Traditional Mat Basics

Hi everybody. I'm Shelly power and we are going to start a really fun mat class. So let's get going. Go ahead and lie down on your backs. Everybody. Thank you for coming today and come all the way down and bend your knees. We're going to do a little combination today of some bridging and some different things put into sequence. So have your feet a comfortable distance apart and comfortably close to you so that you, if your feet are too far away for the bridge, it's a little challenging. So let's just get going. First let's get moving.

Start to go into your bridge by gently tilting your pelvis and then roll up into your bridge position at the top. Take a breath in that feels like it's lengthening your spine a little bit and then roll back down and we'll do another one of those and then we'll start our sequence. So as you begin to bridge, what's really important is to reach the sit bones for the backs of the knees. So as you come up, feel like the under part of your thighs are reaching toward the knees. That's it. And then roll back down as you get back down to the mat. During bring one leg up to tabletop. Bring the other leg up to tabletop. Interlace your hands behind your head.

And as you exhale, start to roll into a small curl up. Just a little one. We'll go into chest lift, reach your arms up and hold the backs of your thighs. And then as you exhale, press your thighs a little bit into your hands. So you're gonna reach away. Hold there. As you reach the arms back up, support the back of your head and roll yourself down. And you can place one foot at a time down or both if you want a little extra challenge. Now keep your hands behind your head unless you feel like that's too high.

If the hands behind the head feels like it's pushing your head forward, you can slip them out a little bit. Brag into Brin Bridge again. So roll up. So we're warming up the spine and exhale to roll down. Feel that your breastbone is lengthening towards your belly button, one or both legs up at a time into your tabletop position. Exhale to chest lift. Inhale to reach your arms. Now remember, the important thing is to press your legs away.

As you curl up that little tiny bit more. Pause there, roll back all the way down to the mat. Good. Keep your hands on your thighs for a moment because we're going to do an assisted Rola curl up again. And this time roll all the way up until your feet are flat on the Mat. Grow Tall. Sit up as tall as you can. Use your legs to help you lift your chest and then begin to roll back down.

All the way back down. Let your legs slide in, back up to tabletop. Hold right there and take your hands around and roll down. So let's do that whole sequence again. Place your feet onto the floor. Bridge up. Feel the length of the back of the pelvis all the way out through your knees.

Roll down one or both legs up to tabletop. Good chasse left small. Reach to the backs of the legs. Now hold there. Taken another breath and exhale to roll yourself up. All the way to sitting tall. Great.

Grow Tall. Lift up, open up right from the center of your breastbone and begin to roll back down. Bring your legs with you. So you're going to come up into your table top position. Pause right there. Now stay that tiny bit curled up. Good. Let go. Let your hands come behind your head.

Roll your body down and let's say both feet down to the mat. This will be our last time, all the way through. Roll up into your bridge. Stay there as you take your breath in and roll down. Feel the space between your shoulder blades widening apart a little bit as you roll down one or both legs up to tabletop. Great. As you exhale, do a small curl, reach up, hold onto the legs. Now as you exhale, continue your roll all the way up to sitting tall and pause there when you come all the way up and cross your legs in front of you and just stay facing.

Yup. All right. Now that feels good. You want somebody to sit up on so it's a little easier. It feels okay. Okay, so now change how your feet are. Yeah, that's the, that's always the thing that feels the weirdest when you're, when you're doing that. Good. We're gonna do a little bit of mermaid just in this position. So we're both gonna go all in the same direction toward the front of the room. So as you put your hand down, you're going to stretch up and over toward the camera.

Pause there to come back up to sit tall and stretch toward me to go over the other direction. Inhale to sit tall against. You can lengthen the spine a little bit. Now as you go over, what I want you to do is I want you to push into the floor a little bit to open up and expand your ribs in how to sit tall and exhale to stretch the other way. Push into your hand and you'll feel, it's like the edges of a fan opening up. Come back up to [inaudible]. We're going to do one more each way. Going over toward the camera, right? And if you want, you can experiment with putting your hand closer to you or farther away.

And that'll change where the emphasis is. Yeah. Come up to sit talls wherever it feels best for you. Now let's go our last one going over. Open up the rib. So half of your rib cage is sliding down, the other half is sliding over and come up to sit tall with your arms out to the sides. And now cross your arms on just into your elbows or even risk.

