Class #4625

Fluid Spine Cadillac

40 min - Class
280 likes

Description

Feel more spacious and grounded after this fluid Cadillac class with Kristi Cooper. Kristi begins class with various spinal articulation movements to warm up both the front and the back of your body. After establishing some foundational work, you will move through more challenging exercises such as Tower Prep, Side Reach, and Back Extension.
What You'll Need: Cadillac

About This Video

Sep 01, 2021
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Transcript

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Welcome to the class everybody, it looks like we're gonna do the Cadillac. So let's just get it set up first. To start, I have the roll back bar. You could take it from the top but I have it down to the first little islet there on the side. I have my legs springs, the proper balanced body for a little bit later, so those are all set, ready to go.

And then on the push through side I have two red or heavier springs at the bottom. And when I go to the top, I'll just take one of those and move it up. So that's it, your safety strap nearby are on hopefully. And let's begin. Settling into the room, into the space, before we just take over this little piece of machine.

Standing feet parallel, shift your weight, find your groove, find your ground. And just take a deep breath, and shrug the shoulders up, maybe roll them back and just drop them down. Again, just shrug them up, roll back and down and then with the arms rotated out, pick up some energy or whatever you need, inhale and exhale, just let them float back down. This time pick up some energy and take your ribs in and shoulders with you. Up, up, up.

Maybe grab onto one wrist and reach way up. I grabbed my left wrist and going over, reaching into my left foot. Try not to lean too much, but if it feels good, why not? Come back up, just switch arms and go the other way. Take it up and over.

Just finding the space right at the beginning as much as we can. Let it go down one more time, inhale up with both arms. (inhales deeply) And exhale down and take it out. Okay, let's just get right to it. So we're gonna come seated probably about middle of your mat, but you'll need to bring your roll back bar with you.

And I'm gonna start in a diamond position today. Holding outside the buckles for this bar, depending on how the longer bar is. Find your sits bones. And be pretty much right on top of them, if not, move slightly back so you have a subtle sense of a posterior tuck. And all we're doing is breathing again.

So we inhale and on the exhale, just press your straight arms down, looking for more length in your spine and release. That's all we're doing is exhaling, pressing down. Not even that hard. It's just trying to connect our arms store back really. I'd like to think of my hands as just the attachment, but I'm really pressing from the upper arm so that it, it really feels and is coming from the shoulders.

No thrusting of the ribs, just creating more space so that when we move, we'll do it more efficiently. (exhales deeply) On the next one, just hold a little bit of resistance down, not a lot, some. And all we're doing is taking another exit but this time we rolled those front hip bones backwards. We don't go backwards, but you just tuck that pelvis and come back up. Two of those.

(exhales deeply) Your arms aren't straining much, but you might feel a little underneath the shoulders or lats. (exhales deeply) And then let's just take it back, say to the low back. Exhaling back, just bring that bar with you and hold it here for just a second. I'd like to use the bar sort of as a reminder of what my collarbone should be doing. So we're not letting the shoulders wrap around the collarbones are straight as the bar.

Take that inhale, start exhaling, hold the waistline back, as long as you can, when you get shoulders over hips straighten up and we go again, exhale. Pelvis starts the motion. Drag the bar with you. Find your low back, inhale. Take a peek at your abs.

Start exhaling and come back up. And again, (indistinct) with the pelvis. Press your low back in and drag the bar with you. Hold inhale. And if you couldn't lift your low back, wait for it, wait for it, you have to bring it with you.

But anyway, let's do it again. We can go further this time, go down to your shoulder blades, take it back, take it back. If you're overstraining your arms, check that out they are straight and you're holding on, that's about it. Inhale, exhale, sink the belly, press it down, press it down shoulders come over hips and we straighten back up. (exhales deeply) Inhale and exhale.

Taking it one more time back. We'll stay there. And then it's, it's a rotation, but it's more like I'm trying to take that left shoulder toward my right hip. So I tilted the bar downwards. And then again, trying to hold back, we're just gonna come up a little bit.

(exhales deeply) And back down. So deepen the breath. Sometimes I like thinking of pressing the rib cage on that side down, but really everything is working. (exhales deeply) One more time. (exhales deeply) Come back to down and to the center, inhale and come up in the middle, check your tension in your hands.

