Just Get Started

Hello Jennifer Golden. Zoom in here and thank you for joining me for a workout. Um, this is going to be a quick and efficient workout. This year was a very challenging year for me as I went through treatment for breast cancer. And there were many, many days where I did not feel like doing anything, uh, weeks where I felt like I didn't want to do anything. It gave me a lot of sensitivity for all the clients, all the friends, all my peers who have gone through any sort of chronic illness where you just feel tired, you just feel maybe apathetic and it's hard to bring yourself to just even get started. But in those weeks, um, I was able to get myself to just do a little bit and get started.

So that's the goal today. The goal today is we're going to get started and we're just going to see where this workout takes us. Usually when I would get started, I could spend a good 15 to 20 minutes getting movement and be so grateful to myself for making that choice. So let's see how we do today. However you feel right now. Obviously you came here in the first place, so you must be ready to get started. But we are going to just say, we're just going to start, we're going to see where it goes and we're gonna let our body take over and make this workout happen. So on these days I often feel like I need to kind of warm up my breathing and get my energy moving through the body. And I'll start that with some gentle rocking going backwards and forwards.

Breathing with it. I like to start with the breath. Pretty gentle. Okay. Inhaling forward and exhaling back and then maybe giving a little more intentional force to the exhaling and to the inhaling. Only if it feels like that can happen without creating any extra attention. And as I do this motion, begin to think about pumping the diaphragm and massaging the internal organs.

We'll do this for a little while longer. Let the body, the rhythm of the body dictate how you rock, how you breathe [inaudible] and then we'll take it into a circle. We'll start stirring around in the abdomen. And the visual here is to avoid going like this where you take your whole torso around, but I picture like a like a hand drill where the upper and the lower are pretty fixed and we churn around in the middle and I don't know about you but I'm actually feeling my abs a lot right now already few more times this direction. If you cannot sit up all the way when you do this, let's switch directions here. If you cannot up all the way, go ahead and sit on a folded up towel or fold it up. Matt, sit up on a surface so you're not fighting to sit up because that actually will compress your discs in your lumbar spine.

Yeah, and we'll just keep going. My abs are feeling it. I hope that you are feeling it as well. Breathing, massaging, picturing all of the organs in the abdomen, just getting a nice gentle massage as we go. No, I feel pretty woken up here. Keep brings a little more energy into the body. Gets my heart rate going. A little bit breath going a little bit and let's come up now to the hands and knees [inaudible].

Okay, so we made it through that first part, made myself get to this next exercise. So the first thing I want to do is just glide up and down with the shoulder blades, beginning to feel a sliding of the muscle fibers through the back, letting the spine drop into the valley and then rise up. And I have my toes under too, a little bit of an alert position. We're going to build into this and round the spine and then come through the other way and extend the spine rounding and extending. When we're dealing with any sort of chronic illness, we tend to spend a lot of time in bed or on the sofa not moving.

So it's nice to make sure you're giving your body a gentle wake up before jumping into more challenging exercises. Let's let the hips go side to side. The, the picture here is like your a loose table, like the legs are loose. So we're just gliding side to side here. Then we're going to take it a little further. So we'll glide to the right and let my feet relax now and stretch towards the back and then back up to the hands and around to the other side.

I'm looking back towards my tail as I go around, which reminds me of this really wonderful Xi Gong exercise called dog wags the tail where you look back at your tail and the spine makes some nice c curve as we go. Now we're going to take it all the way around, all the way around to the center and then back the way we came all the way around and back. The way we came. We'll just do one more good. We'll cross the legs behind and lay down on your back. Bring your right knee into your chest. Allow the weight of the leg to inhibit the abdomen from breathing up this way.

Just use this to create a little barrier so you can send your breath back by the kidneys and the middle spine. Let the abdominals relax down and then inhale, lift the left leg up and down, up and down. We'll do a couple more of these and then have or that leg over the ground here. Round your head up. Take a nice breath into the kidneys, into the shell of the back and then let that come back down again.

