Bow to Boat and Surfing Banana Rolls

As it's essential to learn the basics before attempting anything, we began by looking at bow to boat rolls. For this roll, you must go from lying supine on the floor with your arms above your head and only your back support you to lying on your front with only your torso is supporting your weight. You have to use your abdominal muscles to roll yourself over onto your front whilst stretching your arms and legs away from your body to lengthen your body as much as possible. This exercise strengthens and works your abdominal muscles and the muscles in your lower back. I generally found this exercise easy to carry out, I have quite strong abdominal muscles from years of regular ballet, but I generally think i was successful at carrying this roll out.

We then moved onto banana rolls, like a bow to boat roll but continuously carried out across the floor. You have to try and carry this out without letting your head, arms, neck or legs fall to the floor - although this is harder to carry out as you have to have complete control over your body whilst in the roll otherwise you wouldn't be able to carry it out successfully. I generally found this exercise easy to do and I really enjoyed using it to travel across the room. However, I found that you really have to commit to the roll and to the movement of your body - I found altering the speeds of the roll or learning to hold it in certain places really helped me improve of my technique and enabled me to carry it out more effectively.

Then we moved onto the final stage; surfing banana rolls. With this exercise you pair up in partners and one person takes the position of a banana roll on the floor whilst the other kneels leaning across their body vertically. The person lying down has to roll over as if they would with a usual banana rolls and the other person has to let their body move with the movement as the person below them rolls over. This causes them to travel across the room then swap with the other person without stopping moving. I found this a really fun exercise to carry out as it was a really interesting exercise to use when travelling across the floor - I also generally found it quite easy to carry out and transition the different roles within the roll.