You do wanna hold it, but it's okay, you can lighten it a little bit. Take it down, you know what we're doing next. Yes, other side, rotate. Try not to lean over so much that your other hip comes up. It's pretty, it's more up upper body there.

Exhale up one and back down up two, it's like let the springs bring you as you resist back three of six. (exhales deeply) And come back to the center, hold everything back all the way up. And this time as you press down, go for a little bit of back extension. You might have to press your feet together a little to not thrust the ribs and release it. Press down, arch up just a little bit.

And down one more please. And, release, okay carefully. Just put the bar back. We're gonna flip around and put our legs over the bar. So, make this be fun.

Lay down, take hold of that bar, and then bring your legs over it. It can be kind of tricky. So make sure you could get a pretty good grip on it and then slide yourself down up always. I'm trying for straight arms. But then I need to bring my heels closer and I'm doing my best to keep the feet flat for now.

It's not gonna be easy with when you get straight arms. Here we go, it's a pelvic curl. Keep your feet down. Exhale, roll the pelvis up. Reach the knees.

If you feel like that bar is gonna slip, just walk your feet closer. Just makes it harder on the hamstrings. Inhale and exhale. Elongating as you roll your spine down. Interesting one foot wants to hop sometimes doesn't it?

Exhale, roll up. Keep it going. Keep it going. Yes, and I'm doing this because we're gonna be working the legs, but it's so great to remind yourself in the beginning, how much the backside of the body or the hamstrings can really help balance out all the flection we do. Pull it up and hold check yourself out, are you level?

One more down then we'll come back up and play a little bit. Down, down, down. And here we go right back up. And from here again, my feet kind of slipped away. So I brought them back underneath feet.

I'm just gonna live one heel, down other heel, down both. Lift and lower, just keep it with both legs, lift and lower, lift and lower. Can you tuck a little bit more? Can you feel the hamstrings a little bit more? Almost like when the heels go up then the thighs, go down.

See if that adds to your sensation. Ooh. Okay, roll it down. And we'll play again just a little bit. Oh actually, sorry go back up.

I forgot. I wanna do one little thing to make the next thing easier. So we were lifting the heels, right? So I'm gonna go ahead and do a little jump, a little jump. You're not pulling on the bar, you're pushing on it.

Jump. Jump, keep the shape. Feel your feet. Toe ball heel if you can. Up down up...

Oh look, you can go high. Up gets you high, you start to have to pull a little bit. Now, go to the bottom. Just hold it there. We are going to...

I forget if there is a name for this, but we're gonna go up and we're gonna bring the bar over towards our head and roll ourselves down. Yeah, here it comes. You're gonna pick it up, roll the knees over. Got to hang on to that bar and down. Peel up, when you get to the top you jump, peel up, jump.

Roll it down. Let me jump, and roll it down. Last one, jump and roll it down. Shall we go the other way? Might as well.

Pull that into you first. Roll up, push it away, so you land in that (indistinct) position and roll it down. Once your hips are down, you bring the bar in. You roll up and you reach almost arching your way down to reach the floor, not quite, but that's what it feels like, I think. All right, that's enough for that fun.

Come down, bring the knees in. And then before fully releasing the bar, how about put your feet on the bar? The soles of the feet. Getting ready for our next situation straighten the legs and bend. And straighten, as you straighten your legs, try to reach the hips downwards.

Even if the legs don't get all over the straight. (exhales deeply) One more. Okay, carefully take your feet off. Set the bar down and come on up. I'm actually just gonna move it out of the way, knowing what will come later.

I'm just taking it over the top here. Not very gracefully, but that's what I was doing. Okay, so safety first. We are putting the safety strap on for leg work here at the bottom. And like I said, I have the two short red springs or heavier of the short, shorter springs that come with this Cadillac.

Putting them both on. Checking, checking, checking, checking. I always just like to massage my equipment before I get underneath it. Here we go. We're going underneath it.

Now, if you've got really tight hamstrings, you can do this facing the other way. So you can scoot back a little bit more. I'm gonna scoot pretty far back in my head. I'll just start to come off. And then off we go, and we push that bar up, bring our feet underneath it sort of like what we just did.

