Exploring the Well

Hi and welcome. I'm Leah and I'm so honored to be back here at holidays anytime here to teach you a reformer class. So before we go into this class, I just want to give you a little fair warning that I just have a lot of fun experimenting with kind of a different perspective of the reformer. So nothing fancy, nothing like extraordinary, just something kind of fun and kind of different actually inspired by my children who in my home studio like to play on my reformer despite my requests for them not to. And and they spend a lot of time inside the reformer playing with their trucks and using, you know, everything for trucks and checks and stuff like that. So kind of inspired me to kind of look at movement from that perspective.

So we're going to spend a lot of time inside the reformer and I'm going to spend some time kind of doing some standing work and we're going to spend some time doing some long boxworks and make sure you have your long box available for the end of our session. So I just ask that you go into this kind of with an open mind and just kind of have fun with me, just kind of feeling, um, again, a different perspective, a different angle on working with the reformers. So let's go ahead and get started. So you're going to load your reformer up to one half spring if you have a half spring available to you on the balanced body here I'm working on a blue spring. If you feel like you want to work a little bit heavier, if you kind of try this a couple times, you can work on a red or of course you can go a little bit righter, lighter, rather into a yellow. So just kind of work with wet weight feels best for you according to the type of equipment that you're working on.

So right now we can leave our straps all hooked up and I want you to actually have your head rest up. So as you're standing in here, we're kind of looking at the reformer from a slightly different perspective that we don't do a lot of. And so we're kind of going to go into this warm up. I want you to be in a stance that's about hip with maybe a little bit wider essentially just because we're going to be pulling the reformer toward us and I want you to be able to have room for the head rest to kind of glide in between your knees so you're not hitting your legs with it. So we're going to start with a really basic roll down just to kind of enter into our session, just to Kinda get our mind frame going. And I just want you to think about, again, just kind of having fun, experimenting and exploring. And that's just Kinda the fun thing about our plot is practice.

So let's all take a breath in through the nose and as you roll down, you just gonna let your arms come forward. You can touch the carriage if you'd like. That's totally fine. Take your breath in and then roll out. So again, taking this time to just start to focus on your body and just start to leave everything else that you've experienced today or yesterday, or things that you have to do. And just Kinda let that all leave your mind right now.

And we're just going to spend the next 40, 45 minutes just having fun and just moving together. Let's do one more XL. As you roll down now I want you to place your hands right on the carriage and you kind of need to adjust where you're going to go. You can come in a little bit, you can step a little bit further away. I want you to put a little bit of a bend into your knees so that you're not walking out in your knees. You're not hyperextending your knees and I want you to drop your head. And so from here we're going to do a little bit of a f, uh, like a flection of the spine and you're going to pull the carriage towards your legs. Inhale, you're going to release that and extend.

So I'm focusing on the fluxion coming from my upper spine. And then letting my pelvis respond to that. So it's a little bit different from a pelvic curl where we start from the pelvis and roll up. This time I'm flexing. You can see that detail on my thoracic spine. I'm flexing my thoracic spine, letting my cervical spine and my head join it. And then I'm joining the pelvis into a deeper posterior tills.

And then I'm releasing that into a bit of extension. Now you can maximize your extension if you feel like you're ready to do that or you can kind of just ease into it. The key factor here is I'm not shifting my weight on my feet at all. I'm really holding my leg steady. So as a result and feeling that beautiful isometric contraction in the musculature of my legs and I'm getting some great surveys and lot work and tricep work here as well as my shoulders are moving in toward extension, the action of extension as I pull the carriage toward me.

So let's do a couple more just like that. And on these last two, I want you to exaggerate the extension. Reach your sits bones out. So you're really in a beautiful extension on that diagonal line. And then come back in and extend. Let's do one more and exhale.

So now from here, hold that extended position and I want you to take your left side of your rib cage and reach it out toward the left and come back to center. So we're just going to do some mobilization in our coronal plane. So we're going to be doing a little side shift of the rib cage. So think of if you can, the image of your shoulders and your hips staying relatively on the same line and you're bringing your rib cage away from that. So keeping your shoulders in your hips, in your mind's eye parallel to one another.

