Yep, just reach the other arm forward, lift it up, point through your toes, breathe in fully, and give your partner a high five, and maybe a silly face, and another high five, breathing in, lower all the way on down. Take a child's pose. So press your hips back to your heels, and take two or three breath cycles right here, checking in. How are you feeling in this moment? Just noticing. So I really encourage you to make sure you really balance the moments that are super active with some calming breath and a child's pose. So we will come all the way back up to seated, and then Kai, will you roll onto your back with your head facing in this direction? There we go. Nikolai is going to come around in front, and then we're going to get ready to do some L basing, actually. Will you, Kai, lift your legs all the way to the sky, and we're looking for a little bit of a 90 degree here, and you can relax your head down. So can you put your forearms right there? And then can you lean into those forearms, and maybe even lift your legs off the ground? Oh, yep, there we go. So this is the kind of 90 that we're looking for. If the base's feet come in one direction or the other, and you can't hold, it's not going to feel as good once we go up. You guys have done this a couple of times, right? We're looking for heels over hips. This is our basic 90 degree angle bone stacking. We're going to give him one more little test right here.

So place your forearms back there, and now try to lean him to one side, and he's going to come back to center. There he goes, and then lean to one side, and he comes back to center, and then lean towards me, and he comes back to center. So that's a good little test, and it might be even harder than the regular flying. So from here, Kai will place his legs, his bottoms of his feet, the balls of his feet, and we're going to look for toes kind of in towards the belly button, really parallel on the top of the thigh. Sometimes the legs come out, but today we're focusing for front plank and bird on the feet being parallel. And then will you reach for Kai's toes? Do we reach for his toes on the ground? Yep. Will you walk in so you can almost touch his toes? You can bend your legs a little bit more. Stay in this plank. There we go. Keep walking in. There it is. So that's how close we are. That's going to set everybody up for success. And now all I want you to do is gently bend your legs as you give each other a high five, and then come all the way back up. Wait, wait, come back to standing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're just doing some little weight lifting, so we're not going to interlace fingers right there. Come all the way back up to standing. So your job right now as the flyer is just to lean forward and back. So if you find yourself reaching, I want you to bring back into this plank pose. So strong belly. Okay. So you can lower him down, bring into a high five. Oh, that looks really good. And then press him all the way back up once more, just like that. High five. Oh, that was good. Okay, you feel ready? So this time, as he brings you in, he's going to straighten his legs up towards the sky, lifting from his heels. Flyer's fingers are going to come forward like mittens, base his hands out to the side. Here we go. So don't reach for him. Keep your shoulders back. Yep. He's going to lower you in. And now hands lift. Push into his palms. There we go. Perfect. All right. And this was great. As a base, we went right to that 90. Will you show toes towards your nose a little bit more? So come off of your center. So bring your legs out of your stack. Yeah, that happens a lot in the beginning. And so I'm here to make sure the flyer is safe and also bring your legs back, bring your legs back, bring your legs back. And now gentlemen, let's find the stack in your shoulders, push your shoulders to the sky, lift your head looking up high and lift through your toes a little bit. So I'm telling them where I want them to be in space so they can find this 90. I'm also giving a gentle touch in some of those places so that we can help find where we want to be. How's that feel?

Okay. So are you ready for one more thing right here? Okay. You're going to hold this position. Keep zipping your legs together, reaching them up a little tiny bit. Find that strong front plank. Lift your shoulders up a little higher. A lot of core happening right here. And all you're going to do is point and flex through your ankles and you can bend your arms as well. And notice, yep, that's a little flex. And then we have a little point. Notice how much that changes the flyer's body. Do you not like part of that? And then we'll come all the way back up, straighten through the arms, give a little push through the toes. And now we're in. Can you reach your hands back by your sides? Keep lifting through your shoulders. Look up at the sky.

We think it's more fun doing this here or on the ground? On the ground. On the ground. Let's come all the way down to the earth. All right. High five. That was some really strong core. Yeah. We'll take a few breaths right here. And then would you like to fly? Sure. Okay. So help your base up. And then you're going to help. I'm going to base. You're going to spot, okay? You're going to stand right here. And we can find this little counterbalance, so leaning back to come down. So we're not exactly the same size. So I'm going to use all those techniques that we were just looking at. And you're going to come in close. So if he starts to fall, what do you do?

Help bring his feet to the ground. Just like that. I'm not allowed to drop you. So I bring the balls of my toes just around the ASIS. My toes are in parallel and his feet are really close. Yeah, I can touch his toes. So we're going to start with that first little just lean forward with your hips. Keep that strong plank through your body. That looks great. And I bring him back up. So kind of like weightlifting, but I think a little more fun. We'll do that twice more. We can give each other a high five and come back up. And then once more, high five. We don't really need a spotter right there, but it's nice to have somebody helping us out. So now we're going to lean forward. And then I scoop through my heels. Notice how my voice hasn't changed. Because as long as I'm in my bone stacking, this feels really good. All right. How are you doing? All right. You can look up at the sky. And then I'm going to play with point flex and point. And you can see how much that changes my fliers torso. So that's a lot of articulation that I have. Does that feel okay?

All right. Reach your hands by your sides. And here we are in full bird. And then if I'd like to, I can take a little press either in front plank or in front bird. Yeah. My flyer keeps their shape while I move through a nice range of motion. We'll come on down. All right. Help your bases up. We don't want to waste any energy right there. And do you guys want to go into full super bird right now? All right. There you go. So once you get comfortable with your base and your flyer, you don't have to do the presses. You guys can just go right up, right? Okay. So we'll do that right now. We'll bring those feet back to parallel. We'll come in nice and close. Nice. Heel scoop, heels over hips, find the shoulder stack. We're pushing into the hands. And then as soon as we really find a little tiny point through the toes, the too much point, a little less point, keep lifting through your legs. Yes, that's going to help. And then do you want to go to bird? One hand back, one hand forward, keep lifting through your legs. And then we'll come on down. All right.

That was great. Very nice. Helping you up. And we'll come back to seated. Very nice. So that was some fun flying with super bird. And we'll close the way that we opened. Take a big sweeping breath in. Exhale together. Let's take one home. Thank you both so much for flying with me today. Thank you at home. Happy flying.