Here I go massaging my springs again. And I leave the safety strap right in between my feet. I'm going to my heels, heels on that bar. Maybe ever so slightly closer to the abs than the very edge of the heels. And then I just settle in.

Aiming to keep the tailbone down, okay? So again, if you wanna back up, you can. Sometimes people have (indistinct) chairs right here and they'll just sit right on that. All right. Arms are down, collarbones wide and we just bend.

Keep a parallel, okay? We don't wanna go for the range and lose the form. Exhale straight. Do you still have the sensation of the stretch of the hamstrings we did a moment ago and the work? Try to initiate from there, from high up in the leg.

(exhales deeply) Bring that bar back. (exhales deeply) So let's do one more here. Hold it up there, and just one foot at a time to the balls of your feet with a pointed foot. But not at max range. And that's my max range real high.

I want that a little bit of a break in the ankle. So I'm having to hold with all the muscles, of the calf, and then ideally you'll keep it that way. So when you bend the ankle doesn't change. In other words, it doesn't drop into it anymore than it was. Here we go.

Bending straight. (exhales) What's nice about working foot and leg work here. You can really see what your tendencies are, what foot rolls out? What the knees wanna do? And we're doing our best to have all the toes on.

The calf's working, the hamstring's working and alignment staying as we wish, which in this case is parallel. Let's do three more. Up and up and up. Switching it to the small V position. Again, still trying to keep the, all toes on.

A word about when we bend that is not a release, right? Your imagine your feet were wrapped all the way around and you're dragging the bar too. And you change your mind and you push it back up, squeeze those inner thighs. Drag it to you and push it back up. (exhales deeply) Zip up through those thighs, wrap the legs.

What does that mean? I'm not really sure, but my intent in saying it is to connect with the glutes when you're all the way through if you can. Let's do three more still. (exhales deeply) And hold it up there. Check your hips, are you tucking?

Try to drop... Let the legs like sink into the hip sockets. Heels are going out on the bar. If you can place the ball of the foot on the side of side of push the bar, or you could just leave them up if it's too tight for your calves. All right, legs are turned up and not so much, they match your toes right?

Here we go. Bend, you might be able to go lower on this one, enjoy that. Up and bend and up. Sometimes I like to think that I'm squeezing say a physio ball or a magic circle. So it's not just up and down motion, but also an inward motion.

Let's go for four more. (exhales deeply) And voila. One more to go sort of, I always say sort of when I, there's a different variation here. But for now we're just balls of the feet turned up and same thing as before with those ankles one, enjoy. (exhales deeply) It really shouldn't be any pressure changes in your back.

So if you find that when you bend you all of a sudden, have more pressure on your back, meaning it's touching the mat harder that suggests your pelvis is moving so minimize your range. Couple more. Stay up there, walk the feet back toward the middle parallel. And I'm on the toes, again hold still. All right, point, way up.

You can go high on this one again, keeping the point. Imagine dropping hip sockets into your pelvis. I mean the legs into your hip sockets more so the pelvis drops. Keep it like that, but now flex your feet. Oh my.

Just when I thought they were all warmed up and flex and point and flex. It's tempting to bend the knees for some, as you flex, try not to. It's also tempting for a lot of people to hyper-extend the knees here. Try not to. And if you don't do either, you'll keep the connection all the way up into your trunk, your powerhouse, your body.

Few more here up and stay up again. So that's one part of the move. The next part is to bend, let's say the right knee as you flex the left foot. But the right knee is really it's again, almost like it's pulling the bar, you could actually even do that. Then the left foot does all the work pushes up and switches.

So you're gonna switch where they're both up top and high. Ready for that? Then a little faster now. It's inhale, inhale and exhale. Exhale, push, inhale up, inhale up, exhale up, exhale.

Again inhale, inhale, exhale. How about one more? Inhale, inhale, exhale and hold. Like I said before, you can adjust the foot if you need to shake it out, but go right back to it. And as that right foot flexes, use the left to guide an additional stretch if you need it.

And then push up and switch. (exhales deeply) Wow, isn't that nice? Okay, bend the knees. Take your feet off the bar, holding onto it. And we're just gonna take off one spring.

