Aerial and acro yoga

Aerial and acro yoga are two studio practices that take the weight of the body off the floor: aerial yoga suspends you in a fabric hammock rigged from the ceiling, and acro yoga has one person lifted and balanced by another. Neither is a traditional style, and both are decisions about equipment and company rather than about yoga.

They are on one page here because the question people actually ask is the same for both: is it worth trying, is it safe, and is it a substitute for a class. The short answers are yes, yes with real conditions, and no.

Aerial yoga was developed by Michelle Dortignac in 2006, and the AntiGravity Fitness brand founded by Christopher Harrison in 2007 also claims to have created what became known as aerial yoga, using a hammock adapted from aerial arts. The hammock is a serious piece of equipment: support chains, webbing, carabiners and a ceiling anchor, designed to hold a load in the region of 300 kilograms. Acro yoga's two founding schools were both established in 2003, AcroYoga Montreal by Eugene Poku and Jessie Goldberg, who had used the term informally from 1999, and AcroYoga International by Jason Nemer and Jenny Sauer Klein in California. Its underlying L basing, incidentally, was used by Krishnamacharya in 1938, which is a nice reminder that partner work is not a modern invention. The Mysore lineage guide covers that period.

Aerial. The hammock is set at hip height for most of the class and at other heights for particular shapes. You sit in it, lie over it, stand with a foot in it, and spend a good deal of the hour inverted, hanging by the hips or the waist with the fabric taking the load. The pleasant surprise is the inversions: hanging upside down with the pelvis supported is much easier on the neck than Sirsasana and much easier on the shoulders than Sarvangasana, which is the honest attraction of the whole thing. The unpleasant surprises are the fabric pressing into the hip crease, the grip demand, and the fact that a hammock is a moving support, so everything asks more of the core than the same shape on a mat.

Acro. Three roles: the base lies on the floor with the whole back in contact, taking the weight through straight legs and arms; the flyer is lifted and balanced above; the spotter stands beside them with the single job of making sure the flyer lands safely. A beginners' workshop spends most of its time on a handful of positions and on communication, because the failure mode is two people doing different things at the same moment. The physical demand is on the base's hip flexors and the flyer's core, and the skill demand is on both people's honesty.

Neither class contains much of what I would call yoga. There is little breath work, no long stillness, and the last ten minutes is usually a rest rather than a taught relaxation. That is not a criticism, it is a description, and it is why what to expect in a first yoga class will not prepare you for either.

Aerial yoga has one useful study behind it and almost nothing else. In a six week programme, sixteen healthy active women aged 18 to 45 attended three fifty minute aerial yoga classes a week, eighteen sessions in total. The metabolic response averaged 4.8 METs, which sits inside the moderate intensity band of 3 to 6, and each class used about 320 kilocalories. Over the six weeks the group showed improvements in weight, body fat percentage and waist circumference, a fall in systolic blood pressure of 8.6 mmHg and in diastolic of 1.8 mmHg, a 10.9 per cent improvement in maximal oxygen uptake, a small rise in HDL cholesterol and a fall in triglycerides. Sixteen women over six weeks is a small study and there was no comparison group, so read it as what it is: good evidence that an aerial class is real moderate exercise, and not evidence that it is better than anything else.

Beyond that, aerial yoga has not been studied in clinical trials at all, and the claims made for spinal decompression and the like rest on anecdote rather than measurement. Acro yoga has no trial evidence either.

On injuries, the position is that nobody has counted properly and that the risk is plainly higher than in an ordinary class. The published description of acro yoga is blunt about the direction of it: the practice is more vigorous than many traditional forms of yoga as exercise and may lead to more injuries. There is no trial and no registry to give you a rate. What there is instead is mechanism, and mechanism is enough to reason with. In aerial work the load goes through a hip crease, a shoulder or a grip at angles the joint does not meet in ordinary life, and the failure mode is a fall. In partner work the failure mode is two people doing different things at the same moment, which is why the spotter is a defined role rather than a courtesy. In forty years of teaching on a floor I have had students hurt themselves by pushing a stretch, and none of them fell from a height, and I would rather say that plainly than dress it up as data.

This is a decision page, so here is the decision.

