Up Stretch Hip Pike from seated
Balance Prep cantilever hips to hinged spine, shoulder flex overhead, heels and balls of feet pressing back and into box/carriage to draw body up
Balance Prep into vertical spine, shoulder flexed overhead to extended behind to counter body up
Round Back Plank, + Jack Rabbit to Round Back Long Stretch
Potato Bug (a made up term to describe rounded back hovering over thighs) into Pike to Flat Back Long Stretch
Round Back Stretch Riff to Elephant (posterior chain connection, heels against box)
Flat Back Knee Stretch
I don’t know why one day I decided I could balance on my foam roller the way I did. I don’t think I thought I could? I have a feeling I was just using my foam roller to come up with a warm up for how to achieve the shoulder stability needed to start doing planks well, with the back, instead of with the pecs and all the organs hanging down cuz I see the ribs are stuck and popping out, unable to “protect their organs”. For goodness sakes folks! The ribs! They are there to hug our organs! Poor scapulae! Everything seemingly hanging from them! But I digress. I know I like to use the foam roller under forearms – out and back to help clients activate their triceps (and less biceps so they can experience their humeral heads in the shoulder socket), the serratus anterior, rotator cuffs, deltoids…I’m pretty positive one day, I just slid that roller under my shins and rolled my legs out into a plank. I wonder if I just sat back on it when I was done with the roller back under my shins? I think this is what happened. It gave me so many ideas about a balance challenge for some of my more advanced moving clients. It was also a challenge for me at the stage I was and am in with my own balance and stability, especially unilateral. I also love to try things in plantar flexion, anything to improve the strength and mobility of my toes.
Anything long stretch! I love the long stretch series. And, to me, the knee stretch series is halfway to long stretch series. Knee stretch has similar shapes, but kneeling! And from knee stretch, you can get to a kneeling plaNk. In long stretch, you start standing. There’s just so many variations I can do to make classes interesting without really having to change a class plan. It took me til the last couple months of teaching to realize this; it has been relieving and inspiring to figure out all these little detours I can take from the standard contemporary repertoire. I’m relieved cuz it’s gotten easier to do class planning, especially if I’m teaching a lot more classes than usual at the same studio (some clients take classes 5, sometimes 7(!), days a week!
Anything long stretch! Clients always feel so accomplished when they’re done! They’re sweating, cuz HARD and cuz it’s whole body choreography. Every fiber of your being is engaged and working! Further, I like to think even my hair! I certainly have enough of it…heavy! I’ll often through in a long stretch thing at the end of class if I find me with a few extra minutes. Sometimes I have a few extra minutes cuz well…sometimes the group of people in my class are so different in ability level and I lose steam when I have to modify for that person, figure out a harder variation for another…and then the guy who is just beating to his own drum? That class is hard…. And long stretch? Everybody loves it! They think they can’t do it…but it’s so easy for me to teach it cuz I’ve gone through the entire learning curve in my own body just in the last 8 months.
Anything long stretch! The whole posterior chain experience! I like to start all my classes with work on the mat exploring range of movement – around the shoulder joint, around the hip joint, between the ribs, the pelvis…let’s just say I choose a couple areas. Lately, cuz my clients come for it…can we do that cervical extension one? Can we do that roll down bar one with the box? Can we do that feet one? It’s all posterior chain stuff cuz it’s like the black hole that eludes many in their want to move more efficiently doing all the things they love. And well…the POWER! When the posterior chain is strong and mobile…well the POWER and the GRACE and the feeling we’re just gliding…almost levitating. The taste of it….I’ve tasted it in recent months, every time I pedal around on two wheels…the power and the grace. We deserve it at any age!