Right. Left heel on the bar. And then with the right knee bent for now and foot flat. Just check yourself, you wanna do your best to keep your hips square. It's really tempting to hike the hip of a foot in the air.

Keep that straight. And then if you can and it's may or may not be true, but you can, you wanna straighten out the bottom leg. If you, if bending the bottom leg allows you to straighten the top leg, do that. Rather than a straight leg and not getting this left leg all the way up, okay? Here we go.

Same thing as before. Watch your alignment, one, two. (exhales deeply) I'm just doing six. So let's switch there to the other foot. I'm on the heel, if I didn't say that.

Check, let's just be mindful of the hips and just one more word before we go. Sometimes if you press the lower leg or even if it's just your foot into the mat, it allows some freedom in the moving legs. So the opposition sort of starts to happen. You get, it feels like you're getting further. So it's just an idea if you wanna play with that, two, three, four, five already and six, go back up with the left foot, follow the foot.

Lower the ankle position off we go. Oh yeah. For some reason it's harder to hold the ankle for me on this, on a single leg. (exhales deeply) I think that was probably six, but let's do that one right there, switch. Taking it down and bend and straighten, bend and straighten long body.

I did it again, but I'm gonna do one more after this one, here it is. Okay, bring the bar down. Turn to your side, facing in front of, so you can see what's going on next. We're gonna do a side to lift the leg. So, where you are on the mat will dictate how, how much stretch I guess you're gonna get on opening on the hip.

So the, I think if the further you go forward the little bit easier it's gonna be. So if you wanna try it where say your shoulders are just under the bar and then make the adjustment from there. Here's what we're doing. Push that bar up, flying your body up so it's on its side and then bring that leg up. It's not quite in the middle.

I have it a little forward of that. And then before I straighten, I'm gonna roll my hips forward. So I know if I'm gonna be okay. That this would be the time where you go, okay, she's gonna straighten the leg. You might wanna move forward or further off the mat.

All right. Or you can move your leg more forward on the bar. Okay, so, oh, there's that part. So here we are... It's like the leg is gonna spin backwards.

I don't, I'm trying not to move the foot much, but that is gonna allow the need almost go behind me. Even though I'm not rolling my hips back and straighten. It's not a huge move, but that's a good one. (exhales) Three, oh yeah, four end. I'm gonna go for 10 on this, push.

That leaves us with four more, I believe. And that's, that. Reach up, carefully take that bar. Make your arm ready your shoulder I mean, and then come down and go the other side. Just turn right on over.

Hopefully in about the same position, but not always, right? Climb your foot on. Try to square off the hips first. And then with it's toes. Like it was in a single leg.

Here we go. One, tuck shoulder down two, bend the knee three again, imagine that thighbone almost spiraling backwards. Five to go. (exhales deeply) Four and five. All right, look up at the bar.

Find it, grab it, let it come down and turn back onto your back. How are you doing? You're doing fine, right? Sure. Okay, straighten your arms.

This one again, well you may find, you have to adjust. We're gonna go into a roll up, sitting. So, center of your mat, shoulders are ready to go. We inhale, look forward, exhale with straight arms, all the way up to the straight spine. From there, inhale bend, the elbows, exhale, straighten, and then roll yourself back down from the pelvis.

It's almost like you're pushing that bar forward. If you felt like it was too much on your shoulders, you could back up. You could also lighten the spring. Inhale look forward, exhale up, up, up. And at the top your straight remind your ribs that you're not going into an arch back here.

Let's do two armbands down up one down, up two, hold. Inhale, exhale keep those arms straight, keep those arms straight. Push that bar away from you until you are down. Inhale, exhale, lift. (inhales deeply) Tall spine, go taller.

One and two, hold straight arms and come down. Two more. (inhales deeply) And bend straighten bend straight and hold. Pull yourself back down, push that bar away or in front of you. I said two more, I believe.

Here it is, up, up, up. Oh my goodness. Bend straighten, bend, straighten and hold. Inhale, exhale, roll it down. Like it's nothing, like it's nothing.

(speaks gibberish) Slide yourself way back onto that table. Preferably, definitely until your arms are straight. We're going into a tower prep, okay? You will be holding the poles. And I'm gonna ask you to just aim for as close to the mat as you can, without thrusting the ribs up.

