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Skye Fitness - It's a Trap-eze

Glasgow's newest fitness offering is a trap. Well, it's a trapeze, several of them in fact, courtesy of Skye Fitness.

Shauna Stringer is the owner of and teacher at Skye Fitness. "I think this is perfect for this little town," she said. "I"m excited about doing something new." The yoga trapeze studio uses inversion slings to offer a modified take on traditional yoga. Use of slings relieves pressure on the body that can inhibit some practitioners from full participation in traditional yoga.

Trapeze yoga offers the benefits of traditional yoga – relieve back pain, increase strength and flexibility, improve balance and decrease stress – all while offering a return to childhood fun. "As adults we're not used to getting in swings," laughed Stringer, who takes great joy in teaching her classes.

Stringer's classes utilize a trapeze, which includes a hammock and three sets of handles, as a fitness tool allowing students to incorporate deeper back bends as well as more pushing and pulling into their workouts. The suspension aspect alleviates pressure points typically stressed.

Farah Hystad was "so excited" about the option of trapeze yoga in Glasgow. The young mother, who suffers from lower back and hip issues, attends the class to build strength on the advise of her chiropractor. She enthused at a strong core class, "I can do the moves without pain!"

Her enthusiasm was not for herself alone. Hystad's daughter, Laramie, also attends classes at Skye Fitness. "She just loves it," F. Hystad said. The Monkeyin' Around classes offered by Stringer are limited to kids age 7 to 12 and are a way to introduce a younger audience to the benefits of yoga while having fun.

L. Hystad is a hockey player and her mother believes yoga will be beneficial to her daughter's growth on the ice by improving her balance and flexibility. Stringer added that introducing the younger set to yoga has the potential to improve athletic skills in multiple sports.

As a proud mom herself of young athletes and an athlete herself, Stringer promotes yoga as a way to better performance. She is a recent convert to competitive biking and says her yoga practice has helped her in that aspect. Her kids, who have tried wrestling and baseball also, also find trapeze yoga to be fun as well as a way to get their energy out.

Stringer hopes that her classes at Skye Fitness will be an excellent way for everyone – adults and kids – to "get their energy out" come winter. She herself is what she calls a "mover-arounder" who has found yoga an excellent way to deal with her need to remain active while also calming her mind and decreasing stress. The activity also offers a family-bonding experience for the mother of three.

She explained that she had been intrigued by aerial yoga for quite sometime and was inspired. "I was looking online for something for me and the kids to play around in," she said of her personal introduction to trapeze yoga. She found a set up and fell in love.

In learning how to practice trapeze yoga, she began researching online classes and pursued her teaching certification. She earned her certification in November, 2020. While she had been considering options for offering classes in Glasgow, she did not expect for her plans to come to fruition as quickly as they did.

"So when I saw Toni [LaGree] was leaving the Yoga Wellness Center, I was like 'hmmmmm,'" Stringer laughed. "I think I messaged her like five minutes after she posted that and I was like, 'How do I get in that space?'" A few weeks later, she was celebrating her grand opening.

A few weeks into her classes, Stringer says everything is going well. "I've been learning to switch it up, so if if something hurts in certain ways, how can I make this move easier for someone so they get the benefits of the class," she said.

She has noticed similarities and differences in her classes with adults and kids. Specifically, she noted that the poses that kids find difficult or do not like, tend to elicit the same responses in adults. She laughed while observing the kids' classes tend to do more tricks with more upside down time. "I've even noticed I get dizzy and can't go upside down as long as those kiddos can," she said.

But the most important similarity between the classes regardless of students is the fun. "I'm a laugher. I'm a smiler," Stringer chuckled, "so it'd be hard not to have fun."

Skye Fitness is located at 527 2nd Ave South in Glasgow, behind The Loaded Toad. Cost is $55 for a month (8 classes) or $10 per class. The monthly class schedule is available at https://www.facebook.com/skyefitnessglasgow/ and includes Stretch and Relax, Upper Body Strength, Strong Core and Mokeyin' Around.

 

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