Last month for Fall Break I took a week vacation to Destin, Florida. It was a lovely trip where I spent my days lounging on the beach, drinking some wine, coloring mandalas with my colored pencils, and throwing down some tarot cards. Amongst some of my lazy day shenanigans, when I remembered what day it was, I did make sure to get in some daily workouts. I put together a plan for staying active during my travels by incorporating some of the ideas I came up with in my May 2017 blog post: Staying on Track with Fitness During Travel. This trip I packed up my yoga mat, laptop for DoYogaWithme.com classes, mini stability ball for my current Pinterest Fitness series I was working on, and my Workout Labs exercise cards. I decided I wanted to take a class and as I always do, I searched for pole studios in the area. Unfortunately, there weren't any local pole studios but to my surprise, there were some aerial classes right down the street from my beach house! I immediately signed up for a class via my mindbodyonline app. (Okay as much as I hated MBO as a business owner, I am really starting to love it as a customer.)
I signed up for a Beginner/Intermediate Aerial Silks class with Destin Pilates and Aerial Center. The studio was located in a City Market shopping complex. The outside of the studio was very clean and the signage was easily visible from the street. I used Google maps to find it and had no problems arriving to my destination. Inside the studio I walked into an open space that had privacy partitions placed to allow customers/students privacy while they work out on the various pilates reformers or while attending a pilates or aerial class. The front of the studio had reformers while the back area was an open space. For the aerial silks class, there were three rigging points with three mats below them. The silks are tied up and hung along the wall to keep the open space free of the fabric for the non-aerial classes. When I arrived I introduced myself to the classmates and instructor. I told the instructor that it was not my first class and I currently teach classes and was visiting their studio on my vacation.
Upon arrival, the other students were on the floor stretching and conducting dynamic warmup moves. I took this as the cue that our class was not going to have an instructor lead warmup. Once everyone stated to the instructor that they felt they were ready, class began. We first started with a shoulder stretch that I typically refer to as the twizzler stretch. We then moved on to climbs. Some of the students were working on a new inverted style climb so they incorporated that climb once they completed a few of their basic climbs. After our climbs we moved on to egg inverts or what I call the ball. I did my ball upright then inverted repeatedly without tapping out for 4 in a row. After climbing, it was evident that my endurance was lacking and I decided once I got home I was going to have to start participating in my own classes a little more than I had been. After our conditioning portion, we broke up into groups and those of us that were a little more advanced went to our own silk while the instructor mainly focused her attention on the beginner students. I was fine with this as I said previously, I was actually out of breath and surprised my endurance was as poor as it was. My group then began to work on tying a knot with the feet in the air. A move I had recently seen one of our instructors at the gym I work at working on. Funny how with the distance between our two aerial facilities that everyone seems to be working on the same skills at the same time. I attribute that to a social media win for the day- HAH! 😂 So I some-what learned how to tie the knot with my feet- going to have to work on that one. I then started to pay attention to some of the beginners as terminology peaked my interest. I learned that they call the splits roll up from a double footlock a rotisserie chicken (I let spell check take care of that one, I can't spell rotisserie.) After being amused by the food reference, my group proceeded to work on whatever we could think of. After failing miserably at my attempt to demonstrate a skin the cat flip from a cross back straddle pull up, I decided to take my tired self down and stick to hip keys- which they term fan kicks. I watched one of the students in my group do a mind boggling twisty flip thing and decided it was too much for my body and brain to grasp. I did do a few progressions from hip key and my favorite cyclone/tornado spin from hip key. By the time we worked some more with the beginner students and having them try to master their hip keys, it was time to cool down and head home.
I really enjoyed my class at Destin Pilates and Aerial. Everyone was so nice and easy to get along with. The locals even had cute southern accents. (I'm pretty sure I had an accent to them as well.) My husband and I really enjoyed the vacation destination and have decided we will be returning for future trips. I look forward to returning to more aerial classes on future trips as I felt the studio was a very warm and welcoming environment.
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