It's not going to be perfect or shoulders are going to move a bit, which is fine, but my intention is for you to mobilize the, again, that thoracic spine in the lateral flection. Really getting as much mobility as you can. Let's do one more set to, to the left and to the right. So now with the right, you're gonna reach up in deflection, pull the carriage in towards you. Go to the left and then come back around. So now we're doing circles. So I shift the right ribs out to the side, pull the carriages. I come into the flection just as we were doing the very beginning of the session. Reach to the left and around. One more time to the right.

Okay. And around. Put a little bending your knee so that you can really keep yourself steady on your feet and app into the flection or the pike and around to the left of the rib cage. So hopefully you don't have to look at the screen too much. You can just kind of follow my directions, my verbal cues and up nice steady circles. Come back to the center and I want you to pull one more time into your pike.

Oh good. We're going to do isometric hold as a train passes I think. Okay, good. So hold there. Now Bend your knees and I want you to lift your heels up. So you're doing a little bit of a calf raise or we call an elevator. So heels go up and you're holding that position of your torso. The shoulders are working, the arms are working, the abdominals are working.

Minimize the movement of the carriage heels go down and then extend out. From here, I want you to take a little bit of a step back with your feet and a little bit of a reach forward with your arms. We're going to come into a plank right over the top of the carrot, so feel nice and strong here. Now you may want to watch me the first couple times you're going to shift your weight back. I stepped a little too far back. Excuse me. Shift your weight back so I have this beautiful diagonal line here.

Then I'm going to pull up into the pike. I'm an articulate back out. I'm not going to let the carriage hit the stopper and I'm going to reach out into the plank. Shoulders can be a little forward of risk. That slight shift the hips back weight onto the heels and then come up into the pike. Articulate east center controllers. You reached that carry out. Then shoot the energy out through the crown of the head.

Really reached energy out through the heels. Hold that full body position, shift the hips back with a nice flat back and come into the pike. Again, articulating out and shift. So the idea here is to really practice control of the carriage with your musculature of your body and also to feel the flow of going back and forth. So we're having this beautiful dynamic movement of extension, flection of the spine, extension, flexion of the knees, moving the wrist planter, flection, Dorsiflexion of the ankles. So we're really getting into this nice movement. Let's do two more.

Reach Nice and quiet on the carriage forward, coming back and picking up and reach. So feel that full body control. This is the last one. And hold it here. Now with your arms stay nicest, steady. If you can't transfer, taking your elbows down on the carriage fingers straight forward. So now you're using a shorter lever of your arm support. Widen your stance a little bit if you need to, to really pull that carriage in towards you. So I have a flat back, as you can see on that diagonal position. So from here I'm going to take, I'll start with my left arm. I'm gonna take my left arm out here.

So widen your stance if you need to cause that carriage is going to come in between your legs. You're going to pull the right arm back and you're going to rotate up and reach right arm backing. You're going to rotate your spine over to the left. Looking up at that left hand and beach. So we're focusing on that rotation with extension of the spine, stability of the hips and the pelvis and the legs. I want you to imagine that you're going to keep equal weight on both feet.

It's very easy to shift your weight over onto your right foot. I want you to really feel grounded, planted down through both feet. Equally. Rotate now two more on the side and I want you to really see that spiral of your spine. Reach that spiral. Reach the energy out. Feel all that dynamic energy in your body here. Feel that elbow reaching back. Fill that energy through that left hand and back to center.

One more. Now support that spine with the abdominals back to center. Squeeze the arms in. Chance for. Take your left hand to the shoulder, rest right arm out. We gain your grounded-ness plant your feet down into the earth and then reach and back to center. So the movement is not large, but yet it is powerful. I feel the rotation of my spine. I feel the deep articulation in my hip joint.

