Aaron Martin - Softacrobatics, Hong Kong (2026)

13/03/2022

A humble start… 😌👋
I’ve really enjoyed recording and editing this video on how to approach advanced soft acro flows. (Link in bio)

In my journey, better understanding has always helped me do better - whether it was learning somersaults, putting together flows, improving flexibility, strength or understanding how to come back from an injury.

In some moments, it wasn’t necessarily new content, but the same content presented in a slightly different way that made something ‘click’ for me.

And I hope I can do that for you - helping to turn a key in the lock that opens new skill pathways for more joy in moving ❤️ ☀️ ⛰😄✌️

And I promise I won’t post a picture every time I upload a video - but this first one seemed like a fair occasion. 🙂

07/03/2022

Why 13 intermediate skills? 🎯I believe that having an aim is a key element to making progress 🔑⛰

But sometimes saying ‘I want to get there’ is easier said than done.
What exactly does it take to become a pro soccer-player for example? (A question my 10-year old self would have liked to know the answer to 😄)
 At 17 years old I remember seeing .west and I remember thinking ‘I want to be able to move like him’. Back then, I didn’t know where to start and just doing moves I could already do, like some monkey crawl patterns and a few sloppy cartwheels didn’t seem to get me any closer to the acro kind of floor-play. So I went back to jumping, vaulting and learning backflips with my parkour friends.

Only years later did I see an entry point to doing floor acrobatics similar to Lewie… by learning a few intermediate skills. For me the gumbi and the forward cartwheel were two pieces, that gave me enough confidence to try to put them together in this flowy-elegant way.
A butterfly kick into a roll was another one. Then the coin-up to a cartwheel. The helicoptero seemed to have so many nice applications. Suddenly pieces were connecting left and right. And since then I’ve been trying to see which intermediate moves offer nice progressions, that also feel like solid milestone achievements.

I share this for those of you, who feel similarly to how I did and have a sense of ‘I sort of want to move in THIS kind of way’ - but it seems hard to put a finger to what would be good goals along the way of getting there.
The list of the 13 moves, split into cartwheels, balances, jumps and rolls, all tested with different students across the world, is the most comprehensive collection I’ve found so far. 😊❤️

May you move with joy 🤗🙂🙏 

Photos from Aaron Martin - Softacrobatics's post

07/11/2021

💪The all new STRENGTH+FLEXIBILITY FOUNDATIONS COURSE!🤸 NOV13-DEC4 🥳Sign up links in BIO 🗓

DM 📩 me if you have questions or to check if this is for you 🙂👋

👉A 4-week movement course👈
📆When? Saturdays 10AM-12PM, NOV 13-DEC4

What?
💪Strength+Flexibility Foundations Course🤸

Why did we create this?

Strength and Flexibility are the foundation of almost all advanced sports skills.

While we are passionate about rolling, tumbling, lifting, balancing, vaulting, dodging, swinging and sometimes bellyflopping (mostly on crash matts) and all things movement skill learning - we know that it can be difficult to try new things if we’re not sure how much we can trust our bodies.

In this course we have two main goals:
1. We will learn 10 different movement exercises that will provide us with a good foundation for most beginner and intermediate activities - from forward folding and squatting, to safe backbending, to learning good form pull ups and push-ups, and eventually even front splits.
2. We will cover the most asked questions when it comes to strength and conditioning training like:

How many sets and repetitions do I need to do per session?
How intense do the exercises have to be?
What are a few good exercises I can start with?
Can I make progress with training only once or twice a week?
What do I do if I have plateaued after a few weeks of training?

The course includes
* WhatsApp support
* homework training plans
* and you will learn how to personalize each movement exercise for you.

If you’re doing your homework you will leave this course with a training plan that you will be able to follow, scale and progress with for the comings weeks and months.
🗓 🤩 🥳 👉 💪+🤸

29/10/2021

🥳 6-MINUTE FOLLOW ALONG. If you’ve been wondering what the in-class experience is like for soft acrobatics, this is a bit of a sneak-peek/beginner-friendly follow along for you! All you need is some floor space.

