Trapeze Fit&Fly: Why I Chose It and Why It’s Different from Any Other Workout

I discovered Trapeze, also known as Yoga Trapeze, almost by chance, during aSummer Gathering in Spain with Lucas Rockwood, an American teacher I hadalready trained with on other courses. I was immediately intrigued because,although it included elements I was already familiar with, it introducedsomething completely different: suspension. My body was moving through space ina way I wasn’t used to, and gravity was no longer simply something to workagainst. It became part of the practice, something I could actually use.

That experience made me want to explore it further, and I eventually trainedand qualified to teach it. The funny thing is that, soon afterwards, I almostwondered whether I had made a mistake, because in the beginning I used to feelnauseous. It’s something I still mention to people when they first startpractising with me, because it can happen when we’re not used to suspension,swinging and, above all, constantly changing our orientation in space.

In my case, I also felt a lot of rigidity around my diaphragm, and therewere probably still quite a few things I needed to let go of physically. Ican’t say that this was the cause of the nausea, because scientifically Icouldn’t support that conclusion, but the sensation was very clear to me: mybody didn’t know that language yet, and I was constantly trying to controlsomething that I gradually needed to learn how to feel instead.

The nausea disappeared fairly quickly, and that was when a different storybegan, because I started to realise how much this practice brought togethermany of the things I was already interested in and that, over the years, wouldbecome increasingly central to my work.

Trapeze Fit&Fly and the vestibular system: changing our relationshipwith gravity

One of the things I find most interesting about Trapeze is the way itdisrupts some of our usual movement patterns. We spend much of our day sitting,standing or walking, almost always with our head above our heart and the flooras our main point of reference. In Trapeze, that reference is constantlychanging: we hang, swing, rotate, change our axis and turn upside down.

This places significant demands on the vestibular system which, together withvision and proprioceptive information, helps us understand where we are inspace and organise balance and movement. It is also one of the reasons we caninitially feel disoriented: we are asking the system to process informationthat we encounter far less frequently in everyday life, particularly if ourlifestyle is quite sedentary.

When I first started thinking about this, I used the expression “creatingnew synapses”, but I prefer to be more precise. We don’t need to make such aspecific claim to describe something that is already fascinating in itself:learning new movements, continually changing the body’s orientation, workingwith balance and encountering different sensory information all requireadaptation and sensorimotor learning. Our nervous system has to find newstrategies and, with practice, something that initially seemed completelyunfamiliar begins to make sense.

This progression is what interests me, because it isn’t simply about beingable to perform a particular position. It is about the body’s ability to adaptto something it didn’t know before.

Strength, mobility and balance: training a functional body

Trapeze is, of course, also a physical workout and it can be very intense,depending on the sequence I teach and, most importantly, on the people in frontof me. We work on strength, mobility, flexibility, balance and coordination,involving the body as a whole. The legs, arms, trunk, shoulders and deepmuscles all work, as do the joints of the hands and feet, which we often tendto overlook.

One of the things I introduce almost from the beginning is simply hanging.It sounds almost too basic, but supporting your own body weight through yourgrip is already significant work. Grip strength is also used in research as oneindicator of functional capacity and ageing, but this needs to be understoodproperly: it doesn’t mean that hanging automatically makes us live longer. Whatit does mean is that maintaining our ability to grip, pull, support ourselvesand manage our own body weight is part of the physical capacity thatcontributes to our independence.

This is also where Trapeze connects strongly with the way I think about thebody. I’m not interested in isolating a muscle simply to achieve a particularaesthetic result, although of course the body changes through training. I’minterested in that muscle having a function, in the body becoming strongerbecause it knows how to support itself, more mobile because it has moremovement options available to it, and more agile because it is able to adapt.

Over time, the body often becomes more beautiful too, or at least that ishow we perceive it, but for me that is almost a side effect of becoming morefunctional. The better the body functions, the more often it becomes a body welike and, above all, a body we feel good living in.

Trapeze Fit&Fly, the spine and back health: working with gravity

Working with the spine is definitely another aspect that made me fall inlove with this practice. Through suspension and certain inversions, we can usegravity in a completely different way and experience a sense of length anddecompression through the spine, but for me the point isn’t simply to “stretchthe back”.

What I find much more interesting is the work we build around the spine as awhole: mobility, strength, trunk control, the deep musculature, the pelvis andhips, and our ability to distribute load.

This is also something that relates to me personally. I have discprotrusions throughout my spine, and my own experience has made me increasinglycautious over the years about the idea that a scan or medical report can tellus, on its own, what a body can or cannot do. Structure obviously matters, andthere are conditions that require particular care, but the body is not the samething as its scan. What also matters is how it moves, how strong it is, whatstrategies it has available and, above all, how much we continue to allow it tomove.

For this reason, I would never present Trapeze as a therapy for back pain,nor would I say that an inversion can somehow “fix” the spine. What interestsme much more is that, when it is appropriate for the individual, it allows usto experience the spine under different conditions while at the same timebuilding strength, mobility and confidence around it.

Trapeze Fit&Fly and breathing: the role of the diaphragm

Then there is the breath, which inevitably runs through everything I teach.

When we completely change our orientation in relation to gravity, the way weexperience breathing changes too. In an inversion, the relationship between thediaphragm, abdominal contents and ribcage is different, which can make thebreath particularly noticeable. Again, I prefer not to use expressions such as“releasing the diaphragm”, because that would oversimplify the complexity ofrespiratory physiology, but we can certainly expose the diaphragm and therespiratory system as a whole to mechanical conditions that are different fromthose we normally experience.

