5 Common Mistakes I See Aerialists Make With Inverts: And How To Fix Them

I want to talk about inverts today. I have a lot of curiosity around straight arm inverts. I came into aerial after about 6 years of calisthenics training, which meant I could already do them. But I saw in aerial so many people wanted this skill and had no idea how to train towards it. So I took the time to properly dissect the movement, and really understand it to better be able to teach it. 

This is also what took me from a couple of inverts to being able to do 10 inverts unbroken. It was definitely about building the strength, but I wanted to figure out how to make the movement as efficient as possible to be able to do as many as I could. 

And I’m now sharing my best tips on how to reach your straight arm invert goals, by identifying the common mistakes I see people make, and how to fix them. 

So why are straight arm inverts even important for your aerial? 

You definitely don’t need them in order to be an aerialist. But the level of strength they give you sets you up really well for more advanced aerial skills such as meathooks or certain types of flare. And so if you have big goals for your aerial, working towards more straight arm strength is potentially quite valuable for you.

Let’s begin…

1. Throwing Your Head Back

It makes sense why we do this. We think our bodies will follow where our head goes and follow our line of sight. But for inverts it causes our chest to flare and back to arch, making it incredibly hard to lift our legs and engage our core. 

What we want is to keep our head in a fairly neutral position, or tuck the chin a little so that we don’t open our chest and arch our back. With your head in this position you can more easily have your body in a hollow position, engage your core and lift your legs. It also allows you to engage your shoulders and lats to pull your body up, rather than lifting backwards. 

The Fix: If someone is struggling with the habit of always looking back, a cue that can really help is to tuck your chin and look down your torso. As I mentioned above, you don’t need to excessively tuck your chin, but it’s a very tangible cue that most people can understand and easily implement. This feels completely counterintuitive in the beginning but you will be able to lift your legs and engage your core to hollow your body.

You can even practice the heat position on the floor and simulate your invert to get a feel for how it affects core and leg engagement.

Once this is making more sense and you’re no longer tempted to keep throwing your head back or looking backwards, you can work on your inverts with your head in a neutral position. 

2. Not Training The Top Of The Invert 

This is a part of the movement that I often see completely overlooked. It’s super important to pull your hips all the way up to your hands. You do this by retracting your scapula, externally rotate your shoulders and maintain compression in your hip flexors. We need strength in this position for other skills as well e.g. flares and meathooks. And so not training this means skipping a crucial strength element!

To Fix: I teach a movement called "Invert Top Position Pulses", and they are simply moving in and out of the top position, exaggerating the movement as much as possible. This is a great way to build awareness and control of the position as well as improving strength!

Training this top position has been a game changer for me when it comes to being able to do more consecutive inverts, improve flare strength and technique, and become much stronger in my meathooks. 

3. Bending The Elbows

Just to be really clear, this is not the same as microbends that change the aesthetic of a movement (I am not the microbend police). 

Even the smallest of bends in the elbows means that you're no longer doing a straight arm invert because you're engaging arm, shoulder and back muscles in a different way. But it's super easy to do this if you're very comfortable with bent arm inverts. And sometimes when it's only a small bend, it's hard to see that it's actually happening. If you're always bending your arms you're never actually working proper straight arm strength. And so this is something I really try to look out for.

To Fix: This can take time to improve, especially if it’s a habit. You need to relearn the movement pathway engaging your muscles in a different way. I really love an exercise called half negatives for not only building straight arm strength, but for getting more comfortable and confident with pulling with straight arms. The exercise helps you to get used to how it feels while also controlling what you’re doing. 

With half negatives you move up and down, in and out of the top of the invert, so it helps to build straight arm strength in both directions. And don't forget to keep straight arms when you finish and lower down through the negative for bonus practice!

4. Not Compressing Enough

Another issue I see aerialists experience is not compressing enough to invert. Inverts are a full body movement and the legs play a huge part. The less compression in your inverts, the harder it is to get upside down. This is because more of your weight is in front of you, rather than being evenly distributed under your hands. This is basically pulling to an invert through a straddle pike front lever which is an advanced calisthenics move.

To Fix: Compress and close the angle at the front of your hip. There is a big difference in how it creates more evenly distributed weight under your hands and shoulders. 

Compression strength is something that needs to be trained as it’s own thing, and I have everything you could ever need on Compression Strength in my 4 week program. Check it out here!

5. Doing The Negatives Wrong 

A lot of times I see people falling out of negatives, and not having the strength and control to slowly lower down. This is because they don’t understand the movement pathway of the invert, so of course don’t know how to reverse it. The thing that’s often missing is dropping the hips while also compressing hard to keep the feet over the other side of the body for as long as possible. If you do this, it’s easier to slowly lower down, because again it comes down to keeping your bodyweight evenly distributed under your hands.

To Fix: It’s simply learning to compress more in the front of the hips on the way down. This is genuinely the best cue I’ve found to help people utilise the negative and get the best from it as an exercise. 

Negatives alone won’t help you get your invert, and sometimes I think people thing that’s all you need… It’s not, but they’re a key part in achieving straight arm inverts because they teach you the movement pathway, they are so good for building strength, and progress with them is measurable which helps a lot. So it’s worth learning how to start working on them properly. 

Ultimately any strength goal takes time. There’s no magical fix to achieve anything. Everything I’ve described above requires hard work, consistency, and the ability to listen to your body to make sure you’re not overdoing things. But it’s my hope that by sharing more about how to address certain issues around inverting, more people will be able to uncover what’s limiting them and therefore know how to work towards their goal. 

If you want to finally nail your straight arm invert and build more strength for aerial, book a call to chat about one to one online coaching. 💖

If you have questions, don’t hesitate to reach out!