All right. And you'll, we'll do that in a minute, but let's get our feet on the bar again. Parallel, the balls of feet by the way, and then make sure your arms are still straight or when they give on the bar that they can stay straight. All right, for the prep here. What I want you to do is first, just flex the feet, tap into your hamstrings.

You're gonna point the feet. And I almost think of pushing the bar away a little bit, 'cause you definitely want the hamstrings active right away. This one you're gonna peel up. But as you do, you bend the L sorry, the knees so they're right over your face, okay? But they're not, you're not collapsed.

You're lifted up through the belly. Then you straighten the legs, rebrand them and start to peel your way back down. Imagine just like you're rolling out the spine until your legs are straight, flex the feet. Point the feet let's make it in there exhale that we go up, we go up, we're pushing that bar away we're using it as leverage, but also bending the knees. Inhale, straighten the legs.

Bend the knees, exhaling all the way down, until they're straight again. Flex, point you can keep doing that. Bend to roll up exhaling or we can inhale out just like before you can either go back to the bent knees now, or just keep them straight as you roll all the way down. Smoothly flex. Point bend as you roll up.

Straighten and either go back to the bend or keep them straight. Now here's where you can almost push on the bar with your hands too. Let's do that two more times. Oops, point, bend or roll up. Straighten, you're still lifted up out of that waist.

Come on down. Flex feet, point feet, bend to roll up. Stretch it up and all the way down, flex your feet. Bend your knees and grab the bar. You are free from that.

Sit yourself up. We're gonna take off the safety strap and load it from the top. So actually let's take the spring off first, then the strap. I'm gonna just get this out of our way. Okay, top loaded, seated push through.

Again, if you have two blues at the top, that works just as well. But (indistinct) this is what I'm used to. Moving things around. Okay, feet are on the bar, hands on the bar, sorry, feet are on the poles, hands on the bar. Sitting tall, all we're doing now is sort of like exactly what we did in the beginning.

We used the pelvis to roll us back. We're almost hanging on the bar, but not quite because we have this scoop of the belly. That's gonna allow us to press down and push through, stretch it forward, go forward. Then roll back, think of the pelvis. Think of the pelvis, you don't wanna fling back.

Once you're in that position, we were just in, sit yourself back up, you can even lean forward into it. There we go, we roll from the pelvis. We're anchored our feet are on that bar, we push it down and through. Inhale, take it back. Watch that pop.

Sometimes we pop because we don't get enough of a curve in the low back. So like, if you were here for one, it's almost possible to push, keep the curve and then you'll see if you flatten out too fast, you'll just pop up. So don't do that, here we go. (exhales deeply) And back in. I haven't been doing my full lean forward there we go.

Now this time we'll add something to it. We roll back. Go ahead and push through. Come back up, finish it. Then we can do roll back and take that front arm off, I'll do it for you.

You're in the scoop, you're pushing the opposite pole and reach it back and enjoy. If you're not rounded in the low back a bit, you won't feel nearly as good. Come back in, we're gonna go straight into the saw, reach over. You can grab the pole, push the other one up. And I'll just say that really long back then come back to the start.

We round back, we push through, we round back again, and extend with both arms. Other arm comes off, roll down. Sweep it back, push the foot into the pole, come up into your saw and not long spine. A lot of us have flexible shoulders. So you don't wanna drop into it too much, it's more of an upward press.

And then if you wanna pull more of it, you can just grab the poll harder. Let's do two more. Rounding back, roll it through, pull it back and up come down to the position again. First arm off, reach scoop, and come through for a saw, up. Last one, make it.

(inhales deeply) Back, back, back. Come through. (Kristi sighs) Okay. Let's do one more thing here. Come to your knees.

Little cat. I'm starting with my elbows a little bit bent. Yeah, that's all. And it's the sense I'm hoping to get again, like the beginning is that it leads from my lats until we pushed down, it goes like this. You press the bar down as your spine grows taller.

Now the arms are straight you roll the head forward, like a cat, try not to lean back. Unfurl the spine until it's flat, hopefully or close to it. And then from the pelvis, you roll it back up, bend the elbows. And we can even just lean into it a little bit. Bring it back to the bent elbows we pushed down to straight or spine is long.

