Your dancer’s back handspring feels “off” but you can’t pinpoint why? Nine times out of ten, it’s the sit or the block.

In this fan favourite Spotlight episode, Acrobatic Arts Faculty member and Certified Teacher, Vicki Fletcher breaks down the key safety elements of the back handspring. She covers the hollow and Superman shapes, how to train a proper sit, why you want the skill to travel long instead of high, and the upper body strength it takes to nail the block. You’ll also get the warning signs to watch for and drills you can start years before your dancers are ready to throw one.

Want to go deeper? Check out Acrobatic Arts' Aerial and Back Handspring Certification.

Click Here To Listen!

About Vicki Fletcher
Vicki Fletcher was born and currently lives in Ontario Canada and has been dancing since the age of 2. She soon realized that her love for all forms of dance was something she wanted to share with others through teaching. She began teaching at the age of 17 and has been doing it ever since. Vicki brings 25 years of teaching experience in jazz,tap,acro,lyrical, stretch and conditioning and musical theatre. 

Vicki graduated from Dance Masters of America's Teacher's Training School at Kent State University and the University of New York in Buffalo and is also certified through the Ontario's Gymnastics Federation.

Vicki has adjudicated dance competitions and has taught workshops at many studios in Canada. She feels it is very important to stay current with your training so attends workshops and conventions  whenever she can. She has won many awards for her creative and innovative choreography and her students have won numerous awards,scholarships and titles. Many have gone on to pursue their own careers in dance whether it be performing in companies or on cruise ships, studying dance in University and becoming teachers themselves. 

Through her years of teaching Vicki has become more and more passionate  towards the acro aspect of dance and has had great success in building a strong acro studio. This love for acro and the desire to see it done safely by teachers and students is what makes being a part of Acrobatic Arts so exciting for her.

She is looking forward to working with students and teachers from all over the world who share her passion for acro. 

Previous Episodes with Vicki Fletcher
Ep 38 Drills for your Incline Mat with Vicki Fletcher - https://youtu.be/ay3ItT0AVQI
Ep 48 Back Handspring Essentials with Vicki Fletcher - https://youtu.be/ay3ItT0AVQI
Ep 106 Advanced Acro Tumbling Unlocked with Sandra Elliott & Vicki Fletcher - https://youtu.be/Y519uEvllz8

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PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

Loren  0:01  
Hey everyone! Welcome to the Acrobatic Arts Podcast. I'm Loren, and I will be interviewing some of the top leaders and innovators from the dance and acrobatic industry. If you are a teacher, performer, student, or a lifelong learner like myself, you are sure to find these episodes intriguing and full of inspiration. Acrobatic Arts is passionate about providing current and relevant information for everyone. So please sit back and enjoy as we share our passion with you and the world.

Loren  0:36  
Today's episode is part of our Spotlight series, where we revisit conversations that continue to resonate across the dance community.

Loren  0:46  
Coming up is an episode with Vicki Fletcher, an experienced dance educator, Acrobatic Arts faculty member, and an instructor at Accelerate Acro Convention. Vicki has a wealth of knowledge when it comes to one of Acros most exciting skills: the back handspring. With 25 years of teaching experience across multiple dance disciplines, Vicki has developed a real passion for acro and the importance of teaching skills safely and effectively. Her background includes training through Dance Masters of America and certification through the Ontario Gymnastics Federation.

Loren  1:22  
This episode on back handsprings is definitely a fan favorite. Vicki breaks down the key elements that keep your dancers safe, from body shaping to the sit to the block. She provides drills that you can use right away in your acro class. If you've ever watched a back handspring and thought "something's off, but I can't tell what" This one's for you. Now it's time to shine the spotlight on today's guest.

Vicki  1:51  
Okay, so teachers, today we're going to talk about back handsprings, and what we're going to talk about back handsprings are our key elements. So the things in our back handsprings that's going to keep it safe. So that's the number one thing we really need to do with these back handsprings. Any kind of backwards tumbling skills, the chance of injury is amplified more so than forward tumbling. So we really want to make sure that your dancers have a good understanding of what is required, and that you, as teachers, have a good understanding of what is required. So I'm just going to touch on what we feel are the key elements. So these are the number one things we need to look for. Okay. So the first thing we're going to talk about is our body shaping. So it's really important that our dancers understand our hollow position and our Superman position. These are key for our back handsprings. Our hollow position comes in three times. Okay, so that hollow position is going to be in the sit at the beginning. It's going to be on that second flying phase, and it's also going to be in the rebound after the back handspring.