I feel the work of my radius and my lap, my lower Trapezius, my rhomboids. As I pull that arm back, I feel my spinal extensors reaching with energy. I feel my abdominals supporting my torso with my spine and let's go three more. But then I also feel this sense of beauty and reaching through my body. Long Energy. Hold it there. Come back to the center. Place the elbows down.

Now without the carriage moving, plant your hands down. So nice wide palms. You're going to keep that energy, that carriage back. You're going to start to articulate through the spine. Come up to the [inaudible] carriage. Shouldn't have moved. Now you're going to think of a little bit of Apps, like little pulses you're going to pull us in.

Once I'm thinking of just flexing my upper spine more too. Yeah. Kind of drawing my rib cage down toward my pelvis. Three. Okay. Four.

Okay, so just think of doing reverse little pulses like if you were in a chest lift position and you were doing little pulses of the abs plus one and then articulate it out. Control the care's all to the stopper reach, reach, let it touch the stopper hands come down and roll that roll up. Roll up and roll. Hap. Ah, that feels really good. I hope that feels good for you as well. So now we're gonna move on to some standing leg legwork, some hamstring curls.

We're gonna have a little bit of fun with this as well. I'm going to stay working on the blue spring. Just, I don't tire out on you guys too much, but you're more than welcome to play with the red spring here if you'd like to. But I want your head rest up because that's going to be really key to kind of anchoring our healing for this position. So you're going to stand, we're going to start with the right foot. Foot is flexed, heel is driving down right into the shoulder. Rest here, and then you notice that my left leg is bent and I'm really grounded here. My hips are square. I had this beautiful alignment. Think about where your shoulders are placed over your pelvis and try not to imagine that bearing down on your body, but I'd rather you work with lighter weight and have the ability to really elevate through your spine to really reach that energy upward toward the ceiling and wants you to feel like you're getting longer. Widen your toes, bum both feet, so we really feel that spreading out of this metatarsal so you really can really connect through your feet. Then now very simple, we're going to just bend the knee, pull the carriage towards you for hamstring curl, and we're just going to focus on that really simple work here.

You can feel how wonderful it feels to really connect with those hamstrings, but then you also feel the work starting to really develop and the abductors, the glute mead, the glute Max here. Just really feeling that nice stability work at that pelvis. So if you were to be looking at yourself from the front here, you wouldn't be jetting your hips to the right or to the left. You'd be very square hair, very centered, and you wouldn't feel your weight shifting forward and back on that standing lay. Now hold there, extend that left knee and come up into like a half of a planter flection and do the same thing. So with some balance, if you want to take your arms out to the side, that's fine and pull in. So again, just appreciating that hamstring work that you're getting here, filling that beautiful balance.

Okay? Now if you try this class one time and hopefully you do it more than once, I would encourage you as you feel like you're getting a little more advanced with this, to maybe hold some weights in your hand. In fact, on the other side we're going to add a little bit of arm movements, sat a little bit more dynamic to the cell hold here. What I want you to do is I want you to shift forward almost like you're doing a hip flexor stretch. Bend your knees. So your left heel goes down, shift back and hamstring curl in. Hold that Hampton in. As you lift that heel up, extend the knee, flatten the front foot, lower the back heel into the little a hip flexor opening position here.

Shift back so you can notice them on that wonderful horizontal plane. I flex the foot and I bring it in whole the ice. Micha cold briefly through your hamstring. As you lift your left heel, bring the carriage forward, lean forward with it and coming down. Feel good. So we're going to do that a little bit faster. So reaching up, forward and down. Don't make the carriage talk to you like I did.

Keep it as quiet as possible. So yeah, and we, she'd be feeling those hamstrings. By now you should be filling the outer part of the hip by now should be feeling that beautiful control of your body and rotate to the side. So from here you're going to be an external rotation of both hips. Flex out heel here and we're going to do a little bit of the same hamstring curl, but we're going to getting a little bit of the sensation of a hip opener.

