Functional Strength and Injury Prevention for Circus Artist/Athletes
Screw New Year’s Resolutions.
Unless you have success with them, in which case: good for you!!!
Either way, here we are.
It’s the First Friday of 2019.
Friday’s are for thinking about stuff.
I decided to wait a few days to let the hullabaloo of the New Year settle down a bit. The potential energy of the New Year hasn’t completely faded, though. I love that about this time of year.
[Read more…] about Redefining Goal-setting
In that same presentation where Coach Boyle reminded us of the useful practice of stealing smart people’s stuff to use with our own trainees—the topic was conditioning (not to be confused with strength training)—he also posed the question:
What if the way we’ve always done things is wrong? [Read more…] about Geekery: Relative Stiffness and the Warmup (part deux)
I’ve added Rupert Egan’s slide to the start of part two as a reminder: your foundation is important.
It is perhaps the key to long-term health and injury reduction …and to being able to do cool stuff in circus.
As I mentioned in part one, I would like to suggest that your strength-training goal should be to be stronger than your apparatus or circus-discipline-of-choice asks you to be. This will not only expand your options and possibilities in terms of things you can do, but it will also make it much less likely that your body will be overwhelmed (read: injured) by anything that you do…or try to do. [Read more…] about Strength Training for Circus: 3 reasons to add weight-training to your circus training (part two)
It’s not always sexy. It tends not to be what people are interested in (until they get hurt…then this conversation is easy to have). But, to be perfectly honest with you: I’m always thinking about the foundation. [Read more…] about Strength Training for Circus: 3 reasons to add weight-training to your circus training (part one)
In case you missed it on Instagram…before I accidentally deleted it, here’s another installment of “Exercises Every Circus Artist/Athlete Should Do”.
View this post on InstagramA post shared by Mike Denton (@getcircusstrong) on
In fact, I would like to add sideways crawls to the mix:
And this is, of course, just one piece of the larger puzzle that is your whole-body strength and conditioning plan. Circus arts require a foundation of whole-body, general strength upon which to build the specific-strength needed for all of the cool tricks and skills you want to do.
Need some help figuring out just what to do? Drop me a line. (Do people even say that anymore? Am I dating myself?) I’d be more than happy to help you with some ideas.Or maybe you’d like me to do the thinking for you so that you can just get down to the business of getting stronger…well, we have things for that, too.