The Reach: Upper Body

Hi, I'm Andrea. And today I have a tutorial for you. I very much enjoy looking at the plot, these exercises through the lens of the oppositional forces that are in the body a sometimes that's called the two way stretch. And the way I described the two way stretch is if you can think of, uh, the double leg pull or the double leg stretch that we do in plotting is the mat exercise as really the quintessential example of the Plata method. So you have an oppositional reach strongly away from your strong center. And in this way you can create a singular focus for your workout and you can concentrate on either what's happening in the upper portion of the body or the lower portion of the body. And today's tutorial, we're gonna focus mainly on the upper body reach and we're gonna use as our touchstone exercise.

The third exercise in the stomach massage series on the reformer, which conveniently is called the reach. And so that's really my name for the upper body reach is the reach and pretty much everywhere in the [inaudible] method, wherever you are having your upper body position. Because of the choreography. It's really still the reach in there, but it's just disguised. It's sometimes straight forward, like in the exercise we'll do today. And sometimes it's all upside down, backwards and twisted, and it's hard to find it.

So the premise is that we're going to use our imagination to make our straight forward exercises, build our skills so that that we have the skill in the complex exercise when it's all a little bit turned around and not so straight forward. So let's take a look here and I'm going to have my pad to sit on. I've got two springs on this grots reformer and I'm going to sit somewhere kind of in the middle of the pack. So let's pretend that I've done the first stomach massage and the second position, and now we're on the reach. And before I get into the exercise, this position of the lower body is kind of advantageous.

I feel like sometimes the distillation of the reach and the lower body, that pretty much in every exercise the upper body is reaching and the lower body is standing. So, and sometimes of course you're not literally standing, you're standing, but your legs are in the air. But you're going to figure out how to create these ideas in your body, a memory of them, and then repeat them in the crazy exercises. So in this stomach massage, you've got kind of a as best case scenario as we can have your, you can figure out how to stand on the foot bar, which is going to help you lift yourself up and reach. So as the characters coming in, you're going to lift your heels up and you're going to stand on the carriage as you try to lift and reach ever further upward and you get a little while to do it. I always feel like it's not a, it's not an accident that there are 10 of each of these exercises. Joseph lives with a very emphatic person and sometimes I feel like that comes out in his exercises.

And so after this very straight forward reach, the arm really originates in the low back, comes all the way up. We get a little bit of a complex exercise right away in our twist. So the reach which involves your stomach is not going to go away just because you take your arms further apart from each other, and then they get comeback. So you're still standing, you're still reaching, and your back might crack. Okay?

I invite you to take my other class here on plot is any time where you will use the foundational exercises on the reformer, on the mat, a little helper exercise around the studio, and a nice finish exercise. And in those exercises, you'll get all of the most straightforward opportunity to explore the reach. And really that's, we're just going to deal with that part of the body. And then later we'll talk about the lower body. Thank you so much for watching. Bye.