Class #2323

Aston Kinetics

30 min - Class
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We are so delighted to welcome Judith Aston to Pilates Anytime! In Aston Kinetics, she encourages you to become more aware of what is happening in your body so you can learn how to organize it in a better way. She starts with a few pre-tests, and then repeats the same movements so you can compare how they feel before and after the techniques she teaches. This is the prefect class to do before a workout as it gets you ready to move!
What You'll Need: Table Chair

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Welcome to this class. This is Aston Kinetics for anybody getting ready to do a workout, a pilates class, your workout at home. This is a great preparation and we're going to start with a pretest. I've asked this group to do the roll back, the seated roll back as a pretest for the class that we're going to do, so you might want to join us now. Christie's going to go ahead and just call out the queuing.

Okay, so sit up tall, kind of up on the sit bones. Hold on behind your legs and use your arms a little so you give, give yourself some assistance and sitting up and then without thinking too much, just inhale on your exhale. Roll your pelvis backwards. We're just rounding the spine until the arms straight, maybe a little further. Keep rounding only go as far as you can without falling back. Inhale there, start exhaling and come back up.

Stay curved almost like your waistline is being held back and then straighten up the spine from the bottom to the top. Inhale, we'll do it again. Exhale and roll it back. Just finding your way to the mat. Almost her mid, low back. Good. Inhale and exhale. Keep the curve coming forward. When your shoulders are over your hips, you can start to begin to straighten the back. Inhale and exhale, roll back.

[inaudible] reaching the spine toward the floor. Inhale and exhale to bring it forward. How about one more inhale. Exhale, roll back. Huh? Inhale and exhale forward.

Yeah, and sitting tall. So that's your pretest. You felt how it feel to do to do that and we'll come back to it. We'll come back to it shortly. So now I'm going to have you put your match away. I'm going to have you take one of the chairs and you'll be seated on that for a while.

We'll be doing some movement designs on the chair and we'll come back to the maths later. Okay. So I have you standing for a moment because I'm not going to have you do something that I want the people at home to do and to take the time. And that is I want you to find a full length mirror, if not a good window that reflects your body and look at your body from the front and what do you see now? Have the nice voice in your head. Okay, no cellulite, no seeing anything like that. Just look at your body and see what you see. Do you look pretty, even one side to the other or are your hips shifted or your chest is shifted or maybe your head is tilted? Just take a look. Okay.

Then turn to the side. Get settled and feel the weight on your feet and I can have you do this with me right now. Just sit with your arms by your side. Just stand there. Feel how the weightbearing of your whole body coming down is distributed on your feet. Is it mainly towards your heels? Is it mainly on one foot or the other? Is it one side is on, the weight is on the outside of the foot and on the other foot is on the inside.

For example, register the weight-bearing. Then look in the mirror that you have at home and see whether or not something goes forward. Something goes back, like my pelvis goes forward, my chest goes back, or my pelvis goes back, my chest goes forward, or does my upper chest round and my head goes forward. And when I look, I see this curve in my upper body. Don't judge it. Just notice it. Okay. So turn the video off for a moment. Okay, thank you. Have a seat.

We're back. So first of all, what I'd like you to do is to just feel the design of this chair. Let go into the chair and let it do to you. It's designed and what do you the audience see quite a bit of, how would you call it? Slumping, slouching, collapsing. What else? Something I says, okay, this is, she's unhappy. Yeah. Yeah. But the point is this could make you depressed. This chair design.

Now there are ways of modifying chair, so please don't just run right now and toss out all your chairs out the window. But I just want you to appreciate that the chair design is such a strong influence on us, whether we're eating, whether we're at the desk, whether we're working at the computer, et Cetera, et cetera. So the piece here is feel it. Yeah. Check your range of motion in this position and how far can you turn market on the wall?

How far can you turn to the right and compare that, how far can you turn your head and neck to the left? Okay, good. Now how would you kind of fight that chair and sit on it before I add information? Just how would you have, yeah. Okay. Feel what that did for your range of motion. Check again.

What happened? It's increased. Yes. Okay. Secondly, second thing I'd like you to do is to exhale and take a full inhalation breath and just feel how your body feels, kind of feel how, what the volume is of that, where it goes, and exhale, one more time. This time, count the number of seconds to get a full inhale.

Third, we'll actually be including the exercise, the pilates exercise, the seated roll back. This will be number three, four. What I want you to do now is to touch the floor with your index finger and just feel what you do to get there and get back. Feel what your body does to touch the floor and come back one more time. Let's get advanced. Do it the other hand. Okay.

