5 Reasons to Train Your 'B' Side
Do you pretend your B side doesn’t exist? When your instructor says the words “Now try it on your other side”, do you cringe? Or better yet, take a ‘bathroom break’ until the B side part is over? Well, this blog is for you!
Training the other side is HARD, it can be slow, and it can even feel embarrassing sometimes, but there are so many benefits to doing it! We thought that maybe listing the reasons why you should train your other side might inspire some of you to give it a proper shot.
Reason #1 - Injury prevention
Most of us who have been doing pole or aerials for a bit of time have been injured in one way or another or had a niggle that wouldn’t go away. Well, one way to prevent that from happening is to train your other side!
When your A side is MUCH stronger than your B side, it can lead to you compensating for your weaker side with your stronger side. Compensation in other muscles can lead to injury, which causes you to compensate with other muscles again, leading to injury and… well you probably get the picture. Injuries can be difficult to come back from without going back to square one, so why not prevent them before they happen by training your other side!
Reason #2 - Joint health
This is in some ways linked to reason #1, but hey, it can go in on its own too. This might seem a little obvious, but muscles support joints, and well-supported joints are less prone to injury. Not much else to say about this one!
Reason #3 - Flexibility
Muscles and ligaments tend to become tighter the more they’re used, so if you can balance things out so that your A side isn’t doing all the heavy lifting it can aid with flexibility. This is also important because greater flexibility means greater mobility, and greater mobility means fewer injuries. See, it’s all connected!
Reason #4 - No more ending up on the ‘wrong’ side
Combos often feature a lot of switching around and moving grip points, and sometimes that means you end up on the ‘wrong’ side even though you started on the right one. For some combos there just isn’t getting around it - either you start on your B side and end on your A side, or you start on your A side and end on your B side. But this is only a problem if your B side is a lot worse than your A side. If both of your sides are great then the combo will look great no matter how you start or finish it!
It will also give you more options for chaining moves together, as well as opening up moves that weren’t possible before.
Reason #5 - Don’t just be good, be AWESOME
It’s true that you can be a pretty good aerialist even with one side that’s much stronger than the other, but at some point you will hit a plateau where your weaker side just won’t let you go any further. All of the best aerialists and pole dancers have spent time working on that hard stuff, even if it’s just for a little bit each training session. When you watch Bendy Kate, or Kristy Sellars, or Miss Filly, or whoever you care to name, you’ll have a lot of trouble picking which is their good or bad side (if they even have one! Not sure they’re even human to be honest…) because everything they do is just so gosh darn amazing! You can guarantee that they’ve spent hours upon hours working on inverting on their bad side, spinning on their bad side, stretching their bad side… You can do it too!
And that’s 5 good reasons why you should train your other side. There’s more definitely more good reason to train evenly... but hopefully this is enough to inspire you into action. Think about dedicating some time in your training, even 5 minutes, just to working on the other side.
It’s 2020, a year which is made up of two identical sides. Maybe it’s a sign that this is the year to even things up a bit and take your aerial/pole journey to the next level!
