(Newswire.net — October 13, 2020) — With the recent health scares of COVID in 2020 a lot of businesses have gone online. Fortunately, many health and fitness related businesses were easy to move online.
Today we are talking with Vanessa Barthelmes, a leading flexibility and contortion training coach at JV flexibility. Her blog Jadore Vanessa has over 20,000 hits per week from readers looking for guidance and solutions to their flexibility and strength needs. With a range of online flexibility and contortion classes, Vanessa helps others achieve their dream poses faster than others.
How has your business been affected by COVID?
I was fortunate enough to work with a group of dedicated students that were able to come leaps and bounds in their flexibility training poses. They used COVID as an opportunity to knuckle down on their flexibility training and take it to the next level.
Contortion: What Is It?
Contortion is an art that twists and contorts the body into extreme postures.
How To Train For Contortion
Contortion training is very different to flexibility training. It uses several different exercise modalities in order to stretch and strengthen the body.
You may experience in a class:
- Active flexibility drills
- Ballistic stretching
- Weighted active flexibility drills
- PNF stretching
- Resistance band training.
This is just to name a few. Each teacher will have different methods to achieve these contorted poses.
What is your teaching background?
I started off as a yoga teacher and progressed into acro-yoga, then aerial arts. From there it just continued to grow. After becoming a flexibility and aerial instructor I really began to study contortion training in depth through leading coaches and taking on a science degree in body mechanics.
Is It Safe To Do Contortion Classes Online?
Yes. As long as you have a good level of body awareness and you don’t push yourself too far. Knowing your boundaries in contortion is essential. Pulling, tearing or straining muscles can set you back six months. Damage to the ligaments, cartilage and joints can have irreversible damage and permanent damage.
You never want to be crunching into your back or pushing your body so that you are in pain. While stretching can be uncomfortable pain should never be a part of your practice.
What training methods do you use for students?
Basic flexibility and contortion classes have very different theories and methods based behind them. My contortion classes involve:
- Prehabilitation Exercises: To increase strength to support your increased range of motion.
- Nerve Flexibility: They are stretched very differently to muscles and if they are not targeted they will inhibit your range of motion.
- Muscle Pliability: Muscles do not lengthen, they become more pliable. By switching off the nervous system we can get deeper into the belly of the muscle.
- Breaking Through Fascia: Think the skin of a sausage, fascia is the skin, sausage is your muscle.
- Lengthening Connective Tissue: These are tendons and other tissues that connect the muscles into insertion points.
- Balancing strength in flexibility in all the lines of the body.
How To Find A Good Online Contortion Instructor:
Look at the instructions qualifications. Having a bad instructor can result in permanent damage to the body. Secondly beware of people who claim to be an anatomical stretcher or some fancy science title. It can lead you to believe that they are qualified when they are not.
Ready to take a class?
I currently have contortion and flexibility classes online, you can get your first week free with our current promo with the code: “Friends”.