Hi, and welcome to the Balance Body podcast series.
I'm Amy Taylor Alpers from the Pilates Center in Boulder, Colorado.
We are working on breath, and we're looking at exactly how the Pilates exercises are designed
specifically to enable the breath and expand, especially the rib cage, the thorax, getting
a huge, huge, huge stretch, trying to create a lot more room for your inhale, and then
an extremely powerful exhale.
So the movement itself is designed to actually make that happen.
So we're going to be looking right now at footwork on the one to chair or the low chair.
And so Corey's going to demonstrate for us.
And as she pushes down, it's literally like an injection.
So she pushes down, and the breath fills the lungs, and then she stays there and tries
to find a deep, deep exhale.
Inhale up, and exhale good.
Relaxing the shoulders just a little bit and feeling that the lungs are what are expanding.
So we inhale, expand the lungs, beautiful, exhale, deep squeeze.
So you feel it like a bellows, right?
You feel that spring lift and expand you, deep, deep exhale, inhale, and exhale, and we'll
go a little faster now, in and out, so that we start to really feel that that movement
of the spring up is also what pushes the air out of her body, right?
So if it's too slow, sometimes it gets a little too muscular.
And then we can switch foot positions.
We'll just do a couple in some of the other positions.
Inhale each position, challenges the body in a slightly new way, affecting the lungs.
Let's take the arms down just a little bit.
Really open the chest, deep squeeze, open the chest, deep squeeze, and last one, and
we'll go to the heels.
And inhale, and we worked on footwork on the reformer as well, and we talked a little bit
about how tightness in the lower foot ankle, shin, calf area can really affect.
So we want to try to get a lot of heat, a lot of blood flow in there, and start making
that area a little more supple as well, good.
Feeling it push the air right up into you, exhale, and last time, good.
And then we come to the ball of the feet to do the tendon stretch motion.
And this time we hold the knees very still, and we exhale as the spring closes.
Inhale to push, exhale, good.
So all the time we're feeling that, that relationship to the spring comes all the way up the body,
expanding out into the lungs, enabling the rise and lift, and the open exposure of this
area so that we can really find our deep exhale.
So we're looking at that contraction through here, nice, good.
And then we can take this kind of concept right into something much, much higher.
You wouldn't necessarily do them in this order, but you can see how the idea relates.
So we're going to go into high frog mass, we're going to put our hands on the back
of the chair, and we're going to lift the pelvis up very high, pull the abdominals
in, and then the same movement of the spring, inhale, so you're going to inhale on the push,
inhale, exhale, right, inhale, exhale.
Coming up higher, inhale into the lungs, inhale into the lungs, really big up here, and then
you try to find a deep exhale, and then have a seat, nice.
So you can see that's considerably more challenging, we want to make sure that we've really gotten
a little more openness up here, and that way the abdominals can get a little more contraction
on the exhale phase.
We're going to look at a few more low chair exercises in some of the other podcasts, so
thanks for joining us, and we'll see you there.
