How to do Stretches with Fitness Balls

These inflatable fitness balls are getting more popular everyday and they are a great device because they put your body in a great posture. They help you to work your core muscle groups, your lower back and your abdominal muscles. And they are great for variety of exercises as well as stretches. All day long we sit at our desks and we are in this position or we sit in our cars and we are in a forward position and we very rarely get to stretch out the front of our body and it's a great stress reliever may be to come home after a long day at work, sit on the ball and then start your stretches. So we are going to start a stretch to help stretch out the front of your body first.

So Erin if you will walk yourself out to your length flat on the ball. Be real careful and we are going to extend the arms all the way back and this is going to help stretch out the chest and the abdominal region as well as your shoulders. She is going to bring her right arm towards her leg so now she is getting isolate stretch. A stretch down the left side and switch. Good, remember to keep breathing. Don't hold your breath during these. Breathing is going to help release the muscles. It's going to make the tendons and the ligaments just that much more flexible. Back and now we are going to straighten the legs out walking the hands back. And this is a little bit more advanced stretch. So it's something that you really want to work into. Stretching out the whole hip region and opening up the hips, especially for athletes. This is very important as our hips get tight. Cycling over and over again. Keeping those, keeps those hips really tight.

Good, we are going to come up sitting up on the ball. Good, maintaining good posture with tight abdominal muscles, spreading the feet wide apart now, we are going to do a hamstring stretch. Grabbing the sides of your arm or your elbows and come down and relax the head, relax it back and just hang. And this is going to feel really good after a long day at work. It's going to really help to alleviate a lot of the stress, specially down here in the lower back. It's a lot of tightness in the lower back going on and you can stay here from anywhere 10-30 seconds. We are going to come back up slowly, good, and just maintain good posture and some deep breaths. So many of our sports right done moving in front to back fashion. It's good to stretch out the muscles on an angle.

So we are going to do what we call a torsion stretch. Erin is going to just turn her whole upper body and look as far away as possible towards the other side. Turning the shoulder in, stretching out the lower back in the obliques and the abs. A couple of good deep breaths upwards of 10-12 long slow deep breaths while you hold the stretch and then you can switch sides. Good, so let's switch sides, couple of long slow deep breaths. Staying upright, keeping good posture, head up. Don't let the neck tilt down. Hold for another four, three, two, one, that's a very good torsion stretch.

And now on an excel Erin is going to bring her left arm over. We are going to stretch out the left side of the body from the obliques, all the way up the shoulders. Now the whole time Erin's abdominals have to work and her lower back has to work to stabilize her on the ball. Anytime you do any of the exercises on the ball, your core muscle groups have to work to stabilize. We are going to switch sides on this. Deep breaths. I hear Erin breathing nice and deep. Long inhales down at the belly and long exhales and regular back to sitting position and those are ball specific stretching exercises.


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