Its easy for us movement practitioners to get side tracked with trying to attempt ever more complex and difficult skills and we can forget some foundation skills for our movement practice.
Often I have come across practitioners that have not put in their due diligence with training the foundation skills and are seeking to get to a more difficult practice level as soon as they can even if it means skipping steps. These practitioners can be dangerous and are far more likely to cause injuries in their partners and themselves.
Preparing the body for practices that are more demanding is not only intelligent, but its in your best interest and is good practice.
When initially approaching an acro practice each joint should have some gentle attention. If your a sparse practitioner (1x or less a week) you should consider going through a complete joint rotation exercise that should take about 20 minutes to complete. Work each joint sequentially either starting at head or feet and work your way through the body. Don't just inquire to your mind the state of your body, inquire to your body about the state of your body. Don't over due the rotations, this is just to feel each individual joint move and check in with its state and any corresponding sensations that are caused (does doing ankle circles affect your knee?)
Some initial core engagement exercises should be done. Don't focus so intensely on the core engagements that new comers will be exhausted by the end of warm up phase. Give variations, start with the easiest variation and work up from there. If your a teacher than sometimes choose to not teach more difficult variations because monkey see, monkey do mentalities. Sun salutations is a great way to start into this area of exercise. I encourage at least a 10 minute session of individualized movement.
From here start the basics with some basic partner drills or games. Stuff that is not to demanding, just to initiate the feeling of working with your partner.
Push Pulls or weight in weight out are my favorite ones to explore. Encourage exploration within these drills. Ski jumps are another great one to have in this area or the Trifecta / 3 pillars.
Basic games are things like Car driver, slow motion chain tag, Body part to body part, Ninja Freeze, etc.
After the initial partner work start to move into some basic birdy and/or back birdy, folded leaf, basic therapeutic drill or two, around the world/ prasarita twist, Throne variants. Cartwheels, ticktocks, Chelsea points, ghetto ninja, ninja star. Back bends, bow variants. Hand to foot techniques.
This area can be one of the hardest to navigate in a class setting for teachers as it takes a lot of trial and error to learn what a group is capable of and how to micro manage the groups that are made in the course of a class, and often in a class setting we are working with assistants or other teachers. Figuring out how many groups you can manage is a great thing to learn.
Make time for some cool down, whether you want to do partner based cool downs or individualized will be up to you as a teacher and practitioner. Be sure not to skip this step as it can facilitate good relaxation and community building.
Major thing, Don't over due it! Come back to the foundations often. Find some goals and discover what foundations make that goal attainable.
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