Playing with Movement

Hi, I'm Sarah Berta Celli and I'm filming this piece on the heels of my [inaudible] play 10 day reformer challenge. And I got to thinking, why do I play with plots? Well, there's a number of reasons that it would be beneficial to play with the work, but I find that there's a handful of reasons that I do. One of them is simply to have a little bit of fun because I genuinely believe that movement should be fun. Another one is to kind of stimulate the brain in a different way too, to make me think about my body or feel my body in a different way so that maybe it taxes my brain and hopefully kind of reenergizes some brain cells in there. I think we can all use that. I know I can. And then another reason is that I find when I'm doing the the pure work, which I love, in fact, I dance between play and the pure work, but sometimes when I'm doing the pure work, I find myself a little frustrated because I can't do something as well as I'd like to. So that's oftentimes what provokes the feeling of play.

For me, and specifically I find I have a challenge flexing my low spine and over the years I've been asked to engage my abdominals or engaged my hamstrings to help flex my low spine or stabilize that same area. And I only recently realized that I didn't quite know how to engage those muscles, that they would show up to the party when I did certain things when I played with the movement. But that the act of actual engagement using my brain connected to my muscles was not always crystal clear. So I'm guessing that maybe there's a few other people out there who are challenged by this. So today we're going to play a little bit with ways to feel the connection to the abdominals and the hamstrings surrounding the movement in the pelvis area related to the hips. Okay.

Over the years I've played with how IQ, and recently I find myself really queuing how the bones feel against the earth or against the mat rather than going to the muscle, use your abs or use your hamstrings. I focus on what I feel, what bony landmarks I feel, and that feeling provokes the muscle for me at least. So the first thing I'd like to offer is a a little game with the foam roll. I tend to use the foam roll a lot for a lot of different things, but I find that this little piece is incredibly useful. A little bit later we'll be using this towels, so I'm just going to put it back here so it's out of the way. So what I would like you to do is lie down on your back please and place the foam roll underneath your knees.

This is maybe not the most graceful way to do it, but underneath your knees and, and, and lying on your back here, feel that you're sort of hugging the roll to your backside. You're in a pelvic curl position. So check in for a moment and see if you can feel your neutral spine or what your pelvis feels like against the mat. Honestly, I love doing this on a hardwood floor. Give it a go if that's comfortable enough for you. Okay. Feel your chest open and your arms long.

And here you can do a beautiful pelvic curl or you can simply hoist your pelvis up and roll the foam roll up underneath your pelvis. Now if you find the role to be too high, if you're a little tight, feel free to use a smaller ball or some other prop. Even a yoga block works really nicely here. So check in with your feet and feel that your feet first are aligned. So I like to bring them together and feel my bony landmarks aligned.

Make sure your knees are bent enough so that your feet are not too far away from you. And then separate your heels and your toes a little bit and rest. Literally try to rest here. So put your hands just below your hipbones, your ass in your hip crease and arrange yourself so that you can ever so slightly drop your tailbone down. Going slightly anterior with your pelvis, just very slightly. If you can see me, you can see that I'm not doing a big movement, just a slight drop. So there's a little bit of a groove here. Now I'm going to feel the two sides of my pelvis weighted on the foam roll and sort of press down just a little bit and right away my abdominals showed up.

Release pressed into the foam roll. I feel him release. One more time. Press into the foam roll and then just sort of keep that feeling and see if you can scoop your pelvis a little to a slightly posted, freer, or more neutral position in relationship to your spine. Now, my feet are not really bearing the weight right now. I could lift them up at any time. That will change, but I am waiting my pelvis against the foam roll to feel a sensation and what I feel are firm abdominals done. They're working. Now I want you to pay attention to this shape of your pelvis and keeping it still okay, so the shape of the pelvis stays the same as you ground down through the feet.

Root, all four corners of the feet. Visualize your thigh bones spiraling inward. Not necessarily squeezing them together, but rolling inward. What happened for me is I felt my pelvis almost opening and I felt like a softness through the front of my legs and maybe you even felt your hamstrings. That would be great.

So we're going to keep the left leg down and ground down through the left leg. Keep the pelvis square or stable. Lift the right leg up, put the right leg down. Now in order for me to truly stabilize my pelvis, I have to keep my abs and my left hamstring engaged. Also it feels I have to listen to the word stand on the left side of my pelvis better. In order to lift the right leg up, that's one piece. I'm standing on the left side of my pelvis to lift the right leg up.

Now the second piece is keeping the right side from hiking. So I stand to lift. Now as I pull that knee in, I think of lengthening a little more through my right side and tap the toe down, keeping those pieces in order and lengthening. So now I'm using my abs. I'm using my hamstring and I'm performing hip dis association on my right leg.

Stay here, stretch the leg up to straight. So we're going to keep the weight standing on the left side. But think just a little bit about what's happening now through your right side body. As you lower your right leg down, it feels a little like you have to shorten the waist in order to keep it stable. As you lift up, it feels a little like you have to lengthen in order to keep it stable. So just kind of feel your pelvis and see if you can really keep it still.

