Strength Training for an AcroYoga Base

Most Acroyogi acknowledge that strength is pretty important, especially as a base. However, I don’t see many people in the Acroyoga community doing any dedicated strength training.

I know that lots of people simply don’t like gyms so they stay away from weights. There are also toxic associations with bodybuilding and meathead culture that many Yogi don’t like.

The point of this article is to dispel all those negative thoughts. I want to tell you about strength training as a practice rather than a workout. And encourage the use of weights to supplement your strength and skills as an Acroyogi.

Strength training with weights is sure to take you and your partner to the next level. Particularly if you’re interested in elements from contemporary dance and circus performances. For example, any overhead lifts while the base is standing upright.

Why strength training using your flyer as weight isn’t a good idea.

Lots of people just do a few strengthening exercises at the end of a session. This is better than nothing, but it’s a really slow way to progress.

If you want to push yourself to lift more weight, you need a safe way of practicing. This is why we have barbells and dumbbells in the gym and don’t just practice with rocks.

I can overhead press 60kg for several repetitions, but I would not do this with my partner. Holding a person is different from a weight. Their body shifts around, isn’t perfectly balanced like a barbell, you could drop them or even hurt them just with the way your gripping them.

Safety. When really pushing yourself, you can’t risk dropping your partner. Weights allow you to do more challenging lifts in a safer way.
You can’t always practice together. You can strength train alone. Plus the type of training I’m describing can be done daily.
It’s kinda gross. It’s a bit awkward puffing and sweating all over another person. Even when I’m lifting my girlfriend, I just prefer to stay cool around her 😎.

What about bodyweight strength exercises?

Bodyweight exercises make you stronger, but strength is often very specific. In fact, the border between what is ‘strength’ and what is a ‘skill’ is often very blurred.

So sure, you can do handstands and pushups to increase your pressing strength, but there won’t be a whole lot of transfer to the strength/skill of lifting people, and it will take years to get better this way.

If you want to get better at lifting people, then you need to be good at lifting. Lifting objects is easier than lifting people of the same weight, so it’s simply the best way to practice.

Principles of Strength Training for AcroYoga

Don’t confuse bodybuilding training with strength training. Many acroyoga

practitioners have an aversion to weights because of this misunderstanding.

Treat it as a ‘practice’, not as a ‘workout’

Strength and skill have a lot of overlap.

What I mean by this is your approach should differ. You should not be huffing and puffing and feeling a burn in your muscles.

Rather, similar to a yoga practice, the goal is to become familiar with the feeling and skill of lifting heavy weights, slowly, calmly, and with total control.

You should approach each exercise the same way as you would when learning a new yoga pose. That is, analyzing the movement itself very technically, and then challenging yourself just enough to not become overwhelmed.

Remember that strength is a skill, and you do not necessarily need large muscles to lift heavy weights.

Reps & Tempo

Slow Tempo. The main difference from typical weight training will be the duration of each rep. You are going to be moving extremely slowly in acroyoga so you should practice with weights in the same way.
Low Reps. You aren’t going to be smashing out 10 reps of presses. Rather just 2 or 3 slow and controlled ones. A lot of the time you will practice doing just one (heavy) rep.
Calm Breathing. Your breathing should be slow and you should be in a calm state. Heavy breathing can throw off your balance. Take long breaks between sets to stay calm.

Heavy Weights

No tiny dumbbells (except for warmups). Your partner is likely to be at least 50kg, it’s rare for someone to be lighter than this. So you need to become very familiar with the 50kg weight and be able to lift it in a large variety of ways, from different angles.

Your goal is to be able to squat, bench press, and overhead press your partners weight for multiple reps.

In fact, you may already have the strength to be able to do this, but you’re not able to use it efficiently yet. You probably aren’t recruiting anywhere near 100% of your muscle fibre.

Keep this in mind when doing your exercises with lighter weights, that your goal is to eventually work up to a heavy weight and practice the skill of heavy lifting, or recruiting all available muscle fibre.

Frequency & Workload

This is up to you but I recommend daily sessions of just 20 minutes. This is enough since you are practising a skill, you’re not trying to build muscle.

Another reason to keep the sessions short is so you don’t get too tired. You will be using close to 100% of your max-effort, since you are working with heavy weights for low reps. And you need to be quite energized to do this.

If you had a difficult yoga practice in the morning, then I don’t recommend you do your weight training afterwards. Do it at some other point in the day, e.g. if your yoga session is in the morning, do your weights in the evening. We are usually strongest in the evening anyway.

I recommend just 1 or 2 exercises per day. Don’t do too many or you won’t be able to warmup that body part properly, and you won’t spend enough time practicing to develop the skill aspect.

What equipment you will need

I recommend buying a 10kg, 24kg and 32kg kettlebell.

A gym would obviously be ideal. But for the type of exercises I’m describing, you can get away with using some heavy dumbbells or kettlebells and doing lots of single-arm exercises.

So here is the minimum that you need:

A light dumbbell or kettlebell (around 10kg) for warming up and practising the technique of each exercise.
A heavy dumbbell or kettlebell, weighing around half as much as your partner (or the average of people you practice with). A 32kg kettlebell is usually ideal.

