Side Lying Arm Placement

Hi, I'm Shelly power. So pleased to be back here at plenty's anytime. And as a teacher I get a lot of questions about how do you do the sidekick? Where does your arm go? Do I put my hand here, Kinda hurts my neck and what's all that about? So Amy and I are going to look at that today, have some different options and how you can find your optimal position for your body, your shoulder, and your strength and hope to give you some little tips that you can use while you're doing these things at home when you don't have a teacher. So Amy, go ahead and lie down. And the more traditional classical version of the hand position is somewhere at the side of the head, they're on the elbow and the body is down.

And this is an okay position for some people. But I feel like there's a lot of questions and a lot of, you know, kind of hurts my neck and what am I supposed to do? So in this position you can see that there's a little bit of a curve, which isn't in itself a bad thing. As long as the body's not collapsed down. And it's difficult when you're in this position to feel like you have any lift because the underside of the body is so stretched out, it's hard to pull back in. It's hard to lift up. So Amy, let's look at a little different position here. So come up a little higher.

Yeah, and let's get onto the forearm. So this is not necessarily easier but is a different position that might make the position for you a little bit more attainable. You can get there. So the arm is positioned so that the elbow is comfortably under the shoulder and for everybody that could be a little bit different. And the main thing you want to look at is, is the front of your shoulder that rounded part flush to the rest of your body. If it's sticking forward, that's might kind of feel good as a stretch, but it's actually a pretty unsupported position for the shoulder.

So instead pull up, feel like there's a lift up under the ribs and then you can even check this with your hand. You can put your hand on your shoulder and feel is it sticking forward or is it in line? And then from here you could go on with the rest of your choreography and do all of the different sidekick movements. So now let's take a little different position and even easier positions. So come all the way down on the table and you've probably seen this as an option to where there's a towel or a cushion for the arm.

And we used a bath towel cause everybody's got that at home. You just winded up a little bit until you feel like it's the right height where your whole spine is in line. You don't want your head tipped up too much. You also don't want it tip down too much. So that's one option. And another option, which is really great because it allows you to do some other movements is to put your hand behind your head so that when you're there you can also, if you are going to add an emotion that rolls back or something like that, you could do that. Okay. Yeah. So this enables her to have her head support and you can see she's in a nice straight line from head all the way down to her pelvis. And if she wanted to, she could roll back and the head stays supporting.

We don't get that fall off position. All right, so now let's take it back to where are we started with the elbow on the table and see if we can put some of these things into place. So come up a little bit higher now and yeah, and let's go to where the hand is behind the head. So now once you know that you can get your ribs lifted up and you have that ability, now you can experiment being on the elbow and you can see again that her spine, her head, her shoulders are all in one long line. That's ideal. That way she's not pushing up on her head this way and what I call the TV, TV watching position. It's also the beach position, right?

You're hanging out with your friends, not plot these class positions. So we want to be lifted up a little bit higher. How does that feel for you? It feels good. Yeah. It feels like you have support there and you could, it's not easy to, but you could release your hand a little bit and you should be able to more or less stay in the same position. It's a little easier there, so it kind of feel like the heel of your hand is supporting the back of your head. That way the wrist stays fairly straight. Um, there's not a lot of compression. You can get that position, so thank you, Amy. That was great. I hope that this makes the sidekick exercise a little bit easier for you and you have some options and some ways to figure out what really works best for your body. See, again.