Tourist is fine. Let's do a little spine twist. So again, we're gonna rotate toward the camera. As you exhale, turn. Inhale, face each other, smile at each other and turn the other direction. Might as well. Free smiles. Good. And come back to the center. One more in each direction. Exhale, turn that extra little bit and center and turn. And as you come back to the center, reach your arms out to the sides again and you're going to turn around again to face the camera.

And then you're going to hold and pick something to look at in the room. So find where you're looking. Keep your body just as it is and only turn your heads to look toward me back here. Right now. Turn your head back around to face where you were looking before and see if you can twist just a little bit more. Did it work? Cool. I love when I can do magic on stage. Good.

Come back to the center and let's do that on the other side. So turn all the way around. Pick something to look at. That's it. Now keep your body right there and all you're going to do is turn your head to look out and over your other arm. Start to turn it back. And as you get close to looking where you started, turn a little bit more beautiful. Come back to the front and let your arms rest.

Bring your feet out in front of you. You can go all the way straight for a regular roll down. Now reach the arms out and begin to tilt backward off of your sip phones and royal yourself all the way down. Take a big reach long inhale and then circle your arms around on the floor. Draw your knees back into your chest and place your hands on top of your knees.

Now we're going to do a little different version of double leg stretch. So normally that has both arms and both legs opening at the same time. We're going to do a little easier version, which some of you might want to do if you're doing double leg stretch and it's um, it's just too challenging or you need to warm up a little bit. So press into your hands and you're going to bring yourself into that same chest lift position. So send the knees a little bit away from you, right? You'll find a point where you can balance fairly easily. It doesn't, not so much work. Now we're just going to use the right arm and right leg.

It's like doing half of the hundred. So keep holding on with your left and stretch your right arm and leg toward each other and bring it all the way in the same direction you got it. And then come back in, hold on to the right and stretch the left. Great. Let's do that again. So the nice thing about this two nice things. One, it's assisted. You get to help yourself, but you also get to take the leg down to a point that you might not be able to when both arms and legs are moving. Come in and pause and roll down. Great. Now we'll take the arm and the leg opposite of one another, but still just one side at a time. As you get ready to exhale, curl up.

Now you're going to take right arm and leg, but reach them away from each other. Good. So this is more like the regular exercise to come back in. Exhale, stretch away on the other side. Great. One more each way. Feel the length, feel the stretching deep in the abdomen and change last time. [inaudible] very good. Come in and roll down. Good. Wiggle around just a little bit. Move anything that needs to move.

Turn your head, turn your legs. So now we're going to let that preparation help us with the a hundred a little bit. So any place that's comfortable with your legs, you can go tabletop straight out at 45 degrees or all the way down. You can choose for you, but we're going to get into that with this assisted role at the same thing we've been working on. So hold onto your knees, do your chest lift to axial, enroll up, and then just pause there for a moment. Wiggle around a little bit and get the skin to release from underneath you and then take both arms and legs out to your hundreds position and you're going to hold there. And here we go. In hailing. Exhale, good. Inhale and exhale. Remember we want to have the rib cage expanding and contracting instead of the abdominal wall. Good. Keep going.

Inhaling and exhaling. The floor is supporting your pelvis so the floor is supporting you and your ribs. Let's do four more sense. Exhale, see if you can curl up just a little bit more. Inhale and exhale. Two more sets. Inhale, curl a little bit more. This is our last one. Inhale and exhale. Bring yourself in. Hug your knees into your chest and pause. Good, and let your feet come down.

Super. All right, very good. Now we're going to go back into the bridging, but we're going to make this kind of like the shoulder bridge, but we're not going to have the hands underneath the pelvis. Your pelvis is going to hold itself up instead of your hands holding the pelvis up. So arms will stay down to the sides and you're going to bring your feet into a small Pilati Zvi just like you would on the foot bar doing footwork. Now we're going to take a practice bridge.

It should feel the same as what we did before. So starting to curl up and peel the spine away and hold there for a moment. When you get to the top. Good. And then just let these vertebra come down the tiniest bit. That looks great. So just check that you haven't gone up so high that the are starting to expand toward the ceiling. We want to keep that down just a little. Yeah, exactly.