So squeezing in. Yeah, and squeezing in. So now feel that expansion across your chest, reaching out into the arms. So again, let's not make our work. Stop with the muscles that are the body parts that were moving. Let's reach that energy radiated through the entire body. Make your whole body where care. Join in that work. Hold it. Listen you toughie.

Lift the heel up, reaching out, quiet into it. Bend some doing the same pattern. I bring it in. We're just going to do it four times. Lift the heel up. Hold that. You'll feel a lot more adductor here. Bring it out with that control. I can't hear your carriage. So this is the honor system here. People, I don't know how loud it is. You can hear me.

Mine's not perfect and I'm not striving for perfection, but I'm just striving to be as best I can. So there, hold it, lift up, reaching out, holds your valance and come around to the friends. So whew, that feels good. Right? So we're going to keep going. We're going to the other side. So left side here. Now this side might be harder. Let's start our hamstring curls because we're already a little fatigued here.

So this is the wonderful part of holidays that just a plot he speaks about with the idea of endurance and focus and drawing into our inner self and not hearing those things of like, oh, I can't do it now. Is this the hardest exercise you're ever going to do? Absolutely not. But what it demands is it kind of creeps up on you as you go. It demands this very deliberate intention, this very deliberate control of mind and body coming together. So I think that's really nice because some doing something that's maybe intermediate level like this, that kind of focus is going to serve us as our body gets stronger, I guess more adaptive to able to endure more, then we can start to incorporate that sense of control and focus in our advanced exercises. So come up who hold your balance and bent.

So now what I want you to do, so I want you to lift your arms up and down and up and down [inaudible]. So again, as you do this class more than once, you can start to add hand weights here and do different various arm positions. I didn't want to bring that quite in and our initial practice of this sequence, I want you to just be able to focus on the simplicity of it initially. Then you can add more complexity as you go. Hold it there. We lean forward, lower the right heel, shift back, hamstring curl in. Now when you do this here, I want you to feel very fluid and I often use the word gooey here and I want you to see the circular pattern that's going on here. So with your control, with your focus, try to really make this seamless and beautiful in your movement.

Don't think of it being rigid. It shouldn't be robotic. Yes, it's controlled, but there's flow and there's beauty in that sense of control and come up again. Just playing that little bit of that game of how quiet can you keep the reformer on the stopper and come in. Let's do another one forward. Slowly lower that heel and bring it in. So now we're going to turn to the side, external rotation, arms out to the side, reaching the energy out and me flection again, noticing that your two hip bones and the front, the Asi ass in the back, the psis. Imagine that top ridge, so to speak, of your pelvis being really nice and level and it's not affected by the movement that's going on in your hip and your knee joint, your ankle joint.

It's working hard with that, but it doesn't move as a result of the movement and the other part of the body. Okay, here we go. I'm not gonna lie to you and be tough for me. Heal up. Reach out with that control. Lean into it a little bit more. Bend that right knee that botany and dragging in.

If you need to watch me a couple of times, you can. If not, just listen. We're going to take the carers to the stopper, then more dramatically into your left knee. Reach and bend into your right knee than hamstring curl with the left, lift up, reach out. So again, endurance, control, imbalance, mindful movement here, intentional movement here. And let's do one more. Bend it in, lift up its rod across and bend.

And you should start to feel again the hamstring work and that beautiful gluteal work here. So now we're going to take a look at, we're going to sit down on the floor, interior reformer. We're going to go into some arm work here. So let's keep on the [inaudible] half of spring, your blue spring, and I want you to grab your straps. Now you can play with shortening your straps so that you can hold onto the handles, which is totally fine. If you want to pause me and take a moment to do that.