Vicki  2:55  
So we want to make sure that they are really strong on their hollow position, and this is also going to create really strong core muscles, and this comes right back in the primary level in the acrobatic art syllabus. So we're training them right from when they start talking about log rolls, and that is key. That's a skill right there. That's key for learning hollow and Superman, hollow position. This is really hard to get into with those little ones, and you want to make sure that things aren't happening, like the arms are reaching too far forward, or the arms come back and the legs come up too high. Okay, we want to make sure that that back is pressed really tight into the ground. So I'm not going to spend a lot of time on these because I'm pretty sure we're all good at our Superman and our holo and creating drills for those. But I just really want to reiterate how important those two body shapes are. Okay, so don't skimp on them. Work really hard on them so that your dancers really have a good understanding.

Vicki  3:50  
So now we're going to talk about the sit. So the sit at the beginning of the back handspring is something that needs a lot of attention. The sit is also going to determine just how good or how bad that back handspring is. Work lots and lots of drills. You can work on these years before they're even ready for back handsprings, and then it's fantastic because you can tell the parents that yes, we're going to be working on back handsprings. It might not be this year, but we're working on drills that are going to make those back handsprings come a lot faster when it does come time to doing these, so with our sit, one of the most important things is that we want to make sure that the hips are going behind the heels. So we're going to start with our feet together, and we're going to make sure that those hips, when we sit back, go behind the heels. So I'm going to give you a couple drills on this.

Vicki  4:38  
First, where what I talk about, what I'm talking about when I say the hips need to be behind. So I'm just going to start holding onto Victoria's hands. Her feet are going to start together. She's going to sit back, and she's going to find almost like she's sitting in a chair, but not 90 degrees. So she is not all the way down to 90 degrees. Do that again. Now you're also going to notice too that. She is hollow in her chest there, so we got a rounded shoulders. That is really important. We're going to watch to make sure that the feet are flat and the knees are still stacked over top of the ankles. Okay, this is super super important. So work lots on this. I like to actually put them two in front of an incline mat, so they're going to stand at the base of the incline mat, the lower level, and they can just do this. Sit until they fall onto the mat. So if they sit and come back up, they're in the wrong spot. All right, they need to sit until they fall back. So really, really important that they do this. Watch when they're doing it that their head is also staying neutral. So we don't want them to do this and pull their chin into their chest, kind of like so. In our hollow, we do kind of do that a little bit. We want to make sure that the chin is not coming in and it's not looking down. So we want to make sure that we keep that neutral.

Vicki  5:56  
So now we're going to talk about our sit and our stretch. Okay, so this is the next part of it. So, what's going to initiate this push off is going to be her hips. She really needs to think about driving those hips up to the ceiling. So now I'm going to catch her on a stretch in a hollow position. So she goes hips back, hips up. Once she understands that and she's feeling confident, she's going to go a lot quicker. So these back handsprings are a powerful, quick move. It's not something that you want to train these drills to go really slow. Okay, this I just took it through slow so that you understand the hips back and hips up, and she understands it. Okay, so now once she's got that, now I'm gonna tell her she's gonna go a lot faster, and I'm going to catch her just on the stretch. That's going to really help her create that distance. So with our back handsprings, we don't want high, we want long. Okay. So making sure that that hip sit is going back, so that the direction of the back handspring goes back. Okay. Lots of drills. Spread them all out all over your room, and it's going to allow you to do other things.

Vicki  7:03  
So you might have ones, even if you have dancers that are still working on their back handsprings, they're actually physically doing it. This is something that I 100% believe needs to be spotted. This is not something that I would ever teach a brand new student how to do a back handspring over Zoom. I 100% believe that they need the spot. They need the hands-on for this, just to make sure that they are safe at all times. Okay. When we are also doing this, we're going to look for things like her head going forward. So a lot of the times on our Facebook page, we get a lot of questions about back handsprings and figuring out what's going wrong and asking for suggestions on helping them. These are some of the biggest things that I find are the causes of things. So the first one we're going to talk about is our feet moving at the beginning. Our feet are going to start together, although some dancers they get a little bit nervous for some reason, about those feet being glued together, you do want to try to train them here. But if they're maybe like an inch or two apart, that's not huge. You just don't want them wide. Okay, so you do want to try to get these together as much as possible. But what you want to look for is that when they go to do their back handspring, those feet should not move at all.

Vicki  8:21  
This, to me, is the really unsure and they're lacking confidence in this skill, and so I probably would stop letting them do it on their own, and I would get my hands back on them again. Okay, because to me, if they're if they're doing like a little jump or moving those feet, that's what it's showing. They're just they're unsure and they're kind of questioning the skill of what they're doing. Okay, so if you see a dancer moving their feet, a lot of the times, especially if they're jumping forward, if they jump forward, that's going to cause a lot of problems in that back handspring. It's probably going to cause some undercutting. Undercutting is when those hands land so close to where the feet start. So we want to make sure everything's going back. Those feet need to be solid before they push into that back handspring, and they cannot move. Okay, body leaning too far forward or with your head down. This is going to create the the back handspring to go up way too high. Putting the head down is going to cause them to go up instead of back. So you want to make sure that that head stays neutral. They should always be looking straight ahead of them before they do their back handspring, or if they're looking down a little bit, it should be more towards like the end of the mat. Okay, not down at their feet by any means.