Now we bend forward into a cat reround to roll up. Leaning into it if you'd like, or just waiting, come back just one more. Tall, hold onto the bar, wrap those stumps. And voila. Okay, we can undo this now.

Just leave that where it is. And let's come down to the other side to do some spring work. Yeah, nothing much to say there, I don't think. Laying on our backs again. The positioning, it will depend on exactly what you have your springs, but I tend to like to go for straight arms, although they'll end up down.

Put one foot in the other foot in. All right. So you could have your arms down for these peels together, we'll do a little bit of a frog, okay? So from there we exhale and press out. And pull in and out.

So, and then this one, if you have a mirror, or even if you don't just imagine or look to see that your shins are in the start position are parallel, the heel doesn't change. In other words, it's not going up sort of like what you would have on the reformer. It's pretty much straight out. Let's see if that makes any sense. I suppose I could show you wrong.

They don't go up. You don't lose the tension, you gain resistance that way. All the way in all the way out, couple more, all the way in, all the way out. Last one, keep it out there. Allow the legs to come up.

I have I'm pretty little bit turned out and exhale to lower down for circles. Come out, up and together down. (exhales deeply) Watch the hyperextension knees. (exhales deeply) We'll do four more. One, stirring up that hip socket two, feeling those (indistinct) Last one, here it comes, go to the bottom and reverse up out and a round one.

You can make them big, but you don't really need to. (exhales deeply) I think we have five more, but who knows. Two, one. Keep those hips, nice and still. Last one here.

And there we go. Take a second, we're coming back to the top. You can bend, then straighten them out again. And for pier, just do a little scissor. Keep resistance on the springs.

Boom, boom, boom, is kind of quick. And then we walk it down two, three, four and up give me that two, three, four, and down two, three, four, and longer two, three, four and (speaking gibberish) Down, down, down, down and up, can we do two more? Yeah, why not? One and two and three and four up one and two. Last set.

(speaking gibberish) Okay, you can take your feet out of there. Hopefully, hug your knees to your chest for a moment. Okay, let's just sit up, and a few little mermaid here. So you're sitting in this figure four position in the way, I'm gonna teach it today. And it's not fully open in the hip, but it's pretty, it feels good, right?

So the front chin is about parallel from here. Sitting tall, try to get the hip down, but don't overstrain. Reach out. I kind of pushed my foot into my thigh just as a tip. Land softly on your hand.

Rotate, feel that rotation in your spine again. Reopen, and then just sit up, we can hold onto the shin, reach up and stretch over. And out. Hand goes down, turn from the rib cage, reopen, lift, and take a stretch. Just one more, reaching out a little land softly rotate here, stay here for just a second if you can both hands down and then it's just a sense of pulling your hands towards you, as you extend your spine a little bit.

Then reopen and sit up. Then from here, we reach out one more time. Land, stretch out the legs, top leg in front, and we're going to lift up to the side bend, arch over, come back to the side bend and down, or straight line. Shoot up, lift the waist. Turn your face to look down at that hand, stay in that side bend.

Then come back to straight and down just one more. Up over, come back and down. Swing your legs around to the other side like a mermaid. Here we go. Reaching out landing softly, rotate from the ribs reopened as if someone pulled you with the top arm, come up easy and stretch.

And it's more of an upward situation there than shortening. Over, rotate, reopen and up to stretch, just one more. (exhales deeply) Up, enjoy the stretch this time we go back out. Switch, so that the legs are more or less stacked with the top leg in front shooting up to a side bend. First straight line, then lift the waist and come on over.

Ooh, that's nice. Reopen and down. And lift, nice long, strong body. Push those hips up to arch your spine in the side, flection version back end down last one. We're as long and strong.

Lift up and over. Come back and down. All right, let's do some back extension and call this show over shortly. I am placing that spring back up to the top loaded. I'm gonna come down and do some back extension, a little bit of shoulder work as well.

So I've just pulled the bar down to help myself down and both hands on the bar head floating off the mat just looking at it. Starting with those arms straight. All we're doing is lifting the head to look forward, rising up a bit and then articulating it back down. Sort of like the reverse chest lift, isn't it? Lift it up and down nice little stretch there.

