Quick Spinal Articulation

Hello, I'm Rebecca Rotstein. And today we're going to do a mat class that's more of an intermediate, advanced level and part of our focus will be on articulation of the spine and adding in some new movements. So let's start off on our hands and knees. Yes. So begin here with some cat cow spreading your fingers nice and wide to begin. And our feet and knees will be hip distance apart.

So let's take a deep breath in and exhale. Begin the talking of the tail with the pelvis. Inhale, go the other direction. So I'm going to give you some Oregon cuing today. Your bladder is directly behind your pubic bone, so you're gonna roll your bladder backward and notice how the rest of your trunk follows as well as your head. Inhale, we turned to that starting position and exhale, roll the bladder back and return to the starting position.

Now sit back as if you're going to do child's pose and sit to one side. You might feel a little bit of stretch in one of the hips. It's going to give you a little bit of feedback so that you'll notice the different sides of your sacred [inaudible]. And then try the other side, give you a real nice stretch also for the capsule here. Take a deep breath in and exhale. I now let's lower ourselves down onto our backs. So hands will be by our sides. And again, I like to do a nice little warmup to start moving things around before we start working. So breathe in to prepare, finding that natural curvature of your spine and exhale, rolling the pelvis back so that the pelvis moves towards your face.

Inhale, move it towards your feet. Exhale, rolling back toward your face. Inhale, rolling forward towards your feet. So it's like there's wheels here and rolling back once more rolling forward. Now we'll drive, try some knee drops. So let your knees fall to your left and you might feel a little stretch on your spine. And then returning to the ceiling with your knees pointing and let your knees fall to the other side.

So technically the way that we want this to be working is initiating through the feet. And then the knees fall to the side. So you're moving your knees to the left and the opposite arm. Your right arm is gonna move out to your side and you're going to look toward it. So we get some reciprocal movement. And then we turn your knees to the ceiling. Let your knees fall to the other side and let your head follow away.

Return to center. Once more knees fall away and you look the other direction. And returning to center breathing at your own pace and returning to center Laurie your arms by your sides and fold your knees in toward your face. So notice how your back will automatically flatten there. Allow your tailbone to tilt forward so that your pelvis rolls just so slightly toward. Your feet are away from your face, so you get that little natural curve of your spine. Lift your right foot up to the ceiling, pointing the toes.

You're going to lower that straight leg down for five counts. One, two, three, four, five. Slide it in. Bending the knee. Again, lift the foot up to the ceiling, lowering down for five, four, three, two, one back and again, so we're getting an east centric, so as contraction lowering down arking. One, two, three, four, five, bending the knee in. Now let's come into a tabletop position so that our feet lift a little higher once again, right foot to the ceiling, lowering down for five, four, three, two, one. Notice it's a little harder now and again, lifting up just one more time. Loring five, four, three, two, one. Hover and stay. Reach out through your heel, pushing away and slide it back in. Now let your feet dangle once more. We're going to try the second side. Lifting the left foot up to the ceiling, pointing the toes, breathing in and exhale for five counts. One, two, three, four, five. Slide it in. Reach up to the ceiling. Exhale, lowering down for five, four, three, two, one. Once more, reach it up to the ceiling. Finding a little lower ab support, but you're really working, lowering down through the foot and you're finding that just opposition reaching through the crown of your head. Now lift up into tabletop.

Lift the right foot up to the ceiling, lowering down for five, four, three, two, one, one more time. So as we find this control, it's a little harder because now we have a greater lever, a little more load, I should say, and lowering all the way down and then lower your feet and do a couple more pelvic tilts here just to loosen up the back of tiny bit more. And now we're ready for our hundreds. Lifting the feet up into tabletop. We're going to start right here. Inhale, exhale. Imagine that your hands are resting on a bed of marbles, not in curl forward.

Sliding forward on the marbles. And we're going to start a hundreds here, pumping in hill, two, three, four, five and exhale. Two, three, four, five. Straight in the knees. Two, three, four, five. And exhale. Two, three, four, five. Turnout, two, three, four. Exhale, two, three, four, five, lower, a little bit, two, three, four, and XL. Two, three, four, five. A little more. Do three, four, five, halfway done, a little more. Two, three, four, five. An XL, soft. Shoulders. Two, three, four, five in XL, two, three, four, five, a little lower. Two, three, four. Exhale, two, three, four, five. Rolling backward. Two, three, four, five. And exhale, two, three, four, five. Hovering the feet above the ground. Two, three, four, five and XL two, three, four, five. And relax. So a little variation on our hundreds. Sliding your feet in. Breathe in, lifting your arms up overhead. Slide your feet out and reach through one heel and returned back in and reach the other hill and returned back and point the toes were gonna roll up by starting with our hands. Lifting, dropping the chin, rolling your lungs in your chest, back into your back body.