For the integrity of flow here, I'm just gonna just hold onto the ropes here and I'm going to move there. So mom, blue spring, I can always lighten it a little bit if I need to and I'm going to do a little deltoid res Anterior delt here, reaching up. So again, feeling very stable through my legs, feeling that beautiful. Reach forward, filling the front of my shoulders, working and lifting up. Now I'm going to move on. I'm going to go forward out to the side, bring it back in and down. Your carriage will move a little bit as you do that. Transfer into the horizontal abduction of the arms, bring it back in horizontal abduction and bring it down. So again, a lot of deltoid work here, but because we're moving against the resistance of the spring and the way that the carriage, there's an a massive amount of stability going on through the legs, through the torso, and that work is very dynamic and very powerful as well.

Reach. Now we're going to move on here. You're going to come forward into like a head to tree and deflection and reach up, bring it together and downs. We're just adding onto the sequence, going up out to the sites. A lot of tough work on the shoulders. Bring it up, forward and down two more. And uh, then reach into the flection, extend the spine forward and down.

One more. Reaching up, make sure you're breathing. Exhale and bringing it up forward and down for a lot of great work on the anteriors holder. Now we're going to work on the posterior shoulder, so turns so that you're facing away from your carriage toward your risers. And we're going to move into first starting with our chest expansion. So holding onto the rope here. We're going to pull back now if your care's just coming a little further forward, just waiting [inaudible] that that head reskinned slide right between your knees, your calves and drawback.

This is number four. Exhale. So I really want the idea of reaching the arms down and back. This will work in the opposite part of the shoulder. We just said we just did a lot of the interior. Now we're working at posterior. Catch my breath for a moment. Now let's reach back, lift the chest up, reach forward, reach back, lift the chest up and reach forward. Two more back. Hold the arms lift, elevate that sternum up, no excessive anterior tilt to the pelvis and reach, lift and forward.

So moving on into our next little sequence here, we're going to come up. You may have to adjust your positioning, which I may very well do as well. Make sure you look behind you. We're going to sit down on your head rest here. So just be careful. Just be cautious. They don't choose to fall down. So let's just hold onto that so you can hang up onto your toes.

You're going to do a hinge. Your knees to your shoulders are one beautiful, strong plank hedging back. You can put a little bit of pool. Then you're going to shift your hips back and you're going to sit straight down. Hopefully. Where is it? There we go.

So there you got. So you should be barely on the edge. So we're just gonna be forgiving of each other on these first couple practice run. So from there, so you're sitting down right on the edge of your headrest. You're going to start to come up, sit up, and you're gonna reach back into your hinge and come up. So reaching back into that hinge, keep the tension in the straps. Sit straight down. Come right back up.

Then this time I want you to curl your pelvis back into the hinge and depth. So I've changed it a little bit and I think it may be better if we keep our feet flat here. So we're going to hinge back with those flat feet. So nice grounded feet. Get back as far as you can. Now I want you to think of your Palestinian posterior. Push up with those hip extensors.

Reach the bottom back and sit straight down. Now come straight back up. When you get about halfway up, you're going to curl like a pelvic curl. Come back into that hinge and straight back up into standing position. So hinge ing back again. Need a shoulder one. Nice, beautiful, straight line. This is a here, bottom, straight back. And go down.

Push through your feet. Use Your glutes here as you come up. Pelvic curl into that beautiful hinge and up. Let's do one more. So really challenging again for the control of the body, reaching back, fill the width of the pelvis as you go down, keeping that control and pushing up pell that curl through, through, through, hinge back a little bit more and come up. Town's hard, but good.

So now we're gonna move on into our seated series here. I mean, I have little droplets of sweat here. There you go. That's nice. So I'm going to work on half a spring, but if all sits in the series on one full spring, so I'm going to leave it up to you. You can decide what you want to do. So we're gonna sit down here, kind of fun on our, on the floor, on the carpet, on the mat, wherever your reformer happens to be. You have a couple of choices here you can hold onto on the balanced body equipment, we have these little nifty handles for our straps, or you can hold onto the shoulder, rest of the shoulder blocks here. So from here you're going to basically think of like in a spine stretch position here. So you're going to be upright, right on top of the sitz bones feed or flex.