Up and down. Now you can stick with that one, if you want a little challenge to it, you first bend your elbows to get that bar going behind you. Your head might drop a little that's okay. Then as you go towards straight with the arms you come up and forward, then drop the chest a little. Elbows real wide.

Come down, push the bar overhead again. Prone two bend. Let it pass you a little if you can start straighten your elbows right away and follow it up, drop into it a little. Take that stretch, elbows wide. And take it down.

One more, bend and straighten and look forward. Ooh, take the stretch and do it. Come on down and press. Let's do the third version. This one's a little tricky, but it's fun.

Starts like the first you lift up to the point where you think you can hold it. You're gonna bend the arms without dropping and pass that bar shrimp. Bring the bar back carefully and down. Two more, I'm backing up about a half inch, how about you? Here we go.

Let me start with straight arms lifting up. Hold what you can bring the bar up and over without changing the spine, bring it back down and lower. Last one. Starts with the straight bend the elbows, hold your position, pull return it and down. All right.

One hand on the bar, one hand on the mat, help yourself up to let the bar go up. And I think what we'll do to finish this out is a really nice shoulder stretch goes like this. You can come pretty far forward on your Cadillac. My right elbow is bent, but if it do the arm that you can look that video screen. Right arm is bent, I'm looking up and reaching inside the bar.

If you take it from the outside, it's not gonna work at all. So I'm reaching inside the bar pretty wide, like close to the edge here. And then I'm like, just come on down. The further back again, the more the stretch. So if you need to move more forward it's okay, and this is what we do.

You can also move to the side away from the arm that's in the air. Forehead down. Or watch one. Forehead down. What I'm doing is I'm gonna roll the front of that shoulder to the mat.

And then it's as if the spring gets heavier and I will spiral it like a barbershop pole open, keeping my head down to get a really wonderful peck stretch and shoulder. And then we roll the barbershop pull the other way down. Maybe you'll touch the mat, maybe not, and just allow it to spiral back out and up and again. Hmm, I love it. You could even look away from the arm that's in the air.

Sometimes that feels better for people. I'm doing the last one here. And then just allow it to come all the way to the top and we'll do the other side. I hope that feels good to you. Again, getting into it.

You wanna look up and grab it from inside. That's where they call, I don't know why it's inside, but I don't know why say it's inside, but that's how it feels to me. Head down. Then you roll the shoulder towards the mat, kind of crowds you a little bit. That's why sometimes it's nice to turn your head away.

And then spiral it back out. You can even add a tiny bit of a lift, but make yourself heavy at the bottom and roll it to the mat. (indistinct) a little bit. (indistinct) And open hand is pretty soft, but it does have to hang on, doesn't it? We'll do two more, enjoy.

And let it really pull. Imaginarily getting heavier and then finally help yourself to a release position. Sit yourself up. Let's just. Sit as comfortably as you can, maybe hang your legs.

And from here, we're just taking a couple deep breaths together. Inhale. (inhales deeply) And exhale. (exhales deeply) Then inhale. (exhales) Let's just take the arms up from the front, inhale deep.

Bring in energy or calmness, whatever you need, let everything go and please go and enjoy whatever it is that you're going to do next. Well done, thanks.

Comments

Z A
2 people like this.
At lasttttt❤️
Corinna S
1 person likes this.
thanks for a really inspiring cadillac session Kristy!

1 person likes this.
Oh, that pec stretch at the end made was amazing!!  Thank you!
1 person likes this.
thank you for this!   so well organized..just enough strength & stretch   Thank you thank you
Thanks for joining me Z A , Nicholle H , Corinna S , and Jennifer S ! It HAS been awhile since we could be together on the Cadillac! 
Karla Brooks
That felt amazing Kristi, thanks so much!!!
2 people like this.
I know you didn’t create that class for me and exactly how I was feeling today but- wow - it was perfect. Thank you!
Thank you Kristi! I feel lighter and longer from head to toe. 
Judy S
2 people like this.
Wonderful ! 
2 people like this.
Ohhh baby did I need this! Gracias, Kristi!
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