Kids Fitness Classes in Cape Girardeau

Ages 6–17

The little ones don’t know they’re training. They’re playing a game where the floor is lava and the fabric is the only way across, and somewhere in that game they’re building grip strength, learning to hang from their knees, and figuring out where their body is when it’s upside down. That’s the whole curriculum, disguised.

Around nine or ten it shifts. The games stay, but the skills start having names, and kids get competitive with themselves. This is the age where you’ll hear “watch this” a lot.

By the teens it’s something else again. They’re chasing skills that take months. They fail publicly, in front of a group, week after week — and then one day they don’t, and the whole class loses it. Watching a fifteen-year-old land something she’s been chasing since September is a specific kind of thing, and it changes how she walks.

Everyone starts on lyra, trapeze, and sling — closer to the ground, building strength and vocabulary. Silks come when they’re ready. Rope, straps, and aerial pole after that.

What to wear: fitted leggings covering at least the back of the knees, fitted tee or tank (no floppy tops or crop tops), hair pulled back, no jewelry or long nails.

Ages 6–9, 10–13, 14–17 · Performance Track

Skills classes teach a kid what their body can do. Choreography teaches them to make something out of it.
Students build an act — their own — and perform it in our student showcase and at events around town. Sequencing, musicality, transitions, and the difference between executing a trick and performing one.

Levels 1 & 2 (6-9years): are learning that an audience exists and that they can hold one. Mostly it’s counting music, remembering an order, and finding out that people clap.

Levels 3 & 4 (10–13 years): start making choices. This shape here, that music, this ending. It’s the first time a lot of them have made something and put their name on it.

Levels 5-7 (14–17 years): are doing real creative work. They’ll argue with their instructor about a transition, rework a section three times, and care enormously about the result. Then they’ll stand in front of a room and perform it.

That last part is the whole thing. A fourteen-year-old walks off that stage differently than she walked on.

Choreo is part of Performance Track, so students take it alongside their skills classes and get the privilege of earning their specific color of Levels unitards!

Ages 6–17

Hoops, poi, dragon staff — objects that move around the body in patterns.

This is the one for the kid who isn’t sure about being off the ground yet. Nothing’s in the air, nothing needs spotting, and dropping things is the entire process. Everyone drops things. You pick it up and go again.

For younger kids it’s technique disguised as play with an object. For older ones it becomes genuinely technical — two hoops, then three, patterns that require both hands doing different things at once. The non-dominant hand feels useless for a while. Then it doesn’t.

What to wear: workout clothes, bare feet.

Ages 6–17

Learning to fall down convincingly and get up unhurt.

Kids love this immediately, and what they’re actually learning surprises most parents. Stage combat is built on consent and communication — every exchange is negotiated with a partner before it’s performed, and safe partnering is the first thing taught, not a footnote. A lot of the class is learning to read another person and check in with them.

Younger students work unarmed: falls, the illusion of contact, acting a reaction. Older students can move to broadsword — real steel, with the history of the weapon and the body logic behind how it moves.
Our stage combat instructor is certified through Dueling Arts International.

What to wear: workout clothes, bare feet.

Ages 6–17

Kids are going to do this in your living room whether or not you sign them up. Here they do it on eight inches of mat with somebody who knows how to spot it.

The youngest ones spend a lot of class upside down for the sheer pleasure of it — forward rolls, handstands against the wall, cartwheels that are mostly enthusiasm. The technique gets built underneath the fun.

Older kids want the next skill, and there’s always a next skill. Every one has a progression: the drill before the shape, the shape before the skill. Nobody gets pushed past what they’re solid on, which is both a safety rule and the reason they keep progressing.

What to wear: fitted clothes, bare feet.

Harness classes are placed by skill, not age. Where a student starts depends on what they’ve done, and they move up when their instructor says they’re ready.

Youth single point harness

No prerequisites

Most of this class happens with feet on the floor, which surprises kids who assume harness means hanging.
The harness supports their weight so they can lean further, travel farther, and hold shapes the floor alone wouldn’t allow. Push off, run, come back down. It’s ground work with the ceiling helping.

Front point attaches at the chest — they lean into it and travel forward, supported from above while their feet do the work. Back point attaches behind, upright with hands free, spinning and moving through positions.

Newer students spend most of it running and leaning and finding out they can do things they couldn’t ten minutes ago. As they progress it gets technical: controlling a spin, shifting position mid-movement, working with the rig instead of hanging off it.

This is where everything in the harness starts.

What to wear: fitted leggings and top, hair back, no jewelry.

Prerequisite: Intro to Harness

Aerial dance, with a cord doing half the work.

In a back-point harness, the bungee takes their weight and gives it back — so they can leave the floor and land with no impact, and hold things in the air their own strength wouldn’t hold yet.

The cord fights back, and learning that is the class. Everything is resisted going out and assisted coming back, so students work considerably harder than they realize while learning to move with the rhythm rather than against it.
At first it’s mostly bouncing and flying, which is a perfectly good reason to be there. Further along it becomes sequencing — running, diving, suspending, dropping, strung into phrases instead of collected as separate skills.
It’s also the most forgiving way into aerial. The harness holds them, so they’re off the ground and dancing before they’ve built the strength silks or lyra would ask for first.

What to wear: fitted leggings and top, hair back, no jewelry.

Prerequisite: harness flow and bungee. Placement by instructor.

Somersaults.

Two side points instead of one. Nothing running down the spine, nothing across the chest, nothing at all in the way of a full rotation. Front flips, back flips, spinning — on steel cables, the same rigging that sends stunt performers through the air in films.

Students arrive here already knowing how to control themselves in a harness, because the previous classes were building toward exactly this. That’s why it’s last, and why an instructor decides when a student is ready rather than a sign-up sheet.

It is, by some distance, the thing our students are proudest of being able to do.

What to wear: fitted leggings and top, hair back, no jewelry.