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Pretty Inverts
I’ve been working really hard on building my strength and improving my inverts. Now that my strength is getting there, I realize that my slow strong inverts are kind of ugly lol! So I’ve started swooping my leg back and up to try and make it pretty and/or dramatic. Hard to blend strength and grace sometimes ; ) Anyone else have any tips or struggled with this?
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6 Replies
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I actually find the prettiest inverts to be the slow, controlled ones. Maybe I’m not picturing what you mean by swooping your leg back and up properly… but the way I’m reading it, I would be concerned that it might wind up looking like you’re using it to kick up and use momentum – and you’re not! You’ve been putting in so much work on strength building specifically to avoid that! I think that when you really have the strength built up, the grace will come. You won’t have to concentrate so hard on technique and can then focus on the finer movements and making your inverts look the way you want them to – to suit your mood or the music or the moment. If you’re working on spin pole, I think a lovely graceful invert comes after doing a diagonal pencil spin, holding that for a couple of rotations, and then inverting with either tuck legs that extend out when you hit your chopper, or straight straddle legs the whole time or one leg tucked and one straight then both extended into the chopper (ugh, that was wordy, I hope it made sense). Whether or not you’re at the level that you can do a straight legged invert or if you’re still tucking up – or something in between (like me, I have a pretty decent invert with one leg straight but not both yet) – if you make the movement DELIBERATE, it goes a long way. It looks sloppy if you can’t tell if someone was trying to straight leg invert but got tired and wound up with semi-bent legs, whereas if that person fully tucked their legs and made it clear that their intent was to bend the legs, that could be lovely.
Hope that makes sense. Beautiful inverts are something I struggle with too!
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I’ve been trying to invert with legs out in the v but I’m not able to yet. So I end up going up in this frog-like squat position and then extend my legs out. Maybe I’m being a little hard on myself but I do think I could make it look better. I think I’ll concentrate on first tucking and then extending. Thanks for the tips. More work ahead!
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the stronger your core the easier straight leg inverts are:) i used to be able to do one straight leg, after baby now i can barely do the squatty invert lol
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You can try keeping one leg straight and bending one in the mean time. Typically you would keep the inside leg tucked.
And a “swooping” leg can look pretty. Alethea does it all the time!
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^^^what chem said! Keep the outside leg straight and let it lead your body by sweeping it straight up and overhead, not a kick but a sweep, then you bend that inside leg as you lift. About halfway to a straight leg invert. You can also try keeping the inside leg straight and bending outside leg (Aussie/Bobbi’s style) but I find it’s a wee bit harder to sweep the inside leg than the outside. If you can deadlift and tuck into a basic invert though, you’re strong enough to try that with it, dead lifting into an invert like normal but with the inside leg straight and outside leg bent.
All this presumes you’re opening to chopper before going into an inverted pose. If you’re not strong enough for that, I suggest just working on controlling your basic invert both going up and coming down, and if you want to make it pretty you can throw in an extra step like hooking your outside ankle on the pole when you invert and doing a little hooked heel split/basic invert split before going into your inverted pose and it puts a little visual interest on the basic invert so it doesn’t just look like you’re rushing through that step to get upside down, then you have to control to get back up from that split and that’s a good conditioning thing too.
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I like to do what I call a “power invert”. I like to pull up first then invert with either straight legs or the inside leg straight and the outside bent. Aesthetically speaking, I like the way it looks with both legs straight versus when some people try to do the straight leg invert from the floor, standing with the feet set wide apart then just tipping over. It’s kinda the static version of what Lola mentioned as the spin version, with the body at a diagonal which is very pretty. For myself, I don’t like the look of both legs tucked. I already have short legs, so I like to “sweep” into chopper or all the way up with my legs fully vertical to reverse caterpiller or whatever.
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