You're going to roll back in your pelvis like you're doing a poster, your till a pelvic curl, you're gonna hold there, you're gonna bend, the elbows extend, and you're going to roll up. Now my reformer at home is higher than this reformer. So with my Flex v I can feel the springs kind of rubbing on my toes. So I'm going to go ahead and point my feet here. So I'm in this beautiful posterior tilt.

Then the elbows bring the carriage all the way to my chest. I extend my elbows and roll up. We're going to go a little bit faster. So roll, bending him in, extend and roll up. Two more. Rolling down. Then extend and roll.

That last one, holding the strength of the abdominals there. Now from here, I hope you can see in this slide a little bit forward for you. I'm going to stay on the same. I'm on my head essentially the same in the same spot. Keep the carriage in, drawn into toward my chest. I'm going to hold that and I'm going to extend my spine and the thing on the same spot, I'm going to come back into flection of the spine. So this is a different kind of way to work the rectus abdominis work.

The obliques is for spinal flection but also getting a little bit of beautiful hip flexor work. Spinal extensor work in there as well. So I should probably listen to my own cues and the carriage in and reach up and flex [inaudible] so naturally the carriage is going to move a little bit, but I'm also going to use my arms to Holden as much as you can and I want you to keep going and just feel that beautiful abdominal work here. Extend the arms and reach out. Now both hands are gonna go on to the left shoulder rest. You're going to roll back and you're going to bend, extend and roll up.

So roll back Ben extent. [inaudible] and let's do one more time. Rolling in deflection extensive from here, we leased the left arm. Reach out to the side. If you're, if you have a reformer that's higher at home like mine, just slide your hand under. Okay, so your arm under, so you're there. So from here, twist a little bit more and extend and flex with me a little bit faster here. Extend and flex. Extend.

Flex. One more time. Extend and flex. Sweep it around. Switch sides. Okay. Left arm on the shoulder. Rest right arm out. Hold that rotation. Extend. Now I'm, excuse me, I'm doing this on half a spring, but I can feel a little bit more of a challenge when I deal with a full spring. So play with your resistance here.

Play with what it feels like coming back around both hands here. It feels kind of funny. You'd be looking over that horizon of this carriage. You're gonna roll forward, roll forward, and you're gonna extend up into that beautiful extension here. Hold it there. Now if you can, hopefully this will work. Flex your feet here and I want you to just do a little bit of a scooch back with your hips. Flexing your feet here.

Now here we're going to spine stretch forward. I'm going to keep my shoulders over my hips and what I'm going to do is I'm going to really allow my scapula to open wide across my backs and getting a beautiful opening of that thoracic spine. And then I'm going to pull the scapula together, engage my rom boys, my mid Trapezius as I come up here feeling tall. I'm going to bow forward widening that Scapula, feeling that opening of that back and then I'm going to articulate up and feel the connection there. One more time for, it's a very simple, what I was doing before was I was rolling back and leading from my pelvis. This time I'm keeping my pelvis relatively stable and I'm focusing on bending the upper spine first.

Now from for a little bit of mid back work once you two you can hold here certainly, but I like to kind of sweep in the heel of my hands around the shoulder rest and keep my hands straight and I'm going to pull the Scapula in and open. So doing a little bit of protraction and retraction of the Scapula, opening a, widening that chest and getting a little bit of that posterior work of the back, which is so very important to compat combat rather the forward position that we're so in all the time, even unintentionally, even with the best intentions, we tend to fall into that habit of rounding our shoulders for we're getting tight in our chest and weaken our upper back. So now from here, if your hands are slipping readjusts there, hold on here, we're going to pull back. You're going to lift up. Find that extension. Reach into that extension. Now I want you to wrap your hands. If they weren't already, lift that right arm up and reach back. Reach back, reach back, reach back and come up holds. When the arm zen actually straight elbows, excuse me, lift up.

