Beginner Mat Breakdown 1

Let's come on and lie down with your head this way and your feet this way and just take the full length of the mat and just rest. Good. All right, so we're going to start off with a hundred. I want you to go ahead and bend your knees into your chest. Give them a hug, raise your head into your powerhouse and lengthen your arms and legs and begin. Inhale, two, three, four, five. Exhale, two, three, four, five. Inhale, two, three, four, five. Exhale, two, three, four, five. Good. Come down a little lower right here. Good. There we girl. Nice. And that's enough. Go ahead and hug in the knees and rest.

So that gives you an idea of what the a hundred is. Now we're going to detail it. Okay. We're going to take it apart. So always the most important part is your powerhouse is engaged, so we don't want to bear down and tense our stomach and push it out as we come up. We want to really be aware of it pulling in as well as pulling in an up. It's a lot easier on the reformer when you're pulling against resistance of the springs to really feel that um, counter work, but not so much on the mat. So you kind of have to give yourself a good focus, a great way to always start off with the cit for them intermediate.

But then once you're lying down, let's go ahead and have your feet just on the mat, good. And rest your arm and give your body a moment to just kind of sink down into the mat and then think about your navel. And there shouldn't be too much space between your navel and your spine. It should just sink as low as it can. And that's how you want to engage your stomach.

You don't want to just tighten it. Yeah. And sometimes we can even tighten it so much that we create this jelly donut effect where we kind of spread out to the side. So it might be in, but it's kind of spreading out. So you want to pull in your waist muscles and pull in your navel. And then when you lift up your head or bring in your knees, you want to be pulling in and up. So we're going to go ahead and bring in one knee with that powerhouse.

See if you can feel that, that the stomach pulled in and up. I would have liked to seen it just a little bit more of this in and scooping up. Beautiful. That's the intensity I want to see. And then you're going to do the same thing with the left, pulling it in. Wonderful. Really scooping it in. Now when you bring your head up, I want you to do the same thing. It's from here initiating and palling up.

Good. We want to keep the bottom of the shoulder blades on the mat, but yet create as much of a curve as we can here. The Chin isn't actually on the chest. It's perfect what you have. It's a like a little line between your chin and your chest. Your eye should be there. Good. And let's start off with the legs at a 45 degree angle.

And here you want to feel a lift in the arch, a lift in your inner thighs, a lift in your pelvic floor, through your powerhouse all the way up. So there's this or this is pulling in an up and the legs are stretching there. And let's lift the arms to the level of your hip bones and pump. They're about five inches, so they're going to go a few inches above your hip bones and a few inches below. The breathing is inhale, two, three, four, five. Exhale, two, three, four, five. Now eyes on your belly. And I want you to not let it rise up.

I want you to breathe into the mat, filling your lungs like gills and exhaling, good in with the air. Nice and exhaling. This is very good. You're still trying to rise up a little too much with there. I want you to kind of fill up my hand a little more right there. So that's always something to work on. And then the goal of this exercise is to have your eyes at the same level as your, your toes, the same level as your eyes.

So you're going to bring them all the way down here. Good. And that is extremely difficult to not just have the legs here but to lower them from here. Cause sometimes when we go out right from the floor, we can use our back muscles to help support. Exactly. And Go ahead and draw the knees in and take a little bit of a break. So the hundred is literally a manual heart pump where you're pumping the blood through your body. It's very important to inhale all the good oxygen and exhale all the stale air out of your body.

There's 10% of air that gets left in the lungs. And Joe supplies was very good about cleansing the body of that, all those toxins in air and keeping his clients very healthy. So he's very, very famous for that. So you want to really warm up the body by warming up your powerhouse. It's the only warm up exercise on the Mat.

So that's why it's so important to focus before you start because then it's gonna take you throughout the rest. Ideally your thighs would also feel the engagement, the outer thighs, wrapping the bottom, squeezing the inner thighs, squeezing that kind of all worked when you started pulling up your arches and pulling up your inner thighs and all those muscles got into gear. Okay, so a lot of work with the legs, but mainly it's about warming up the powerhouse and pumping the blood through your body. Are you supposed to, do you teach it or are you supposed to hear the breath? Uh, no. Joseph Milady's believed that you eat and drink with your mouth and you breathe with your nose. So it's ideally inhaling and exhaling through the nose.

So there isn't the shushing or um, loud audio breathing. OK. He believed it was much deeper breathing when you breathe in and out through your notes. Yeah. All right, so let's go ahead and try it now on your own. Okay. All right. So you're going to use your powerhouse to draw in and up as you lift your head up and now length in the legs to where you think you can hold them from your stomach. Good and pumping. Okay. So at this stage of the game, you are quite advanced.

So things that you might focus on are the lowering legs and making sure that you, what you're doing is not holding him from your hip flexors, but you really feel it from here. Again, those bottom of the shoulder blades are dying to lift up. You've got to hold them back. So you have that nice open chest. That's it. Good. So you're about 40 now. So let's do another 60. Sometimes we can tune out other muscles. So you've got your stomach, let's make sure your bottom is squeezing. Let's make sure those outer thighs are engaged.

And if you imagine a back line from the bottom of your school, all the way down to your heels, you want to make sure that one is really long and lengthening while the front is pulling in and up. Give me one more here and draw those knees into your chest and head to hear the breath. Oh, that's okay. That's all right. It doesn't, what you are doing is absolutely fine. And um, it's all, it's all fine and whatever it gets you more connected is good. But in Joseph Trudeau supplies teachings, it just wasn't something that you worked on hearing. So you, if it helps you go ahead and go through your mouth and would eventually, exactly. Yes. And eventually you even want to inhale only for two counts and exhale longer and deeper for the following eight counts.