How to Setup the body at the start of each class

Posture

 

• Feet hip width apart.

• Soft knees.

• Imagine that your pelvis is a bowl of water, tilt your pelvis backwards and forwards and imagine which direction the water is tipping out of the bowl. Make this movement smaller until you find the position where the water doesn’t tip out of the bowl, this is your neutral spine position.

• Bring the shoulders up back and down imaging tucking your shoulder blades into your back pockets

• Imagine a piece of string on top of the head pulling the head up towards the ceiling.

• Keep the chin level like it is resting on a shelf.

 

 

Use Lateral Thoracic breathing 

 

• Place your hands on your rib cage, fingers touching in the middle and the heel of your hand on the side of your rib cage. 

• Breath in and the finger tips should come apart, breath out and they go back together again.

• Breath into the sides of the ribs.

• Breathing in through the nose and out through the mouth. 

 

 

Lift and Hollow

. 

• By engaging the deep core stabilising muscles (Transverse Abdominis, Pelvic Floor and Multifidus) by about 30%.

• Imagine you have a belt around your hips and pull this as tight as you can – notch 10 on the belt; you’ve engaged your deep core muscles by 100%. 

• Let this go to notch 5 on the belt; 50% engagement.

• Go another 2 notches and this is 30% engagement that we need to maintain throughout.

 

OR

 

• When you really want to go to the toilet and hold in, the muscles that you use are your pelvic floor muscles. 

• Draw in these muscles and imagine these muscles are a lift in a building, when you hold in as much as possible the lift is at floor 10;  100% engagement, release by 50% until the lift is at the 5th floor, and then let it go down another 2 floors, this is 30% engagement and we need to maintain this throughout. 

• When you activate ONE of the deep stabilising muscles then a co-contraction takes place which switches on the other deep stabilising muscles.