So here I'm lengthening and I'm shortening, but standing on my left side one more time. You can point and flex the foot if you'd like. I just didn't want to give you too many things to think about because there's already a lot to think about and lift up. Place your foot down, organize. Feel the spiraling on the right side. Rotation of the thighbone. Stand on your right side of your pelvis.

Lift your left leg up and stay. I'm standing on my right side against the foam roll. I want to keep the space between my left ribbon hip as I tap the toe. And as I lift it up, check in. Your ad's should be working. Tap The toe.

I'm lengthening the left side as I come up with the leg while standing on the right side. And just one more like that. Breathing when it makes sense. We hold here. Now straighten your leg and keep the leg long here. As you take the leg down. Think a little a bit about shortening as you lift up, think about lengthening and as you go down, abs are engaged, shortening. And as we lift up, lengthening, and just one more time, feel that nice openness through the front hip here and we lift up.

Place your feet down. Now a little gift. We lift one leg up to tabletop, we lift the other leg up. If it doesn't feel like the foam roll is in the right spot, adjust it. It should be on your pelvis, not your low back. Take your legs just a little to one side.

Feel that beautiful massage through your glutes, and then take the legs to the other side. A beautiful little massage through the outer glute and perhaps one more time each side. My golly, if you want to continue with this, because I know I would like to feel free to pause this video and continue on here. We'll place one foot down, place the other foot down, gently lift your pelvis up, slide that foam roll back between your bottom and your feet and enjoy that gift. The gift for me is that I feel as though my pelvis is three feet wide and I feel my pelvis grounded on both sides, waited but yet also soft and relaxed. So let's make our way up to a sitting position. You'll no longer need your foam rolls, so I'm going to simply put mine down here so it's out of the way and instead have your towel nearby. You may not need it, but I want it to be available to you just in case because it's a nice little treat here and the roll up is the single most challenging exercise for me.

I still love doing it, I really do. But here I want to talk about how I've learned to feel the roll up a little more solidly in my body and it's through playing. Here I am sitting upright, my knees are bent, no energy over my legs, knee needing to be straight. My heels are digging in and I feel both sides of my sits bones. So you'll often see me sitting and doing something like this, which may look a little funny and a little playful perhaps. But the point is feeling both sides of my pelvis.

Then over the years I've realized my left side doesn't sit down as well as my right. So I want this to be a Sensei, a moment to feel sensation so that I'm thinking about the muscles and without thinking about where you, where you land, simply curl your pelvis underneath you and allow yourself to roll to the back side of your pelvis. Just feel that and then tip your tailbone back in up. So I'm going to choose to bend my knees just a little bit more just for fluid movement here. So curling your pelvis underneath you, feeling both sides of your pelvis, well weighted. Just feel that, sense that and then roll yourself back up. So for a lot of people we get this fear of rolling back. For people that are challenged in moving through the low back, this fear of rolling back and really if you ground down a little bit more through the pieces that are touching, it will be a little bit easier to flex the spine, to go all the way down and then reach the arms, perhaps overhead. Now when I roll up some days I can roll up easily and some days I can't.

Okay, so this is why I like to play with bent knees. You'll see me do that sometimes in round yourself back. This is in fact though a modification of this exercise that allows me to fluidly move through the low back, engage the hamstrings because of the bent knees. Okay, hamstrings and ABS. Now we're in a class. Everyone else is doing straight legs. We want to perform the role up. Maybe our low backs are tight. Maybe we can do it, maybe we can't.

We rolled down, so if you get to this point right here and you think, by Golly, I cannot get up without hoisting myself up today, I can. That's nice. My suggestion to you is to have your fancy little towel available to you. Perhaps many of you know about this trick, but if you don't know about this trick, putting the towel just behind your sits bones, feeling both sides grounded down but haven't bought it two inches behind my sits bones, maybe an inch and a half. When I peel back, what that will do will give me a ground. The ground is closer to my body, which gives me something to work against, which will make it almost magical. When I wanna roll back up to flex my spine and stay engaged in the backs of my legs.

Eventually you'll find that you're able to use perhaps even less surface area or maybe you need a higher pad. Perhaps you use one of the pads, those thicker dense foam pads that we use. I wouldn't go more than about a half an inch. But that little assist should make it so that you can perform your rod true PyLadies roles let a little more fluidly. So for me, [inaudible] is really about dancing between play and true form. And while the work speaks for itself, it is amazing. I absolutely love it. I find that playing with PyLadies, playing with your body, playing with different feelings gives you an opportunity to feel something differently and then see what happens when something unexpected happens.

Does your body show up? I hope it will. Thanks for playing. So if you're interested in exploring the idea of true [inaudible] or straightforward Pilati is, and playing with Pele's, I have created a playlist of classes that I've taught over the years that will allow you to taste some of the things that I have the offer I hope you enjoy.