Now we're going to bring that left leg out to the side and around and up. You know, softly flex my foot and I'm going to visualize that I'm in a dome and that my foot is running along that surface of the dome. Now there is a lot of counter balance tensioning that your abdominals have to do here so you're not rocking around side to side. Explore the the curve of the hip socket as we move and let's do one more time and then stretch that leg to the floor and slide it in till the foot is flat. Bring your arms down by your size and roll your hips up into a one legged bridge.

Try to keep your hip steady here and really use the whole hamstring and hold back body on that left side and roll back down and again up and down. One more time, up and down. Hug that leg again. Slide the leg out once more. Bring it up. Okay.

And let's switch legs. So we're gonna start just by holding that left leg in. Take a couple breaths to bring the breath into the back body a little bit more, not up into the chest, not forward into the belly, but right into the back body. And inhale up and down. [inaudible] I think we'll do two more. I don't know what we did on the other side. We'll just do a couple more. Do as many as it feels like and hold it down.

Extend through the toes, round up, expand into your back, making more contact with more of the vertebrae into the floor. I always imagine sort of like porcupine quills so I have now, good contact you my mid spine as I lay back down and now we're gonna bring that leg out to the side, around and up, and then back open. And uh, and again, now, ideally you're not feeling any hip clicking here, but I know that sometimes people get that, get some clicking in their hips during these exercises. So what I'd like you to do is to really feel where your sacrum is and only move that leg in a range in which you can keep that sacrum stable and the hip doesn't pop. So that might mean you might think you can go really far, but actually maybe it has to go a little smaller to build the range up a little bit more or at least to build a stability while you build your range. Hey and let's finish this up. Bring it back up. Okay.

Bend that knee down. Place it on the floor in line with your sitting bone to get ready for bridge. The other leg will come to a tabletop or shelf position, and this is my hard sets. I have to concentrate. We're going to roll the pelvis up, tried to keep the pelvis level so we don't dip onto one side and then roll back down and again, rolling up and rolling down one more time and then bring us to the right into your chest. Round your head up. We'll go right into single leg stretch.

Make your focus this inflating into your back. Breathing in and breathing out. There's so many different breathing patterns you can do for this exercise and they're fine. But right now I want you to focus on expanding into your kidneys and opening up that mid back, the rebbe hinge area. Now let's take it right into Chris Cross. I think about rolling from one kidney to the other. No, I'm talking so I'm not really breathing enough, but I want you to breathe, breathing in and out. One more time and bring that back down.

Hold the backs of your legs and right away come up to a seated position. We're going to do a loose rolling like a ball. I want you to let yourself drop forward. The reason I like to do this is to really bring the energy up and down the spine and we'll do one more and now we're going to create some balancing. We'll go into open leg rocker and inhale back and exhale forward.

Whoa, too far, but I have more Gusto than I thought. Inhale back and exhale forward. Find your balance and again [inaudible] nice and easy. One more time. Good holding here. Bring the legs together and open and together and open.

One more time, bring them together and then we're going to walk down. Let the knees come in and bring the arms out to the side. We're going to roll the knees towards the right armpit and take a couple of breaths here. You're not going to let the feet come to the floor. What we're doing here is finding a balance point where we have to work the muscles through the trunk to balance. But I want your focus point to be the ribs on the side you're twisting towards and as you breathe in and try to make contact with those ribs and the floor, okay.

And then roll it back to the center and back over to the other side. [inaudible] you can let your head turn away if that feels good to you, but really do make your focus the expanding of that mid back into the floor and back to the center and rock up to sit. Let's do the saw. So we're going to open the legs to the sides. Now I'm on a high mat here so my legs are only this far, but you can take your legs wider if you want to. The instructions in return to life say as wide as possible.

So for me this is why that's possible cause I have no more space to go, but you might have more. Let's bring the arms out to the size and imagine coming from your middle right here, growing down into the ground and up towards the ceiling and out to your personal east and west. And then let's go ahead and press the arms back, bringing the shoulder blades together without sending the ribs forward. So just three, two, one, turn your palms forward. Three, two, one. Turn your palms up. Three, two, one. Now I'm keeping my containers stacked my ribs over my pelvis. I'm not rocking the ribcage here, very strong in here and very strong through the spine. Now we'll spin the arms back and go into the SA.