Ah, rolling all the way forward. Yeah. Now if you want, you could go for a full stretch. Otherwise maintain a more equal curve through your spine. Now we're going to begin with the bladder that's just behind the pubic bone.

Rolling that back to begin. There you go. Lowering all the way down, down onto our backs. Inhale, exhale. We rise with the lungs rolling back and we returned back down leading with the pelvis, but actually leading with the bladder. And one more time. Inhale. Exhale the lung and leading back with the bladder. Ah, the way down. Hands overhead. Flex the feet. Lower your hands down by your side.

Bend the knees in and reach your feet up to the ceiling. And exhale just a little pointing up of the toes toward the ceiling and leering down. So we do a little lower ab work as we push the feet up and we lower it down. And again, push up lower down. So here's what I want. As your feet push up, I want to see your belly drop. I don't want the belly to pooch up. So again, the bladder, let the bladder roll back. See if that cue helps you.

And last time and lower your feet down. Reach your right foot up to the ceiling. So instead of traditional rolling like a ball, we're going to do something a little more like climb a tree and you're going to start to rise up. And you're gonna find your balance. Point is if you were rolling like a ball, bend your knee and start lowering yourself down partway and rising back up and lowering yourself down and rising back up. Now lead back with the bladder. There you go. And lowering yourself down and pause right here.

Switch and rising back up. Straighten the knee for a second and now bend it and lowering yourself down. Careful that you don't twist through your pelvis and rising back up. So I'm really focusing on that bladder motion so that I don't go into the excessive lung motion and lowering back down and rising back up. [inaudible] and lowering back down once more, rising up and lowering back down and relax.

So we'll go into our abs series as if that weren't already. Lift your feet up into tabletop. Inhale, exhale, hands on the marbles. Slide them forward. So we'll go into single leg stretch first. Breathe in. Exhale, push and switch. Push two, three, soft shoulders, four, five, six, seven, eight and lower your feet down. I should say, lower your head down and not in curl. To return back up, let's do double leg stretch and reach out. Circle around. Reach out, circle around, make sure that you don't lift your shoulders too much last time and around. Lower your head. Breathe in Exelon. Crawl right back up. Reach the feet up to the ceiling.

We'll do single leg pull, pull, pull, switch, pull, pull, switch, pull, pull, switch, pull, pull, switch, pause. Pull here. Now instead of just pulling, I want you to let go and I want you to reach your hand to the outside. Yeah, so it's almost like you're sighing and switch. Pull, pull Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, oh my gosh. Paul Paul and relax all the way down. I think that's good enough. Including our Chris Cross. Let's roll over onto our stomachs. So for our swan dive, why don't I have everybody with their heads facing inward?

Let's lower down onto her foreheads. Our hands will be by our chest with her elbows slightly lifted. So let's just prepare our upper backs in the following way. Lift your hands up and lift your head. Now think more of shooting out like a dirt or an Arrow through the crown of your head and lower your head and hands.

And once more hands and head lift and push yourself up into a little baby swan and push yourself as far as you'd like. Lowering yourself down, preparing your back for what we're about to do. I know lower your head, but seesawing your feet up into the air. Lorne, your feet down to lift, pushing yourself up through your chest and as your chest and head start to lower your feet starts to rise. Feet start to lower. Head starts to rise. And if you'd like, you can now take this into your full swan. I've reaching forward and up and forward and up and forward and up. Last time, forward and up and lower yourself down. Sit back in child's pose. Getting a nice stretch through your back.

Take a deep breath in with your hands as far forward as you can and exhale. Let sit up. Actually no, don't sit up yet. I take that back. I want you to go hunt your plank. Forgive me. Go into your hands and knees and I want you to hold this now hold it for ten nine are you lifted through your hurt or are you sinking through your shoulders? Is your head dangling or is it in alignment? Are you breaking at the hips and dipping?

Or are you in a straight line from head to heel and lower yourself down onto your forearms? So now that you've gotten that strength through your shoulder stabilizers, doing the single leg kick should be a piece of cake. So you're going to stay lifted through your heart because it's nothing compared to bring your whole body weight. Kick your right heel to your butt. Twice. Kick, kick, lower down left leg kick, kick lower downs. There's no excuse for anybody to be sinking. Kick, kick, lower down, kick, kick, lower down. Stay lifted. Once more, kick, kick, lower down, kick, kick, lower down, speed it up. Kick, kick, switch, kick, kick, kick, kick, kick, kick, kick, kick, kick, kick and relax. All the way down. Lawyer's sells for double leg stretch to face me.

