Exercise #1461

Seal

2 min - Exercise

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Description

Muscle Focus: Abdominals.

Objective: Trunk stabilization and spinal control and massage.

Start Position: Sit with hips close to feet, knees bent. Lace your hands between your legs and hold on to the outsides of your ankles with your feet together and knees shoulder distance apart. Make a C-curve with the spine and gaze into your abdominals. Balance just behind the sits bones with your feet floating off the Mat.

Movement: Clap your feet together three times. While maintaining the C-curve shape, inhale roll back to balance on the shoulder blades with the hips over shoulders and clap the feet three times. Exhale roll through the spine to return to start position with feet floating off the Mat.

Precautions: Maintain the C-curve shape of the body throughout. Avoid rolling onto the neck.

What You'll Need: Mat

About This Video

Intermediate

Deliberate Pace

Apr 10, 2014

Romana's Pilates®

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Transcript

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So here we have the seal and it is technically an intermediate exercise, but you it be one of the first ones you're going to add to your beginner series. The seal is four rolling is a rolling exercise, so it's a massage for the spine as well as a breathing exercise and adds a little bit of a balance and stability with it. So let's go ahead and begin. We're going to bring our bottom forward a little bit so you have more room behind you to roll. Bring your arms through your legs and hands under the ankle and using your powerhouse balance with your feet up. All right, and you're going to roll back through your spine. Go ahead and inhale and roll back and exhale and come forward.

Good. I would like for you to have a nice c curve with your shoulders over your hips and hold that same c curve when you go back. So inhale, roll back, hold the seat curve and exhale come up. Be careful not to have all of your weights solely on your neck. When you roll back, you want to make sure that the shoulder blades are still on the mat, even though your is going to lift all the way over your shoulders. So watch that. So we're going to roll through your lower back. Good.

And here. Good. And then finally the goal is to clap the feet an inch off the floor in front of you. Clap one, two, three as well as an inch off the floor behind you so you can be a little looser with your feet. So go ahead and roll back through your spine and hold this position. And we're going to lift your seat up just a little more to give you the feeling. And now lowering. Nope. I'm going to have you lower your fetal. Yes.

And clap here. One, two, three. So that gives you your range of motion. Use your powerhouse. And exhale. Roll Up. Clap two, three. Now hold it here. We'll back in the powerhouse more. I'm going to go ahead and let you do three on your own to tempo. Okay? All right, go ahead and inhale and roll back. Clap two, three.

Exhale, come up. Two, three. Inhale, roll back. Two, three. Exhale, roll. Two, three, last one. Inhale, roll back. Two, three. Exhale. Holding with your powerhouse. Two, three, and you may lower your feet and that is the seal.