• You are fit, curious and want to try something once. Aerial, in a studio with proper rigging and a small class. It is genuinely enjoyable and it will surprise you how hard your hands work.
• You want to be upside down and your neck or shoulders will not allow the classical inversions. This is the strongest real argument for aerial, and it is a good one. The floor alternative is Legs Up The Wall, which gives most of the same effect with none of the risk and no equipment.
• You have high blood pressure, glaucoma or any eye pressure problem, a heart condition, vertigo, osteoporosis, a recent head or neck injury, or you are pregnant. Then not aerial, and this is not a case of modifying a posture. Being inverted is the class. Yoga for high blood pressure explains why inversions are on the avoid list there, and prenatal yoga is the right room if you are pregnant.
• You want to get fitter. Aerial will do it at about 4.8 METs, and so will power yoga or vinyasa for a third of the money and with no rigging involved.
• You like working with a partner and you want a skill. Acro, with a spotter, in a workshop, and be honest with each other from the first minute.
• You have a shoulder, wrist or lower back complaint. Neither. Both load exactly those. Yoga for back pain and yoga for neck and shoulder pain are the pages, and an ordinary slow class is the answer.
• You are over sixty, or you want a practice you will still be doing in twenty years. The floor. That is not caution for its own sake, it is arithmetic about knees and wrists.

My verdict. I am eighty nine and I have never hung from a hammock, so on the sensation of it my opinion is worthless and I will not pretend. On the practice, I have a clear one. These are good exercise classes and interesting skills, and they are not practices you can keep. A yoga practice earns its place by being available to you on a bad morning at seventy five, in a small room, with no equipment and nobody to help. Aerial needs a rigged ceiling, acro needs another person and both need a body that tolerates being loaded in unusual directions. Enjoy them if they appeal to you, take the coaching seriously, and keep something on the floor underneath them, because the floor practice is the one that will still be there. If what draws you is being upside down, learn Sarvangasana properly with a teacher and use Legs Up The Wall on the days it is too much. That takes longer and it costs nothing and nobody has to catch you.

Neither aerial nor acro yoga is taught here. No style is: the classes here are not labelled by style. They are one teacher, about forty years of teaching, one hall at the residents' association in MSR Nagar in north Bangalore, in person there or live online, all ages and all levels, and the hour is asana, pranayama and relaxation, taught slowly.

The reason the classes are floor based is worth giving properly rather than as an excuse. It is a residents' association hall, so there is nothing in the ceiling to rig from and there should not be. The room holds people from their twenties to their eighties in the same hour, and a practice that requires being inverted or being lifted excludes most of them. And the classes are taught online as well as in person, where nobody can spot a fall or check a carabiner, which rules out both of these on safety grounds alone.

What is offered instead, for the two things people want from these classes, is this. For inversion, Viparita Karani with the legs up a wall, and Sarvangasana taught slowly with a folded blanket under the shoulders when it is appropriate for you. For the strength and the novelty, an ordinary practice held longer, which is duller and works. Ten minutes in the morning is where most people should start, how to start yoga at home explains the order, and the classes page has timings and costs.

I would rather somebody went to a well run studio than not go, so here is what I would ask about if it were my daughter booking.

• Ask who rigged the hammock and what the anchor is fixed to. A hammock is rigged into structure, not into a false ceiling. If nobody in the building can answer that question, leave.
• Ask the class size. Aerial needs a teacher who can watch you. Twenty people on twenty hammocks with one teacher is not a class, it is a queue.
• Say your medical history out loud before you pay. Blood pressure, eyes, heart, vertigo, neck, pregnancy, osteoporosis. A good teacher will tell you not to come; a poor one will say you can modify, which for an inversion class is not true.
• For acro, insist on a spotter. The spotter is a defined role in the practice, not an optional courtesy, and a workshop that skips it is telling you something.
• Do not learn either from a video at home. Improvised rigging and unspotted lifts are how the serious injuries happen.
• Expect skin marks. Fabric burn and bruising from the hammock are ordinary rather than a sign of bad teaching, and long sleeves help.
• Keep a floor practice underneath it. One aerial class a week plus a short floor practice at home is a better week than two aerial classes.