Air awareness is something that is very difficult to teach. For most people, you either have it, or you don't. This is because air awareness is something that is most effectively developed at a very young age, before the reasoning part of our brain is fully developed. Think about it, toddlers are risk takers. They have to be in order to learn many of the motor skills they will need in order to survive, such as walking. Toddlers fall over and over while learning to walk and it doesn't seem to phase them in the slightest. At the same time, however, their survival instinct is very low. Toddlers do not need to take care of themselves. That's what moms and dads are for. The kids that push themselves and take the hardest falls in those formative years often develop a higher risk tolerance that they carry with them through life.
For me, I was a rambunctious kid that was constantly climbing on things and jumping off of them. This interest in tumbling eventually led me to activities that further developed this body control and air awareness. Gymnastics, Tae Kwon Do, and spring board diving offered me controlled environments to explore the boundaries of physics. Flipping and spinning through the air is really no different from walking or skiing; all of these things involve moving our body while being subjected to various forces around us. The difference with jumping, flipping, and spinning, is that there is an inherent element of risk involved that makes practicing these movements more difficult than simply walking.
Trying to develop air awareness later in life, although challenging, is not impossible. As many have mentioned, trampolines are great. They offer a ton of repetition, which ultimately contributes to muscle memory. Muscle memory is KEY and it is the advantage that those who start young have over those who do not. When you are spinning through the air, everything seems to speed up. Your visual perception is distorted because you can't seem to focus on one particular visual cue. Your brain interprets lots of different visual stimuli and doesn't really know what to make of it. Those of us that have spent our entire lives doing this stuff, have developed a visual hypersensitivity that allows us to actually see what is going on around us. This is most commonly referred to as spotting. The second spotting begins to happen, everything magically begins to slow down. When things slow down, we are able to coordinate the activity between our brain and our body more accurately. Eventually, your body begins to react to these visual cues without you even being aware of it. This is muscle memory.
Getting together with a qualified coach that not only understands these concepts, but also has the ability to communicate them effectively to you, cannot be undervalued here. A lot of coaching comes down to a person's ability to empathize. The best coaches know exactly what their students are feeling, because they themselves were once the student; they overcame the same challenges and are now helping others to do the same. People may develop different psychologies, but human motor skills and the immutable laws of physics remain the same.