I mean that's great. So now hold there and then roll back down to the mat. Good. So that's the position we're going to sustain when we lift the leg up. So the choreography is going to be to lift lower and lift two times and then we'll place the foot back down. Now the whole point of this is to try to keep the pelvis stationary when you go, so let's give it a try. Let's give it a trial run.

Starting Your Bridge to roll up and length and more so instead of talking so much in length in this way. Yeah, great. That was nice. I'll pause there for a moment. We're just going to do a single leg lift with the right, so start to reach your right leg to the ceiling. Pause there for just a moment. Now let's put that back down onto the floor and go onto the other side. Lifting up just so you have a preview of coming events here. Go ahead and place that back down. Let's go right into it now. Take the leg up, hold there. We're going to lower it out two times.

Reach across to the person on the other side of the room and lift it up and go again. Keep the pelvis full, loading up, bend the knee, change legs, bringing in, reaching up low, lower down, and the lift. Low or down. Beautiful. Lift. Bend the knee in change feet. Last time. Reach up, hold there for a second. Reach Oh away, good and up. Beautiful job keeping the pelvis level and up. Bend the knee last time and if you are ever wondering, you can always place your hands on your pelvis and just check it out.

What's happening there and lift up and reach longer. Lift up, bend the knee in, pause, center yourself and begin to roll down. Yeah, and pause at the bottom. Good. Bring your legs back to a parallel position and draw your right knee in towards your chest. Hold behind your thigh from, oh, we're just going to stretch and lengthen the hamstrings a couple of times. So flex the foot and I want you to again, broaden that you have something balanced on your foot.

Could be a glass of water or something balanced that you don't want to fall and you're going to bend your knee with that balanced and straight and you're going to resist just a little bit in both directions. So there's a little tiny bit of work but not too much. Bend and lengthen. Let's do it two more times. Ben and Ian. Lengthen, good and bend and length and change legs during the left side in, remember you have something balanced, ride on the sole of your foot and you're going to start to bend in annulling then up. So again, just a light resistance in both directions, just a little bit in and up. Two more times, bending.

Pull gently and then press against your hands to straighten. And then one more time bend. And as you get to this next lengthening pause, start to walk your hands up toward your calf. Curl your head up. Now hold on. And just like we did before, pressure leg away from you just a little bit to help start to lift and start to stretch the other leg away for single straight leg stretch. Let's change on one and two and three.

Good. And for keep going. Flex your feet and flex and flex and flex and point, point, point, last set and flex. Good Flex. That's the hardest thing is pointing and flexing your feet. Good. And come in, bend your knees and curl down. Great. Fabulous.

Roll yourselves up to sitting and let's go into our prone position. We're going to go all the way flat heads to the center and place your hands together and then just put your forehead on your hands for now, right? Walk your legs a little bit away from you. So do a little, little bit of lengthening and you can kind of start to get this to length in a way. So you almost feel that there's a stretching in the front of your hip and that's great cause that's going to help us with the next, with the next part that we're doing. So on your right leg, keeping your thigh on the Mat, I want you to turn your right toes under as if you are going to Tuck your toes to go into a push up. But we're not. We're not doing that. Don't worry. No, no pushups. So all I want you to do from this position, you can start with your knee down. Yup. You're going to keep your foot on the floor and straighten your leg.

All right. You'll feel your thighs start to engage and then place it back down. So it's not any major amount of work. Just lift the knee from the floor and engage the quadriceps, the front of the thigh, and then let it go this time. Do that same thing. Straighten it now. Hold your leg at this height and simply brush your toes out and point your foot.

Yep. And then flex the foot. Put the toes down and relax your knee to the floor. Right? Good. Let's do it on the other side. So tuck your toes under and we're just going to lift the knee from the floor a couple of times. So lengthen the leg and then place it back down. So what you'll feel is the back of the leg starting to activate a little bit more.

The center part of the gluteal start to activate a little bit more and kind of feel the back of your bottom. Yeah, let's do it one more time. Plane. And that co contraction is going to help us in keeping the leg really straight because sometimes when you do this kind of thing, the knee wants to bend too, too soon in the movement. So now let's get into position. Hold there for a moment. Tighten the front and the back of your thigh and then brush your toes out. Tuck them back under an places. Lie Down. Let's go onto the right.

