Hi! My name is Vionna Jones with the Hot Mama Fitness Studio. Today, I am showing you how to work out during your pregnancy. In this segment, I am going to show you an exercise called Hamstring Curl.
To begin this exercise, you will need a mat and a stability ball. We are going to do this exercise on the floor. So from the seated position you can actually come down onto your back, on the floor, on your mat. You will only be on your back here for a second.
Now, Julie is going to put her feet on the ball and extend her legs all the way out. Now you want to be careful here, you want to put weight of your feet into the ball, but not so much that it engages your calf muscles. So you want to balance your weight there.
Now from here, she is going to bring her belly button into her spine to engage her abdominal muscles. It's also very important to have your arms next to your body. Then she is going to lift her hips off of the floor. So lifting her lifts off of the floor means that she is going to have to balance, that's why it's important to engage the abdominal muscles.
Next step, she is going to bring her heels in towards her body, bending the knees and then she is going to push them all the way back out. Now this exercise can be done in this position because it's not putting any pressure on the lower back or on any of the veins and arteries that are bringing blood to and from the baby.
If you start to feel any tingling in your legs or anything during this exercise, you would want to stop. Otherwise, this is a very good exercise to strengthen the glutes, to strengthen the hamstrings and to strengthen your abdominal muscles.
Strengthening the glutes and the hamstrings are important because that helps to alleviate any symptoms of sciatica or to maybe keep away those symptoms of sciatica altogether which is something that plagues pregnant women a lot.
So again, she is going to do 12-15 repetitions of this in 2-3 sets. Then when she is done with her legs extended all the way out, she just lowly lowers down to the mat and she will release her feet from the ball and come back to a seated position.
That is how you do a Hamstring Curl. In the next segment, we will show you how to do hip circles and pelvic tilts on the ball.
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