So place your hands first under your head for a moment. Just kick your heels to your butt twice. Kick, kick, lower down. Open your arms out to the sides and return to side to kick. Kick lower down. Open your arms out to the sides and now lower them behind your back for the traditional way. Kick your heels to your butt twice. K kick lower down. No.

Extend your elbows to rise up. Lowering your feet down so that no work is occurring. Well, I guess the majority of the work is occurring through the upper back. I know lower yourself. Decide to kick, kick lower down. Reach out and extend through the elbows to rise. But keep the working in the upper back rather than the lower back and lower yourself down. Now try this. Take your left hand if you can. If you want, you can keep it where you just had it, but place your left hand overhead so that you're doing a weird stretch behind you. Grabbing your hands behind you if you can and no kick.

Kick lower down and open your arms out to the sides to rise and reverse that to lower. So we get full range of motion through our shoulders and kick lower down, open your arms out to the sides and returning to that starting position. Okay. Now we can sit up as I had wanted to previously and we're going to go our spine stretch so you can face the center again. Place your hands straight out in front of you as if they're resting on an imaginary ball.

Now this was my Aha moment when I started doing Polonius and I want to share this with you. I want you to pull in and up while you shoot your feet out. When I experienced that sensation, when I started doing this before I was teaching, it was when I first really grasped what was happening in the core with Pele's, I was able to relax through my hip flexors. So imagine that you're at the top of a waterfall or your head is the top of the waterfall and the water is just going to pour forward just through the upper body and slowly stacking back up. So that waterfall image is the, the water here at the top and it just pours forward. There's not that much effort, but you're lifted from underneath and back up and then doing it as such. I have no tension here in my hips.

And last time, exhale and rising back up. So let's separate our feet. Let's get a little bit of rotation. Let's start by rotating to the left for our saw. Inhale and saw off your outside Pinky toe. Push, push and rise up and rotate. Push, push and rise and rotate.

So I like to think of the saw as more of a breathing exercise. So I inhaled the twist and the exhale. Inhale to twist and an XL so I could great stretch on the twist. And I even held a twist once more and excelled and rising back up. Move your feet together.

And now we're going to lower selves onto our side for sidekick. I want you to prop yourself up. Yeah, I didn't, it wasn't very specific, so that's great. Everybody's on the same side, Robert itself up on your elbow and let's move your feet slightly forward in front of you. So we're going to lift that top foot and we're gonna kick the heel twice. Kick, kick reached behind you. Exhale forward, kick, kick, and reach behind you. Exhale forward, kick, kick or reach behind you. Now pause. Really lengthen out through that hip so that you increase the length of the waistline here and you might feel a really good stretch through that Fastenal area and once more kick kick and lengthen and reach behind you.

Now Stack your feet. I want you to do the up, down kick and I don't want you to go as high as you can because then you're really altering the structure and positioning of the hip. I want you to keep the pelvis where it is and just move the thigh bone in the socket and up and down and up. Very nice and down and up and down. Time and up and down. Now Bend your knees in. Prop yourself up. We're gonna do a clamshell variation here.

You're going to open both knees and lower down. Open both knees and lower down. This one has really helped my back issues lately, up and down as I feel the glute working and down last time and up and try and rotate your trunk and rise. Stay up, rotate your trunk and rise. And I just got a good adjustment. Lower yourself down. Now swing your feet to the second side. Pause.

Uh Huh. But you're not ready to go yet because you are going to swing your feet to the first side. Again, it's a little bit harder on these mats. I apologize. And swing and swing. So your abdominals be kicking and you don't have to think too much about it and swing last time and swing good. And now lower yourselves for side too.

Okay. And we're propped up and we're going to start with the front back leg kicks and we're gonna kick forward twice and low or I shouldn't even say lower. We're gonna point back. And if anybody else has that, sometimes words just seem to come out of the mouth and you don't really mean it. It's the nouns and kick forward and back and last time, forward and back. Now Leslie, move your bottom foot forward a little bit more as we all stretch behind us. There you go. Point those toes behind you.

Find the length and stack your feet. Now turn out and we go up and down and up and down and up and down and up and down. And now bend the knees. Jeez, we prop ourselves up onto our forearm and we rise and lower and rise and lower and arise and lower and rise and stay and a rotate and return and rotate. And we turn and rotate and return and lower yourselves down. And we're going to go into a little bicycle propping ourselves on our forearms. But now our chest is facing the ceiling.

Fold your knees in and that's bicycle hair. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 and point your toes and straighten your knees and point. So it's like a pointed toe frog. So now we're going to talk to position, right? I want you to, not ours, but I want to try and get a little bit more neutral. As you slowly lower your knees down, [inaudible] lower your hands out in front of you. Separate your feet to hip distance apart. And we're going to bridge up.