So turn both towards under when to keep alternating. Now from right to left. So straighten the right knee, just the right one. Brush the toes out and hold there. Bring the toes back under and set the knee down on the left straight in the knee. Now be really conscious when you brush your toes out that your thigh is really staying straight.

Tuck the toes back under without bending your knee if you can, and place it down. We're going to do one more on each side. Straight brush, tuck back under. Beautiful. And down. Last one, stretch length and in point, tuck back under and pause for a moment. Good. Alright. Juggle your legs around a little bit. Not The glutes go. Good. How did that feel free? Was that, can you feel the work there? Yeah.

So now we're going to go onto more familiar exercise, which is single leg kick. So kick, kick, lengthen, kick, kick length, and the one that has the tempo to it. And we're going to use that lengthening when we're going. So after you do the kicks on email, do it on you quickly first. So you're going to do, and I don't really care if you point or flex the foot, it doesn't matter to me as long as everything else that we talk about is, is going. So you're going to bring the heel in toward the bottom and it's a, think of it as a pulse, not a kick, it's not aggressive. And then after you've done those two, you're going to lengthen the leg and then set it down.

So we're in the same position again. Okay. We're going to have the upper body just in just for a single day. Yeah. Yeah. Just going and just reviewing the, the leg part for now. So there's kick, kick or pulse. Pulse lengthen. Then lower. All right. The other thing I want you to try is this imaginary, I'm going to give you a tiny, tiny little egg, like a quail egg. Okay. Not hard-boiled. Okay.

And I want you to have that little egg sitting at the back of your knee. So when you bend, you don't want to go squish, squish the egg, and it gets all over the place. You're going to make some space. So let your foot rest against my arm. Just for a moment. I want you to go around the egg. Oh, I think it's going to crack. There you go. Yeah, that's it. So what that is going to do is make your thigh length and even more, okay? So just practice that at your own timing, not, not as, and you can do anything you want right now with your upper body.

So if you had a little baby quail egg right here, you'd go, oh, round it as you bend. And what again that does is your thigh is going to feel like it's lengthening long, right? It looks different just as you're doing it. That's great. Beautiful. But do, do bend your leg a lot. So I don't want it just to be to here, that's kind of cheating. You're not going to break the egg because you actually didn't bend your knee, so you want to go around it and still get the kick in.

That's also probably going to give you more of the stretch feeling in the thigh. Yeah, all of that. And you might even feel the stretch go all the way up through the, through the belly and the lower part of the abdomen. Okay. All right. So let's get, let's get going real now. So hands where ever you'd like them, they can be straight out, clasped hand over hand. Pull a little bit with your arms and try to expand the front of your chest and again, look across at the person on the other side of the room a little bit.

Yeah. So you're smiling and happy while we're doing this. Good. So here we go. This is the first ones we'll do and then we'll keep going at a normal tempo. So get ready and kicking the right one to lengthen, change and, and, and lengthen. Change. And let's do inhale. Inhale, exhale. Inhale, inhale. Exhale. Good around, around. Lengthen and around, around. Lengthen.

One more each side and lengthen. Last time in, in lengthen, pause and roll down. Good. Good. Jiggle around or wiggle around or sit in child's pose if you need to, to give that a little bit of a rest. It's so common when we do these movements that it starts to kind of get into this. Wow. Look outside. Ah, what's happening? You know, it doesn't have a lot of oomph to it. So when we can get to that point of moving in two directions at once.

So as my heel is coming toward me, my thigh is lengthening away. And that also helps with the upper body, right? It's perfectly fine to do this in a more lengthened position. You might have to, but it's really nice if we can get the feeling of openness to hear and then have that bit of work until, all right, so let's put that into double that stretch back up. And we're going to start first with just the upper body. So we'll leave the legs down, have them a little energized, but you can, you don't have to. We're not going to do the leg choreography yet.

So hands in, any fashion that is comfortable and you're gonna start to lengthen. Slide your hands down over your pelvis and then start to peel the front of your body up and just see what that position is like right now. Turn your head to the other side and lower down. Bend the arms. Exhale. Start to lengthen the arms first and come up into position. Good. And then come back down. Good. And you're looking at each other.

