Backstroke

Let's take a look at the backstroke first. We're set on one red spring on the balanced body equipment and you want to make sure that you place yourself on the box in a way that when you roll back, your shoulder blades will be just off the mat. And then here you can bring your legs to tabletop position and pause here for a moment. Next step is to retrieve the straps and then hold them in your hands with a soft fist. So the fist is going to be kind of just above your eyes. The carriage is no longer at the stopper. And here we want to make sure we're in full trunk flection. Nice, good abdominal curl, big focus on abdominals here.

We're going to take the arms straight up to the ceiling. We're going to take the arms open and then here circle around and you're essentially in a teaser type position here. And then the knees draw in and the arms draw in as well. So the arms go up and open and we circle around. That's a long exhale. Drawing the knees in.

We inhale up and open and we use the exhale to complete the movement. So a big focus here on the abdominals, there's also quite a big focus on coordination. So the idea here of being able to coordinate maintaining trunk flection while you lift the arms up and circle around. Let's look at that a little bit more. So come in here, pause. We want to maintain that trunk flection as the arms and legs go straight up.

Taking a moment here to ensure that we're at perpendicular with the arms and the legs with the ceiling or the floor, however you look at it without moving the carriage. Then we open the arms and then we use those back muscles to pull everything back to where it came from. Just one more time here, cleaning up and viewing the backstroke. Beautiful and gently come in and come to rest. And that's the backstroke on the reformer.