Now lift the left arm up, reach back, reach back, feel the back, fill the stretch through the front body. No, use the abdominals to come up. Keep the Scapula in. Lift the right arm up and here watches me. Energy goes up, then I reach, reach, reach, reach. And I bring it back up nice and steady, straight. I'm scapula in last one, left arm. Feel the energy, yet you should. Feeling good and powerful right now and reach up, filling the joy of that movement, feeling strong. And that my friends is just some of the fun we can have sitting and standing inside a reformer. Very Fun. So now we're gonna do a little bit more carefully.

Step out of your reformer and I want you to load up to either on it half spring or you can load up to one spring. Now we're doing a little bit of a sequence here, so I'm going to break it down for you real quick. We're going to do on each side, and we're gonna kind of have fun with playing with a little bit faster tempo. So I want you to set up with this case. I'm doing my left leg up on the carriage, left foot at against the shoulder rest and my right leg, or my right foot rather is down on the ground, but my knees are on the same plane here. As you can see again, if you're in a higher reformer, just as I've said I have at my studio, at my home studio, I always have a little box there and I stand on a little box just to kind of make it so my hips are a little bit more nimble and that my knee doesn't run into the carrot chair. So we're going to sit nice and straight here.

Square hips, beautifully aligned, shoulders over a pelvis, really lots of energy up through the upper back. So you're going to push the carriage back and in. And we did a lot of hamstring work with the standing work. So now I want to get a little bit more hip extension, work with the glutes and opening the front of the hip here so you can see how I'm getting that beautiful glute work here. Really Nice and steady. And the more I keep my pelvis in a posterior pool or posterior direction, meaning pulling my pubic bone forward, elevating my chest up, really maximizing that glute work. Let's go to more like that.

Then we're gonna add onto the sequence. So now from here when we come in, we're gonna flex the spine to a beautiful spinal flection with a little hug, a tree, arms, the rent extend out, and we're going to do two of those. So that's number two. Let's just add one more just for the sequencing here. Now from here, I'm gonna roll through. I'm going to place my hands on the foot bar. So I'm here and I'm going to do what I call it through the pipe.

So I'm kind of getting this beautiful snake like extension of my spine. So I'm in this flection. As I do that sink like extension, I'm going to transfer my weight onto my hands and I'm going to lift that left knee up. So I'm doing a single kind of plank Renner position, however you want to imagine it. I'm going to come down, place my foot right back down, keep that carriage in as best as I can. I'm going to sweep my hips back, come into that flection, release my arms, I find my balance. I reach up hip extension and in out and enlist your three of them out. Now here I sneak through really leading with your head. Make it dramatic.

Boom. I transfer my weight over. I'm up. I feel the power of the shoulders. I feel the power of my trunk reaching energy up through the crown of my head. I bring it back down. I transfer the weight and find my balance again. Boom, and in some getting glue work, abdominal work, telic stabilization work and in hands down and shoot up. Bring it down.

Last one out and fulfill that full body component here, that beautiful flow and diving down and up. Hold it there. Hold it there. Now you're just going to simply walk over to the other side. Place that foot down, get that right leg up. Find the balance here. We're going to go into just the hip extension here.

Really focusing on your alignment. Elevate the rib cage up away from the pelvis. Just giving that space in the torso, giving that space in the spine. He has the same time you're focusing on holding a posterior bias, as I'd call it, of that pelvis. Really accentuating the hip extensors. Reach mean she using your breath. That beautiful balance work and last one.

Then we're going to go into the flection of the spine and adding a little bit more flow, a little bit more of a dance quality to it, and this is a third one. We dive through and up. We hold it, transfer down, know where your feet go. Boom. Reach up and reach out and intentionally use your abdominals to flex your spine here. Hold it. Dive through quiet carriage and up, down onto that foot in. Reach out and reach out in. Reach out and flow through. Feel it, hold it. Really Youth I have flexor. Use those abdominals.

Bring that knee in, transfer Holt reach and reach in. This is our last one. Make it your best one and reach through and hold, hold, hold it there and come down. Nice and slow. Perfect timing while we get our long box.