Inhale as you twist and exhale, wring out the waist like we did in the beginning with our churning exercise. And I'm going to give a little bit of a recoil bounce here cause I think that's fun. Exhaling and inhale. Exhale and inhale should be warming up. One more time to each side.

[inaudible] good. And now we're going to turn onto the belly. So down onto your belly. We're going to bend the knees right away and keep anchored in the front of the pelvis. We're going to pivot the chest up just a bit. Stretch the arms and legs. Feel like you're stretching your whole spine like a slinky, almost. Tuck the tail a micro tuck and then pull it back and again, stretch and hold it back two more and hold the long stretch.

Bring the arms open and back forward and open and back forward. One more time and pull your arms underneath. Want you to really pivot yourself up. So really give yourself that sense that you are pivoting yourself up. We're going to do a switch with the legs, activate the back of the legs, pull up through the pubic bone. Imagine a strong piece of tape from your pubic bone to your sternum and your palling it up strong.

One more with each leg and bring it down though. Turn onto your side. Palms are gonna stay together to begin with. You can let your head rest. You can have a cushion here if that's not okay for your shoulder, you can put your arm underneath. Starting with the knees forward here, keeping my palms together. I'm going to swing that top leg. The reason I'm keeping my poems together here is to prevent myself from rocking back and forth with the whole body. Inhale forward.

Exhale back. Let's do two more of these. Okay, good. Now stretch the bottom leg out and come on up to your forearm. We're gonna reach opposite arm and leg. We'll do a couple more of these. I want you to think about these as trunk exercises, not just leg up and over, up and over.

[inaudible]. One more to each side. Good. And now we'll go into bicycle. So bring it forward and back. Need a shoulder. Try to keep the leg there while you stretch that leg.

Swing it to the back and bend one more time. Now get a nice open stretch here. And remember this sternum to pubic bone connection. We're not contracting, it's short, it's an East centric long contraction, but just like there's a nice strong piece of tape here holding the surface and we'll go the other direction. [inaudible] that will prevent us from spilling forward and back. One more good.

Bring the legs together and come up to the forearm. Stretch over and come up. We're just going to do one more of these because we're doing a short workout. You're going to clasp your wrist and lift yourself up and to the other side. This is a challenge, but it's great to get your hips ready for this up and down position.

Getting up and down off the floor, landing over on this side and then lying down pumps together. Great. Bend that bottom leg. And here we go. On the other side, I mentioned before that I want this to be a trunk exercise, not just a leg exercise. So I want you to feel how the tensioning in your trunk, not just your abs, your whole trunk has to respond to the swinging of the leg. You said, I'm really swinging my leg. Let's do one more time. Good. Now stretch that bottom leg out. Come on up to the forearm. And again, we're going to swing. I want you to have a sense of pendulum swing. The leg begins up here at the top of the SOS.

So this motion is beginning up here and I'm counterbalancing with my arm, but it's really a waste exercise. And we're going to take it into an arc. Now up and down. We'll do one more to each side. Good. And then we'll move into bicycle. So prop yourself up here. Bottom leg is anchored knee forward to begin and stretch.

Remember our sturdy piece of tape? Okay. And we keep breathing. Yeah. If you've held your breath, the exercise is gonna take a different, different quality to it. So you start to feel yourself getting tired.

Just bring your mind back to your breath. We'll do one more. Good. All right. Hey, we'll bend the legs here. Come to the forearm and stretch and bring it up and stretch. Open up the whole side of the body and again and open up the side of the body.

Now we'll come back up to the hands and knees. How will bring the right leg back? We're just going to do a little pump of the ankle here, little pump, so this is also giving me the chance to get stable in my shoulder blades as I glide forward and back here and then let that leg come up and round and extend. Still moving from the middle one more time. Go ahead and then bring that light back in. Let's pump the other side. Remember I said this exercise, this workout is kind of taking us from a more sedentary state into a little bit of a more active state, so waking up the feet and ankles is really helpful.