That's great. All right, so now I want to have a little more focus on what the shoulders are doing. So come up to sitting for a second so you can, we can have this all together. So quite often when we're doing this, it ends up looking like this. So the elbows hyperextend, which might do a lot more than they, more than they should. And the shoulder stay kind of forward. So if you can turn your shoulders and if you need to let go.

So I'd rather have the shoulder moving out and open, then stayed staying down and forward like that. So yeah. Yeah. So you're going to be here first, starts to slide and then this wraps all around. But I'm not focusing so much on moving the shoulders together, the shoulder blades together really quickly. I'm really tying to focus on getting this to open. I give my collarbones could stretch out more. Yeah, we'll see. They might be able to, they might be able to. Good. So let's also, as we're going now, let's also add the legs. All right, so we're going to do three pulses. We'll do a kick, kick, kick length, very yummy and gooey and luxurious. Here we go.

Bend your knees and pulse in one, two, three and lengthen. Lengthen. Lengthen. Better. Two, three and lengthen to three and bend to so much better. And length and good. Two, three and in. How are those quail eggs doing? Oh, to the end. One more each way. Three and lengthened. Open the chest, open the chest.

And in two, three now you're going to lengthen and you're going to hold pause there. Let go of your hands is reached the long you're going to start to bring them forward and around. Doesn't have to be too high, but turn your palms to the ceiling. Good. Circle the arms back out and reach towards your feet and circle around and turn the arms. Palms up. Great. And I know it's getting tiring. We're only gonna do one more and her in the arms. So when we turn and we get that rotation of palms up, our rotator cuff muscles are working a little bit to help us the arms back around. Turn your head to the side, come down and press yourself back into child's pose for a well deserved stretch in the other direction. Good.

How did your shoulders feel when you were doing the arm movement? Was that okay? Tough. It's tough to hold it. Tough to hold it, but really important to remember about turning the arm. So as much as you can, anytime you come overhead and the palms are down, it's a little more challenging sometimes. Then if you can get palms up, not challenging in terms of work, it's, it's more work to do this, but it's, it's easier to be in a good position. I should qualify that a little bit. Yeah. Great. So now we're going to put some of those things together and go into an exercise called the scarecrow, which is not a traditional plottings exercise, but it's a great prep for doing swan on the tower bar.

So if you think of line on the trapeze table and you're face down, bending the arms, spiraling the arm into extra rotation, thoracic extension, arms in the bar, push up. We've been, we come back out and we come back down. Okay, so this is our prep for jumping up onto the trap table when we go to class next session. All right, here we go. Face down. We're going to take this in parts because if we do it all together, it just becomes a little bit too much in the beginning. So again, walk your legs back, stretch your legs out, and then bring your arms to what I call the capital e position or bent arm goalposts. Yep. All right, so you're going to leave your elbows down to start. We're not going to lift the elbows, but I do want you to get into the active starting position with your forehead hovering off of the floor. That's great. Now all I want you to do, and I say all I want you to do because it's actually quite a bit of work, is to take your hand, wrist and forearm off of the floor, but leave your elbows down yet and you're going to both sides. Yeah. And then put it back down. So again, don't hold too long. And if you need to stop, just stop and come down again, rotate there.

Right. And notice that as you're lifting your hands and come back down, your arm is being turned into this position, which is external rotation, which if you're a teacher, that's really important. If you're a student of this, it's important what you feel from this. Yeah, the benefit of it. All right, now we're going to go onto the next step. So do that again. Try not to move anything else, but your forearm and hand. And now keep that sensation and your elbow come away from the floor. Hold there. Good. Put your elbow down. Put your hands down. Yeah.

One more time. Hands and forearms. Lift, elbows, lift. Make sure you now your hands are higher than your elbows. Put your elbows down, put your hands down and pause. Good. Let everything rest for a second. Oh, so this is super, it's a really great exercise for strengthening some of the upper back postural muscles and the shoulders. So this is really good for that. So let's keep going. Turn the face down. We're going to now add some extensions and thoracic extension to this.