Okay, so now we have our long box here and now we want to work on some back extension. We've done a little bit and kind of doing some high arcs, but I want to go a little bit more on our hip extension. Like we just sit in our kind of scooter I hip extension, standing balance exercise thingamajigger and so now we're going to work on just really beautiful classic hip extension. So I want you to bring your foot bar down and choose which spring you want to work on. I'm gonna work on a full red sprain. I'm kind of just going to see how that feels.

So from here we're going to go ahead and set up bringing your body weight a little bit more forward on your hips. So your shoulders are relatively over your wrist here. So from here I want you to really extort by this beautiful back extension, lifting that sternum up, and we're just going to be really simple. We're going to reach forward, but I want you to actually dive all the way down and look at your springs on the bottom side of your reformer. They're gonna lift up and you're going to come up, up and up, extending that spine here and then reach down who reached forward flexing all the way. Let your head hang down. Then I want you to reach up, reach up, reach up.

Let's do one more time and forward. Now from here you're gonna. You might need to slide a little bit more for, but you're going to lift your legs up and I want you to really play with the edge chair. Live a little right. Push those hips up into extension. Reach that body down. Now your spinal energy is going to lead to notice how I'm trying to keep my legs up as high as I can. Then my legs will go down naturally as I come up into the extension.

Then I lift those hips up. So I'm doing a little swan here, reaching forward, feel that dive and then coming up, coming up, coming up all the way. Feel that beautiful extension and then reach diving forward, diving forward, fill that length and come all the way up, all the way up and hold it for that beautiful lift. Beautiful lift there. So now I simply want you to turn where to finish here with a little bit of a side. So I want you to turn onto the side. Reached out, arms straight up here. Now, same thing here. You're going to reach down, reach down, feel that length. May want to go a little later, but I'm going to stay here.

Reach down. Then we come up. I want you to reach, Ooh, luckily is shaky. I'm going to hold it. It's good for you guys to see how majorly hard the controllers for every single Polonius practitioner. Can I get an amen, please? And reach all the way over there that leans. So how much depends on my shoulder strength here, my balance, my pelvic control, my torso control. Hold it.

This is where you want to rotate and turn and reach. So again, focusing on that beautiful length, rotate the body, feel that twist, then come up, come up, come up, find it, find it, hold it and down other side. So rotate over. If you try it on the lighter spring, let me know how it feels. Fulfills harder or easier. So feel that. Reach. Now from here, I'm really engaging that shoulder. I'm reaching that energy up, squeezing underneath that arm, looking up, looking up. Now I feel much, maybe I shouldn't speak too soon, much more controlled on this side, and just goes to show us our natural movement and balances and patterns and favors of one side over the other unreached. Feel that lean, feel that lead through your body all the way out. Mary, the control of your solar, your torso, your hips, your pelvis up. Hold it and reach.

Come all the way around. Square your hips in your box. Reach down. Now I want you to come up as gracefully as you can. I'm going to choose to take this path and come back inside your carriage or your reformer brother and holds and fill this stretch and come into a pike. This is, you're on that heavy spring. You can do it. If you need to change it.

Go ahead and do it and reach back. Fill that extension and just kind of reflect on kind of a little bit how I'm familiar yet different. Some of that work felt of kind of standing inside the reformer and sitting down and pulling the carriage toward us a little bit different than what we do, but still kind of based on some our classic, very familiar work and I encourage you to try this class a couple more times and just kind of play with some of the different variations that I spoke to, kind of some of the control elements of it and just enjoying the challenge of a different perspective and enjoying the challenge of balance and the little bit that unilateral work that we did and we explored and just kind of how we kind of bring all that control together and how that really is such. Another element of challenge that comes with the plot is work that doesn't always necessarily have to do with just brute strength or pure endurance, but kind of a little bit more of a different nuance of some of those qualities that we know and love of the practice. Thank you so much for exploring and experimenting with me today and allowing me the space to be really creative and to have a lot of fun with the work that I love so much, and I know that you do as well. Thank you. Thank you. I hope you enjoyed it.