Control Balance

Hi everybody. My name is Benjamin degenhart's hearts. I'm here with Benny. We're breaking down the control balance exercise. The second to last in the original book by Joe [inaudible]. Clearly a movement that we have warmed up for for 32 exercise at this point. So there's a lot of things coming together here. There's an inversion, there's a hip differentiation, and there's a shoulder stand built in right where we balance on the head and the shoulders, which uh, we try to sustain for a longer period of time in order to understand that exercise best.

I think it's great to master the high scissors first because it's essentially the same movement with the support of our hands. So we'll quickly go over that because a lot of the same component parts will come back in the exercise. So go ahead and lie down on your back when your arms down by your sides. At this point you'll already have done the rollover several times and different variations. We're going to begin with that. The legs lift up, the legs lift overhead. In this exercise we try to underweight and unload the back as much as that as possible. By way of using the arms against the ground, we'll be extending through the shoulders, lifting the seat away from the shoulders and then stretching the legs up a little bit higher so that the spine is not compressed.

The front of the throat is open and then from there we turn the pumps who face up, bend the elbows in, place the hands against the lower back with the fingertips sliding up towards the seat. From here. This is the same position that we look for in control balance. We stretch one leg straight up to the ceiling as the other leg goes overhead, so there's a split happening at the hips. The legs reach away from one another, they're both straight, and then we switch to the other side. In high scissors we often play around with moving the leg away from the body a little bit more to create an opening in the front of the thigh. But as we're relating this to control balance, you can think of this as the leg that reaches overhead.

Really coming far down against the top leg reaching up. We'll take one more each way. Switching all the while the hands really shouldn't hold that much weight and if you feel in this exercise you need your hands for support. Control balance will probably be very difficult for you. Lift your legs back up. So this is a good precursor to know how far you want to take this movement because it's the same arms come down by your sides here.

Roll yourself all the way down, stretch your legs away from you and just shake it out for a second. All right, so next up we go into control balance, which has less support against the ground because we don't have our arms underneath our shoulders, but rather take them over our head and we use the arms to also create a deeper split of the legs. Starts the same way though the legs lift up, we roll the hips over, we unweight the spine by lifting the legs up nice and high and to a jack knife of sorts, and then either one at a time or both at the same time. The arms reach overhead behind the body from here with one leg stretching of it. Start with the right leg coming down. We pull the leg down towards the ground. If it's within reach for the body, you take your hands, you pull the leg down against the opposite leg, reaching up all the way or looking for length in the back and opening the front of the throat. And then we switch to the other side. This is the tricky portion, the balanced portion lifting one leg up against the other coming down. So we almost have a vertical line here. I'm going to let you do it on your own.

Now you switch to the other side. Keeping that tripod of shoulders and head holding the weight of the body and making sure that we don't constrict the throat cause we want to be able to breathe throughout this whole crazy thing. We'll take two more pulling down against the leg, reaching up and switch one last time and then let both legs lift up to the ceiling. Bring your arms down by your sides again, slowly roll yourself all the way down and then stretch your legs away from you. So you see there's a lot of exercise that are repeated in this very one. There's a whole workout sequence around control balance that you will find here in plot anytime as well. Check that out as well. Um, and I hope you find success in your control of balance.