Alycea's Workout Theme This Week - LIFT OFF
Alycea Ungaro with Lead Trainer Samantha Datz
I've been thinking a lot about Travel these days.
We've been still for so long - missed our trips with family, our work trips and our spontaneous getaways in the time of Covid-19.
A friend of mine had just traveled to a tropical island and I found myself responding how "much I'd like to lift off right now".
That simple phrase stayed with me for a few days.
And when it came time for the Lead Trainers to get together with me for a work out - I had been percolating on this exact idea - as it relates to Pilates.
Where is lift off?
The precise moment, I mean.
Where does it come from - how do you dig into those moments? Is it from the bottom or the top?
Turns out this makes for a great Mat class and here are just some of the exercises we played with!
100 - Advanced preparation just like Joe did it. Lifting everything at once and working the timing so that the full body is suspended and lengthened. We held this position and then lowered everything down to repeat several more times before doing the full 100.
ROLL UP - Working the upper body timing and coordination we slowed down to focus on the moment that the shoulder blades lifted off the mat. A hard moment to find as spinal articulation differs from student to student. This focus helped everyone to really fold the abdominals in - in order to create that peeling of the spine off the mat right at the moment of "lift off".
SHORT SPINE MASSAGE - Wait, I thought you said this was mat? It is! Before even thinking about the Roll Over - I thought we could work our Short Spine Massage on the Mat. So we borrowed from Reformer On the Mat and took time to focus on that 45 degree angle of the legs just before the hips lift off. This is a great exercise to prep on the mat and I don't feel like we do it enough!
HORSEBACK - Totally different approach for this one. Borrowing the Reformer on the Mat version - this gave us the option to play with all the weight shift that is necessary when trying to lift the hips up and off the mat. Tipping the body forward, driving the arms down and unweighting the hips was a really clear demonstration of how the body needs to accommodate to lift off one section while grounding another.
I didn't get to travel anywhere - but my mind did get to wander a bit and that's always refreshing.
Sometimes your class doesn't need to be complicated or extensively planned in order to be impactful.
Leave yourself some space to follow your intuition while giving yourself a simple idea as an anchor.
It's always about the anchor.... hmmm that sounds like another great idea for a class.
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