So foreheads hovering, let your hands and forearms come. Bring your elbows off the floor. Now start to look forward at the person in front of you. Sink your ribs down to do that. Small Curl into extension. Bring your body down. Bring your elbows down, bring your hands down. And we're going to do it.

One last time. Hands lift, elbows lift. Start to bend your spine into extension. Now if you want to stretch your arms out over her head, if you don't, don't bend back in elbows. Oh sorry. Body first. Elbows next. And hands down. Good. All right, that's a tough one. Phew. All right. Ready to get out of extension. No more extension.

Let's practice a little bit of teaser as our finale for today. Hmm. So we've done some things that are teaser, like we haven't done all the rolling or open leg rocker, any of those things. But we have done single straight leg stretch, which I really like for just kind of getting close to the position and we're going to go back to an exercise that um, many of you have done lots of times, which is the pelvic clock exercise to help help the teaser, right? So stretch out on your backs and bend your knees and just put your feet flat. This is the, the Yummy, easy part.

Okay. So in the pelvic clock or just the pelvic tilts, there's that feeling of tilting the pelvis towards your tailbone and towards your lower back. Yup. And imagine if you were on, um, a soft ball that was about halfway inflated or deflated, how your pelvis would just rock back and forth. Right? Exactly. Exactly. So she'll feel very easy. That's it. Now keep doing that and stretch your legs out. So see if you can do it with long legs.

It's a weird feeling if you haven't done this before and you can even use your heels on the floor a little bit to kind of push and pull that motion. That's it, right? So now it becomes more about your heels pulling you, then the muscles moving. You good? That's it. All right. So what this means is that our legs and our pelvis and our spine want to move together in these, these pathways are these, um, movements. And unfortunately this is really cool if we're doing something that has all this movement. But teaser, we don't want that. And teaser, we want to be able to keep this area a little bit more stable.

So what I want you to think about is how can you lengthen, and again, sometimes this is just an image, it's not, it's not always a physical thing cause somebody might actually do a little bit too much. So you're going to lengthen the legs a little bit as if you could stretch them longer and just very gently draw the abdomen in. Okay. That's, that in itself is actually seems like very little, but it's actually quite a lot. So if somebody was pulling on your feet, could you prevent them from letting your pelvis tip forward in that same thing that we just did? And I want you to have a little less hard point of your feet. You can keep the ankle pointed, but don't, don't use your feet too much to just have that sensation instead of pushing down. Lengthen Long. That's it. Yes, exactly.

So I'm trying to get to everybody so you can feel it. So I'm gonna pull and you're gonna just resist me just enough. That's it. Good. Now the timing is going to be important. So let that go for a moment. Timing is important. We want to, yeah, I know. So where I want us to go with this is head and shoulders first.

You're going to do this small chest lift like we've worked on already. You're going to have the sense of lengthening. And again, it may not be an act of thing. What I don't, what I don't want is you to lengthen your legs so much that you then Tuck your pelvis right inadvertently. Right? So it might just be the thought and that that might be, that might be enough. Okay. Then you're going to continue to roll up into your teaser, lifting the legs whenever it feels good. Okay. So let's just take one kind of at your own tempo. I'll talk you through, but if you need to go faster or slower, you can turn your palms to the ceiling, start to exhale and just do your chest lift and see if you can energetically lengthen your legs to the person on the other side of the room and then at your own time and come up to be useful teasers and then roll back down and in how that was beautiful. Exhale, scoop under the, almost the feeling of you're scooping your legs up with you and roll back down.

Roll your body away from your legs. We're going to do two more. Inhale, expand the back ribs against. So take time to do the curl in your upper back. That's it. Even better timing. Amy, that was great. And then roll down. Roll your body back away from your legs.

The legs are now breaching to the person on the other side. And this is our last one. Grand Finale. Exhale. Take the time to lengthen. That's it. Yes. Good. And lift. Stretch low and roll back down.

Pull in. Move the pelvis first and down. [inaudible] great. Everybody. How do you feel? Yeah. Hopefully it was a little easier. Yeah. If you can work on the timing. Sometimes we're doing something super basic like that, working on the timing we don't even think, don't even think to do so. Yeah. Great. All right, well thank you. Have a great day and we'll see you again soon.

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