Lift one foot. It's a lot harder than when your feet are narrow and lower that foot. And lift the other one and lower and lift now pointed up to the ceiling and flex the foot to lower it down. Point the foot to rise. Flex the foot to lower point the foot to rise. Flex the foot to lower. Point the foot to rise and switch. Feet. Stay up, no resting.

Lift your foot up toward the ceiling and flex to lower point to rise. Flex the lower blah blah, blah. You know, and lots time. Flex the foot to lower and point the foot to rise. Make sure the glutes going so that you don't feel cramping in that hamstring. Lower the foot and lower the butt and grab hold of your knees. To give yourself a little stretch here.

Take a deep breath in and exhale rolling onto your side in order or to come into a downward dog position. So let's have everybody, yes, facing the center. We're going to go into downward dog here and we're going to get some ankle integration. Your feet should be hip distance apart. Shift her weight forward. Maybe walk your feet back to come into a plank and we're going to bring ourselves into arabesque. Lift your right foot on top of your left and shift your weight back to lift the foot. Lower yourself down into the plank. Exactly. And shift back and lower yourself down.

And now stay there. Stay in this one legged plank. Go into a one legged pike. So now we're not going to alter ourselves for the arabesque. Your foot's not going to come very high, but it's going to lift behind you so that your hips can stay very nice and square. I want you to be able to look at your supporting ankle, drop your heel, finding the alignment so that your ankle stays in line with your second toe and lift up and lower down and lift up. So what are the difference of what I'm doing?

And what I see here is that I don't want your weight to shift. I literally just want the ankle to move nothing else and let's try the other foot. So we placed the top foot, the left foot on top, and we shift our weight forward into a one legged plank. And then we go into the Aribel desk. So our air bask is lifting our foot as high as we can. Lowering down into plank, lifting back up, lowering down. Now stay here.

Shift your weight into the one legged pike, then lift your foot and it may not come so high. I'm not thinking about it coming up toward the ceiling because now my intention and focus is at the top foot is flex and I'm focusing on the supporting ankle so that I lower that heel and then I lift and I lower and lift. So we really work on the ankle alignment and get the Peroneal, the outside calf muscles to work and relax. Lower your knees [inaudible] sit back on your heels for a moment. Open your arms out to the sides, lift your arms up toward the ceiling and lean back so that you can place one hand down and bridge up and lower yourself down. Try the other side, lower that hand behind you. Come into a little extension.

So we come into hip extension as well as a tiny bit of thoracic extension. Lowering yourself down and now we come to finish our marathon. You're going to place your hands in front of you. We're going to do a little leg pull, lift your right foot, shift your weight back, shift your weight forward, shift your weight back, shift your weight forward, switch legs, shifts your weight back. Shift forward, shift back, shift forward. Now wait on both hands.

Pause and then rotate for a side plank toward me. Yes, and lift that top foot up and lower down. So a lot scarier up here. And shift to the other side and lift that top foot and lower it down and shift into the full plank. Bend your knees and look forward in front of you. Sticking out your bum. [inaudible] and slowly walk your feet inward. Then your knees and straighten and bend your knees and straighten and walk your feet back. One more plank.

Bend your knees and slowly lower your elbows or bend your elbows to lower your chest. Straighten your knees, bring your arms up to the sides, lift them slightly up off the ground and rotate your wrists around and reverse the rotation of your wrist and help yourself sit up. So we're going to sit with one foot out to the side and let's have yep, your foot, uh, facing this direction, which the opposite arm up overhead. And I want you to shift your ribs toward your foot. Breathe in. So you're not really going to hold it. You're going to just lengthen out. So I want you to lift that kneecap as well and rise up.

Try the other side, which out through that heel. Shift your ribs toward it so you could reach it initially, but it's not a static stretch. I want you to be very active through it the whole time. Breathe in and exhale and let stand up. So standing off your mats here, I want you to lift your arms out to the sides and I want you to take a step forward, a big lunch, and push yourself back. And again, big lunge forward and push yourself back. Big lunge, forward lift, whichever is the one, the foot that you're lunging forward on. Lift that arm up and rotate your trunk to look hot.

So you're going to rotate the other direction area, go and return. Ooh. Then there. Now we're going to try the second side. We take a deep one's forward. If it's my left foot that I've lunged forward on. If it's been, it's my left arm that lifts overhead and I rotate to the left. So left as the magic number. Breathe in, and now all in one count returned to the starting position.

So we deve rotate and step back. Inhale, lift your hands up, clasp your fingers and push your hands up toward the ceiling. Lower your shoulders and lower your hands. Thanks so much for joining me today.