🤸 These floor flows are usually how we warm up for the first part of a soft acrobatics practice, before we move onto reach skill work, such as the aerial or macaco.

🐒 As a long time parkour+acrobatics practitioner, I find that the exploration of smooth, controlled movements like these is more sustainable and accessible for different bodies.

Try it on for size :) and get in touch if you’re interested in learning this stuff with me :)

Many thanks to ex-rugby student for being a fantastic demo body!

27/10/2021

👋 Previously I’ve mostly shown what I can do, and thought it might be helpful for you to see what some of my students can do, so you know what’s possible for YOU.

🤸Henry did the Handstand Course in November 2020, then he joined the 8-week Soft acrobatics (twice!) and has continued with us since.

🤓 NEXT COURSE START DATES
Handstands - SAT, NOV 6
Soft Acro - THU, NOV 11
Soft Acro - FRI, NOV 12
*Event links are in my bio link tree. DM me if you have any questions!

💪 Because of Henry’s foundation through strength training and yoga, he learned the aerial in a few weeks! 🤯

😉When you start to learn soft acrobatics, you can use all the movement skills you already have and apply them to skills that come easy to you!

25/10/2021

NEW COURSES! Sign up links in bio. Softacro course are back on Thursdays and Fridays 🤩🥳

And we have 2 MORE courses this time:

💪STRENGTH + FLEXIBILITY FOUNDATIONS COURSE
Why did we create this?
Beginners who have a good strength to bodyweight ratio and those who can safely squat, forward fold or extended with ease are often at an advantage when it comes to learning new skills. And while progress is not everything, we do want to prep each and every one of you well. 😇

But if you’re not already fit and flexible, getting started can feel like standing at a crossroads with dozens of possible paths to pick from - which one is the right one for me?

We’ve created this course to make this first step a little bit easier. We cover the foundations of becoming stronger and more flexible. Just 10 balanced exercises, 4 principles to follow, 4 weekly 2-hour sessions of in-person learning, including homework and written trainings plans for self-practice plus a WhatsApp group for Q&As.

(🤫 And secondly - this course is for our students who have been improving in their skill work, but who could use a boost in either strength or flexibility to overcome a plateau and get to the next level.)

🤸‍♀️HANDSTAND FOUNDATIONS COURSE
Learning how to be able to kick up into a handstand, how to reliably get to the first 3-, 5-, or 10-second balance and how to progress away from the wall are all useful skills in acrobatics, yoga or calisthenics practice.

We’re no master handbalancers - but we have decided to try and make learning the foundations of handstands as easy, as clear and as logical as possible in the 7th iteration of this course.

Looking forward to journeying into movement land with some of this November. 😊🛫🚀🛸😄

31/08/2021

📬Softacro course continues 😯Openings for a new round of explorers, movers, learners 🕵️ 🥷 🕺

The details are in the carrousel and in the Eventbrite link in my bio! ➡️🔗🌲

DM 📩 me if you have questions or to check if this is for you 🙂👋

And here in short:
• 7 weeks
• at 7pm on Fridays in CWB
• starting on Sept 10
• 75 min sessions split into
1) floor flows (think rolls, sweeps, spins, and anything that challenges your coordination and where you‘ll break a sweat) and
2) reach skills (inversions, cartwheels, balances and jumps - all the harder moves that we will work up to and yes, everyone can start somewhere and we will map out your personal skill pathways with you) 🙌🕺

29/08/2021

Making sustainable progress as a teacher 💪🤓📈

The clip on the left shows my first ever, full range handstand push-up in January. With a lot of momentum, a lot of arching and barely making it up.

The clip on the right, shows my first re-test after roughly 4 months of dedicated handstand pushing training. One clean rep. And a second sloppy one, because I was trying to push it.

It may not look like much, but it felt worlds apart. 🥲😄🤟

For me, making progress as a teacher in my skill training is not about ‘getting better no matter what’.

I care more about creating a pathway for sustainable, long term progress.

