Katherine: Welcome to the ultimatepilatesworkouts.com, Pilates on Fifth video podcast. I am Katherine.
Kimberley: And I am Kimberly.
Katherine: Today’s exercise is heel squeeze using the Pilates ring. So, Kimberley will lie prone on the mat and shall open her legs just a bit about shoulder distance apart, bent her knees and then we are going to put the ring between the ankles, so you don’t want that the heels that will slip too easily and you want to make sure you get it even here and the legs will also slightly be laterally rotated as well.
So, make sure that the spine, pelvis are nice and neutral so you want the gluteus engaged from the beginning and make sure that the head and neck are comfortable as well. So, when to start we will do nothing, we won’t lift the legs, we will just squeeze the ring, inhale prepare, exhale squeeze hold two three and release. This is option one. We will do option-one one more time.
Squeeze two, three and release. Notice when she is squeezing the ring she is not lifting her hips up and she is not lifting the knees up either and don’t do that, that’s not really a good look for too many people actually. Now you can also do a pattern when you keep squeezing the ring a little bit more each time. Hard to see, for here we will go and show, so squeeze two three and release. So, squeeze, squeeze a little bit more, squeeze a little bit more, it’s like a trying to make the ring to look like a peanut shape and one more time squeeze, squeeze, squeeze and release.
Now, for your advanced clients or for you of your more advanced, you want to make this a little bit more challenging, you can lift the knees but what you want to make sure of this is you don’t crunch on the lower back. Can you crunch on your lower back beautifully for us? Yeah, see us all the tension went to the back, that’s not a good thing, so we think of the legs pulling out of the hips this way, then lifting, you are in good shape.
So, let’s just show that you just do the regular squeeze, we don’t have to do three pulses, so you will squeeze the ring as you lift up, good, notice no crunching in the lower back and then lower down and exhale squeeze and lift, boots are working nice and hard and release. So, one other point about this exercise is you want to keep it nice and slow, the minute you start to add speed to this exercise, it’s very easy to by past the gluteus and make it in the recto-spinal, where the lower back muscle workout and that’s never a good thing and after finishing this exercise, probably good idea to stretch the hamstrings and the adductors as well as possibly the lower back and that is heel squeeze featuring the Pilates ring, featuring the star of the podcast is the Pilates ring and you would like more information on our New York studio, Pilates on Fifth, on our teacher training program, the Pilates Academy International, or any of our products please log onto pilatesonfifth.com. Also if you haven’t or already checked out ultimatepilatesworkouts.com, we have lots of workouts featuring the Pilates ring, asset featuring again, please check that on too. Take care, bye.
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