Getting the blood pumping through the leg and lift the leg up and round and extend round and extent and round and extent and then bring the leg down. Now we're going to step out to a plank and lift toward a downward dog position. Continue to feel yourself grounding your, your arms into the floor and let the thigh bones get pulled back and up. Now lift the right leg up. We're gonna curl forward and bring the knee towards your nose and then stretch it back again and knee towards the nose.

Now we're going to bring that right knee towards your right armpit and back and again, and now we're going to bring it towards the left armpit and back and over and back. I'm feeling it. Are you feeling it? Bring your leg down and come down to your knees. Bring your hands behind your back, open up your chest and stretch forward. We're going to do that a couple more times. Just give the wrists and shoulders arrest. If you start to get tired, then you're going to lose your form. The exercise won't really be as effective.

Doesn't do much good just to get through it. We want to make the most of it. Now come back to the hands and knees and back to the downward dog position. Your left leg is going to come up and first we'll go to the center one. Now don't skip the curling of the upper spine. And now same size, the left knee towards the left armpit and back hand again.

And then we'll go across Ross. Good and back. Down to the knees and down to your belly hand arms. We'll come forward. We're going to lift the chest, lift the limbs above water and swim for five, four, three, two, one. Stretch yourself from the waist out and bring that down.

Alright, now we're going to flip back over onto the back and we're going to go for a rollover. We should be warmed up now. So legs are gonna come up. Fold them in, up towards ceiling here, sturdy through the arms and roll over. Open the legs and back down. Now we were getting some attention early on to the kidney area, to that mid back area. Use your breath here to expand into that area and give that your attention more than your dominoes.

Focus on the opening of that mid spine and that'll begin with the legs. Open. Hand Roll back, close. Flex and Dodd. And again [inaudible] one more time and down. Rock up to a seated position. All right. Now we're going to do our spine twist, like straight out. Once again, feel like you're reaching down through your roots, up through your crown, out, and we will twist and center.

The reason I like to twist a lot when I'd been sedentary is because it also wakes up your sluggish organs. One more time to each side. And we'll do a couple of boomerangs because they're fun. You're going to cross one, they go over the other first one. We're going to start with the hands by the sides. Roll back. Give the legs to switch. Now when you roll up, let your arms go back.

Now if you can't hear, you can keep the arms up and so they won't touch the floor again as you go one more time. And now we're gonna roll one time and up to stand. So rock back, let your feet find the floor and stand up. Now I always like to end with some kind of push up. So the first thing we're gonna do here is just bring your arms up overhead. Now if this is not comfortable for your shoulders, you can just bring them to here because the visual I want you to have right now is the sense of a tree and its branches.

The idea here being that the branches don't begin where the where they emerge from the tree, the branches are woven into the trunk so they are part of the trunk and part of the roots. So as we lift the arms, feel that you are actually relating them all the way through your legs and all the way to your gravitational pull into the ground. That gravitational pull is going to anchor you as you roll down, bending your knees if you need to, letting your arms frame your head. And all we're doing here is flipping where our roots are relatively. Let's put all the weight into your, open your feet, put all the weight into your right hand and twist your tree open and then bring that back down and twist it open the other way and just see how far that spiral takes you. Let your whole body find the rhythm of that spiral.

We'll do one more of those and then let your knees come to the ground. When I've been tired, I can't do a straight pushup, so I do a little more of a yoga version. Expand the breastbone towards the floor, slide the chest forward and then bring it back. Now this looks like it's Kinda sweeping from the back to the front, but actually aim your chest right towards your hands. You don't need to lower yourself back first. Aim your chest right between your hands, slide forward and then bring it back.

Let's do that two more times down, forward and back. One more time. Down forward. This time lifted up. Let your roots find the ground. Once more. Let your knees bend and allow your spine just to dangle over your thighs and then begin to pull the spine up away from the floor. Straighten your legs as your pelvis becomes upright and then finish just by gathering up from the ground, pulling up energy from the ground up, drawing it up overhead, and then let the arms open. Let your feet find the ground once more, and that is all. Thank you for joining me for this workout.