I try to distill concepts and training principles that I can pass on. Which is why for this skill - inspired by - I chose to only train for one serious pushing session per week. Yes, the progress hasn’t been as fast as it possibly could be. But it means that I have learned a lot about how to get a lot out of a relatively short training time.

If my strength work takes up less time and energy per week, it makes it easier for me to study, to teach, to work on my flexibility and on softacro skills.

And hopefully it also means I can help other people get stronger, sustainably, over a longer time frame.

There is loads left to learn. But I am grateful to find ways to nurture what I consider a ‘diverse movement practice’, without spending a crazy amount of time (like 30+ hours per week?!) practicing. I am not a full time athlete. I am a full time teacher, and I hope my schedule can reflect that accurately as I become a little bit more mature. 😄

Other channels I can recommend for bodyweight strength training that are helping me tons:

Of course the quality information is on YouTube 😏

🎵 by Spooky Boot - As the Village Burns
🙌

16/06/2021

🍬Sweet Spot Learning is when the learning happens almost by itself😌

I can‘t say that I don‘t get frustrated or loose motivation in my practice.😬

But luckily I often get a third person perspective as a teacher and I can sometimes witness when progress seems to happen automatically for some learners.😮

When I share this, I don’t want to say that there is one magic recipe. Instead I’d like to offer up a perspective that I think could help to spot what has been blocking progress.🙂

It’s a process I keep in mind when writing training plans or when I want to optimize my own training.

I ask myself 3 questions:

1️⃣Am I setting myself up to have fun in my practice?

For me that means avoiding moves that could create pain or fear. And finding a challenge that is in the ‘flow zone’ of learning: not too hard to be frustrating, not too easy to be boring.

2️⃣Do I have good measures to track my progress?

In softacrobatics measures involve angles, heights and distances, time, number of successful tries or degrees of assist. If I have selected a good measure and the right progression I will likely make objectively measurable progress within 5-20 attempts.

3️⃣Do I have at least 2, but better 4 alternative ways of practicing the same skill?

That is in case the current way isn’t working out. For me that also means I don’t have to be too attached to the current path leading me straight to my goal. How to be not too attached? Having viable alternatives routes. 😌😊

Maybe this can help some of you out there. I’d be delighted if it does. 😊❤️

Please send me a message if you found value in this and if it helped you in your practice, I would love to hear more!

And if you’re in the mood to write and be part of a conversation: what circle are you most likely to forget about or not use when you train?😯

For me it’s gotta be measured progress 😅 - too much of a free spirit sometimes 😄🥲😁

15/06/2021

COOL stuff doesn’t have to be BIG to be cool.😎😜

I used to grow up thinking acrobatics is this untouchable layer of body control that is beholden only to orphaned kids who are taken in by circus families - maybe a by-product of reading too many Batman comics? 🦇🦸‍♂️🤔😅

My outlook changed when I met the first kids teaching themselves parkour in my hometown Frankfurt, Germany, when I did my first backflip!

As the years went by and I honed in on teaching adults, I came to understand that a daring teenager (with a high risk profile) learns differently from most adults - we have responsibilities and good reasons to be cautious. But that doesn’t mean we cannot challenge ourselves to learn new, fun skills and inversions and become stronger and more coordinated along the way. 💪😁🤹

We just have to approach the practice differently! Rolls, spins, cartwheels and balances have so much in common with the acrobatics I admired as a kid. They teach us to invert, flip, control momentum and stay oriented in space.

I love seeing people learn their first ever cartwheels or unlock skills, sometimes in just minutes, that they didn’t think were in the cards for them.

And then the cool thing is, each flow move can be taken to the next higher level, over time turning a Macaco into a back handspring, in safe and controlled ways.

And for me personally - I love how doing the basic elements softer and with more control helps my advanced acrobatic moves as well. 😌

🤓❤️🦸‍♂️

🎵 1️⃣Outbreak - Fashion
🎵 2️⃣ Consequences - Funky Fella

Aaron Martin - Softacrobatics

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