Personally, I practice at a CrossFit-style gym. There is a lot of floor space, and a lot of equipment for more ‘functional’ training like kettlebells and sandbags. There is also less judgement if you are doing any non-traditional types of lifts.

If I didn’t have access to the gym I would probably buy a 32kg kettlebell for home training. This is approximately half the weight of my partner, so if I get comfortable with handling this weight with one arm, I should theoretically be comfortable with twice that weight on two arms. It’s not very scientific, but it works.

Exercises for an AcroYoga base

The following is not a full strength program for a balanced body. It is specific for Acroyoga and very focused on the pushing muscles.

It will be best to balance this out with pulling exercises such as pullups and rows to keep your joints healthy and muscles balanced.

Also for general strength I would recommend using a general strength training program like Starting Strength (for beginners) or Wendler’s 5/3/1 (for more experienced lifters).

Below is a list of exercises you should master and practice in the slow and controlled acroyoga style with heavy weight.

I won’t go too in-depth on the technique of each because you can just look these up on Youtube. But I will explain why they’re useful for acroyoga.

Floor Press

This is a lesser-known version of the very popular ‘Bench Press’ exercise.

The bench allows your elbows to go lower—involving more of your pectoral muscles, whereas the floor press requires stronger arms. Before the bench was invented these were pretty common. But now only acroyogi and wrestlers need it.

Overhead Press

If you have access to a barbell then this will allow you to practice pressing the same weight as your partner over your head. You can also experiment with timed holds overhead.

Single-arm Overhead Press

If you only have dumbbells then your best option is to work up to doing single-arm presses with half your partners bodyweight. Single-arm presses are also safer for the lower back, because you don’t have to lean back to do them (whereas with a barbell you lean back to get your face out of the way).
This means you can do them much more often.

Push Press

Most of the time you won’t be strong enough to do a slow strict press with your partners bodyweight. You will need to do a small push with your legs in order to accelerate the weight first. That’s what a push press is, and you should practice it with weights to learn how to do it with a person. You can use about 20% more weight on this than on the regular overhead press.

This applies with any equipment. And with two arms or single-arm.

Squat variations

Anyone that does strength training will tell you that squats are probably the number 1 exercise for building whole body strength. Strength comes from the legs, you need to have a stable base to be able to do things with your upper body.

This might not be so applicable for classical acroyoga (laying down) but if you ever want to lift you partner on your shoulders you must be able to squat down to do so.

Actually this is the one exercise I would say you can quite safely do with your partner. They can sit on your shoulders or draped over your upper back in a ‘fireman carry’.

A few variations you can practice are wide and narrow squats, split squats or staggered squats, and with the weight in front of you (princess carry) or on your back (firemans carry). Make sure you go low and slow.

Turkish Get-Up

Starting from a laying down position, with a kettlebell in one straight arm overhead, stand up to your feet. And then reverse it, laying back down.

This is an excellent exercise in balancing a weight overhead from a variety of angles as your body moves underneath it but the weight stays still.

You can think of each stage as a separate pose just like in Yoga. The entire sequence of standing up and laying back down can take over a minute to complete.

People sometimes do this with a person simply as a demonstration of strength. Anyone who can do this is definitely strong enough for advanced acroyoga.

A good goal is doing it with a kettlebell weighing around 60% of your own bodyweight.

Kettlebell Swing

In some more dynamic acrobatics moves you need to swing a partner up from between your legs to overhead. This is exactly the same movement as a kettlebell swing. Besides that, it’s a very safe and useful movement to practice, and healthy for posture and the entire posterior chain.

You can sometimes find gyms with heavy (60kg+) kettlebells if you’re lucky.

Kettlebell swings are great for the posterior chain muscles (glutes, hamstrings, lower back).

A typical training session — putting it all together.

I recommend doing just one exercise a day. Spend around 20 minutes to practice that movement to the best of your ability with the heaviest weight that you can safely do.

Let’s say you’ve picked the single-arm overhead press (using a kettlebell or dumbbell). Here is what the training session might look like:

Warm up with some pushups or medium-intensity yoga movements focused on shoulder strength e.g. down-dog or crow pose. If you have a lighter kettlebell than your main one, do a few presses.
Timed overhead holds (3 sets each hand). Press your main kettlebell overhead just once and hold it for 10 to 30 seconds. This is a further warmup of your shoulder stabilizers. You can walk around a bit with the kettlebell overhead to make it more challenging. Don’t get too tired, your main work is up next.
Pressing practice (around 10 sets of 1-3 reps). Your sets and reps will depend on the equipment you have. But preferably you have something heavy enough that you can only do 5 reps at the absolute max, and more like 2–3 reps usually. 10 sets is a lot. (In typical strength training you only do something like 5 sets of 5 reps), but because you are only doing 1–3 reps you need to get more practice in, to get around 20 to 30 reps in total that day.
Cool down. After many sets of such a heavy weight, you will feel weakened but still have energy. Now is the time to take care of your tissues—stretch, go through some yoga poses and static drills.

Practice some handstands if your shoulders can still take it, or do some alignment drills like planks.

If daily training isn’t an option for you, then you can do two or three exercises in the same day. Any more than that and you will probably start to lose focus and be more prone to injury.