For me, this is above all an opportunity for perception. When the body is inan unfamiliar position, breathing becomes something we can feel much moreclearly: I can notice where I am holding tension, how much I am trying tocontrol, whether I can create more space for the exhalation, and whether I amresisting the position.

Perhaps this is also why my initial experience of nausea stayed with me sostrongly. I don’t know how much of it was related to my diaphragm, how much tomy vestibular system or simply to the fact that my body needed to adapt to anew experience, but I do know that gradually I learnt to breathe within thosepositions rather than constantly trying to control them.

“I can’t do that”: Trapeze, confidence and self-belief

This is probably the part I enjoy most.

Many people arrive and immediately tell me they aren’t flexible, they aren’tstrong enough, they could never be upside down or they will never be able to doa particular movement.

What I see very often, though, is that when we progress gradually and thebody begins to understand the movement, people who were absolutely convincedthey couldn’t do something suddenly find themselves doing it.

What interests me isn’t really the position itself. We’re not doinggymnastics and I’m not interested in collecting shapes. I’m interested in whathappens when someone discovers that the limit they had imagined wasn’tnecessarily the limit of their body.

It is an experience that has a lot to do with confidence and self-belief,because what stays with you isn’t simply “I managed to go upside down”, but “Idid something I was convinced I couldn’t do”.

Moving beyond the comfort zone without forcing the body

This is why I often talk about moving beyond our comfort zone, although forme that absolutely does not mean pushing someone beyond their limits.

It is almost the opposite. It means approaching a boundary with curiosity,noticing what happens and perhaps discovering that we can take a small stepbeyond what we already know, while always retaining the possibility of steppingback.

The fabric helps enormously with this because it supports the body. You cantry, stop, try again or decide not to go any further. It is precisely thiselement of choice that makes the experience so interesting from the perspectiveof resilience as well.

The resilience I am interested in is not about enduring something at allcosts. It is the ability to encounter difficulty, notice the activation itcreates, remain present enough to understand what we need and find a strategyto move through it.

This is one of the reasons I consider Trapeze to be much more than aphysical workout.

Proprioception, interoception and presence in Trapeze

There is also something very simple about being suspended: you can’t get toodistracted.

You need to know where your hands are, where your feet are, how the fabricis positioned, how much weight you are giving it and where your body is inspace. This requires attention and greatly increases the amount of informationwe receive from the body.

It is a powerful form of proprioceptive work, developing our ability toperceive the position and movement of the body, while at the same time bringingattention to internal sensations: the breath, tension, heartbeat, fatigue,fear, and the moment when we can allow ourselves to let go of a little control.

And I find it interesting that, although this is a practice done insuspension, for me it is one of the most concrete experiences of grounding.

I don’t necessarily need to ask you to be present. The situation itselfdemands presence, because while the body is working out how to orient itself inspace, it becomes much harder for the mind to be somewhere else entirely.

How I developed my Trapeze Fit&Fly method

When I qualified, I could simply have continued teaching the sequences I hadlearnt, but over time Trapeze inevitably began to interact with everything elseI was already studying and practising.

I started incorporating more work on mobility, functional strength,proprioception and the vestibular system, together with the breath, whichremains the thread running through all my work. At the same time, my study ofbreathwork, nervous system regulation and body awareness continued to evolve,and inevitably the way I taught Trapeze evolved with it.

This is how my Fit&Fly method gradually developed.

A class can be physically demanding. We work on strength and mobility, wesweat and we may reach a significant level of fatigue, but I don’t want theexperience to end there. This is why I always finish with a short breathingpractice: after bringing the system towards activation, I also want to accompanyit in the opposite direction.

That distinction matters to me. An intense workout can leave us simplyfeeling tired because we have used a great deal of energy. Instead, I try tolet people experience both directions: the ability to activate, sustain effortand meet something new, but also the ability to reduce that activationafterwards, recover the breath and return to a more regulated state.

Ultimately, this too is resilience: not being calm all the time, but beingable to move between different states without getting stuck in one of them.

Why I continue to choose Trapeze Fit&Fly

When I started, I thought of it primarily as a very complete physicalpractice. Today I realise that this isn’t the main reason I continue to teachit.

Of course I value the work on strength, mobility, balance, the spine and thejoints, but within Trapeze I also find everything that has become central tothe way I work over the years: breath, the vestibular system, proprioception,interoception, adaptability, regulation, confidence, resilience and, above all,the opportunity to explore.

There is something else I don’t consider secondary at all: it’s fun.You can work intensely without everything having to be serious orperformance-driven, and you can encounter your own limits with curiosity andsometimes even laugh at them.

Over time, the body becomes stronger, more mobile and more agile, and itwill probably change aesthetically too. But that is never where I start. Idon’t choose an exercise because I want to change the shape of someone’s glutesor create a particular look; I would rather work towards a body that functionsbetter, has more options and is better able to support itself and adapt. Ifbecoming more functional also means it becomes a body we like more, even better.

That, ultimately, is why Trapeze has remained part of my work: not because Iam interested in teaching people how to be upside down, but because it is oneof the many ways we can get to know the body better, discover possibilities wedidn’t know we had and, above all, learn to trust a little more in what thebody can do.

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