Vicki  9:31  
Now we're going to talk about our weight going back. A double bounce could still send the back handspring back, but the problem with the double bounce is it's going to make connecting to a back handspring really hard, so you want to get rid of this double bounce. Those are some of the things that we want to look for. You want to make sure that they are doing super super strong arm swing. No hesitation on things. That jump has to be powerful every single time. It's like they need 100% commitment. Commitment to this skill, they can't sort of do like I'm not sure if I want to do it and kind of 60% go for it. 60% go for it is going to be arms giving out and probably falling on the back of their neck, which is extremely dangerous and we don't want to happen. So building confidence on this sit and starting them young is fantastic.

Vicki  10:22  
All right, so now we're going to talk about the next area. This is our blocking stage. This is where we're talking about they have to build a lot of upper body strength. So the number one thing that I say tell anybody in acro is to work on handstands, handstands, handstands, handstands. Super important. The blocking is that shoulder action that creates the second flying phase. Okay, so your handstand shoulder shrugs are fantastic. You can do those handstand shoulder shrugs when they're younger, in a push-up position or up on their hands and knees. This blocking stage requires really good upper body strength, wrist strength, and core strength. So we're going to talk about the shape of it first. So I'm just going to talk first about first about my clock reference. Kicking up to a handstand. This is our 6 o'clock. So this, if you hit this position, she's missed the blocking stage. So what we want are her legs to go to about here. Okay. So for you, it's about 10 to six. So that is where the blocking stage has to come in, and when she's in that proper position, she's going to have her shoulders stacked over her wrists, and her hips are going to be pretty close to being stacked over top as well. Okay, because that momentum is going back, it might be a split second off that they're not quite there, but they get there like within half a second. Okay, so one good thing that I actually like to do the handstand shoulder shrugs on the wall, but in that 10-two position. This is going to build a lot of lower back strength to be able to do this. It's going to get her to understand that as soon as she jumps back, she's going to sink in her shoulders, right, and then she immediately has to push out. So getting this proper position is really important, and finding that proper position is going to depend on that sit.

Vicki  12:12  
Okay, so I'm going to tell you that the 90% of the problems are going to come from that sit, and from lack of upper body strength. This is showing that they just don't have enough upper body strength to create that second flying face. So this is where you're going to get them on the wall doing the handstand shoulder shrugs, donkey kicks, handstand hops, all of those things to build strong upper body. But this is what I do with my little ones. So I get them to actually sit back with all their way into my arms, where they would normally be to take off, and then I get her to go from there. So she's not going to be able to do the block or anything at the end, but it's going to help her kind of understand where she needs to be. Okay, so she's going to sit back, and I'm going to have her in the position she needs to be in, and then she's going to spring from there. Okay, so that's what I do with my little ones. I pull them, get them to feel exactly where they are, and then they go. You can also stop them in that handstand, in that 10 past, and make sure that they are nice and stacked.

Vicki  13:13  
Okay, so super important on these back handsprings that those hips are stacked over top of the shoulders, shoulders are stacked over the wrists, so that we are not having any breaks in there. If they are arching way too much, they're going to come into a lot of problems with that block. Okay, so if they have a huge arch in their body, their block is probably going to be coming from like a 90 degree angle, which sometimes is just way too low. So they're going to have to muscle their way over these two things: the sit and that block. Those are the two main areas that I want you to pay attention to when you're when you're teaching your back handsprings, making sure that they are solid. So start them long before they are doing back handsprings. So say you want to start back handsprings around age 10, then from the age they're seven up until 10, you can work on all of these drills. So then, when it comes time for them to actually do the back handsprings, they're going to learn it a lot faster because they have the body awareness. I love to drill my dancers a lot on questions and asking them the different shapes so that they can really understand what's going on.

Vicki  14:22  
Okay, that is our quick little class on back handsprings, and this is by any means not the do all and end all to act to your back handspring training. Okay, so take lots of time, take the aerial back handspring workshop. That is a fantastic course that does like two and a half hours just on back handspring drills. I didn't even touch on the second part, like the the rebound or the shape of the body coming down, because we're talking about the safety a lot of this, and that the safety is going to come from that sit and that block. Okay, so making sure that those two areas are strong is key.

Loren  15:00  
If you enjoyed today's conversation, be sure to subscribe and follow so you never miss an episode. And if you know a dance teacher, student, or parent who would love to hear this discussion, send it their way. Sharing the show is one of the best ways to support the podcast.

Loren  15:20  
Until next time, find power in your strength, freedom in your flexibility, and know that we are here to support you on your acro journey.

Loren  15:32  
Thanks for listening, everyone, and have a great day!