And lastly, and very nice. Very nice. And lastly, I'd like you to come to standing. How do you get there? Peel that and sit down and stand up. Sit down. And one last time on your own. Good. Okay. Alright, so now we can start the lesson, the astic kinetics lesson, all these pre-testing. But believe me, pre-testing is a good idea because then you have some comparison. The comparison is for you to become your own teacher.

When you have comparison, you say the way I did that made me feel worse. The way I did that exercise. I now have limited range. Something's wrong. You become your own feedback system. I feel it's very, very important. So let's just start with one of the ideas we'll you sit forward so that you're just sitting on your pelvis and not the back of your thighs that far forward with no coaching. Other than that, turn your head right in left and tell me what happened. Do you feel like you could do three 60 so what do you think? What causes that?

Yeah. Yeah. So compared to the first way, when you were matching the design of the chair, this is expanded, right? It's increased quite a bit when we sit on the thighs, the thighs encourage the pelvis to go into a slight posterior tilt. Okay? So just sit back a couple inches on your thighs, not even very much, and feel the difference. You got that? Yeah. So suddenly you get to the same place you think you should go and your effort to go further. You feel that? So come forward. So you're just on your pelvis. Now what I'd like you to do from here, I'd like you to place your hands on top of the crest of your pelvis with your thumbs to the back.

I'm going to have you roll your pelvis back and your thumbs or go down and roll your pelvis forward. And this time really notice what the rolling of the Palestine to your chest, your head in the neck and what it does when you have bring the pelvis under the head and the neck. Beautiful and again and now something very, very big. Go ahead and rest your hands on your lap for people that are used to having, uh, most of the exercises done with a tight core to begin with, I'm going to ask you to let this abdomen be loose and be soft for a moment. The reason being to reach the articulation of the anterior part of the spine, I need you to have some undulating possibility. And when you go on contraction, it stabilized, which we want when we're toning, but not when we're listening. So right now for the loose thing, just place your hands kind of grabbed the abs like this.

So he got them in your hand. Remind them to be soft so nobody can see. Isn't as clever of me to have you cover your stomach. Does it feel like a big stunt? You know you're actually pumping. Okay, now relax the ABS and do this movement again and come on out of it now. This time, just waiver ever so gently, right and left as you're going down, down, down. There you go.

Come on out of it and do it one more time on your own with or without the hands. Very nice. Now come back and do it with the tone contract and do it with the tone. It's still an a lovely exercise. It's not the same. That's what I want you to feel. Okay?

So we want to get some rehydration and a little bit closer to the spine and this is a way to do that. So let's progress the exercise. Just watch me once. So I'm going to let my pelvis waiver back, my chest in my neck and my head. Please notice my chest, my neck and my head are falling down because I've taken the support from mine, chest, neck, and head out. And as my pelvis goes back, this will fall. Please don't lean back or you'll be toning again. Again, excellent way to tone. The ABS. Lean back from tone, the pelvis rolls back and the chest, nick and head fall. I want you at the bottom here to exhale and then just come on out of it. Let's do it together. That's your pelvis, slightly micro-movement feather, feather, feather.

Blow the air exhalation out to inhale while you're down here again, blow the air out. Slide your palm of your hand up to your pelvis. Lean forward a little bit. Push off your feet, push off your hands and traction yourself up in long, long, long to the front, the ceiling. Release the hands in. Let go and see where you settled. What do you think? That's good. Good. Yeah.

So what happens is that you are losing on the way down, getting the air out. And this is Mr Boone's. We've had him for years and years and we can't find him anymore. So if any of you know how to find this guy, they stop making 'em. Here in the u s everything is articulate. All the ribs, the spine, every joint scapular, everything is articulating. So in this case, as your pelvis rolls back, these ribs as they descend, start to hug, hug the lungs.

Shall we get a lot of that dead air out? Then as we roll forward and we're going to now rather quickly spring load, we can fill the lungs with fresh air. Okay, so let's do this together again. The pelvis just feathers, waves very gently, maybe asymmetrically side to side. Blow the dead, air out another inhalation and blow it out. Lean forward a couple of inches. Slide your hands, push down on the heels, push down on the hands, come on up. Inhale and let go. How's that? Okay. Nod your head and see if you can feel your pelvis move.

Just go back on the chair and nod your head and see if you can feel your pelvis, man. Oh, not much, Huh? The position, the angle, the compression change, the connectedness from the head all the way to the pelvic floor. So come forward one time more and just do this on your own. So I can observe hands on the lab only because this will create more drag on the shoulder girdle. Another thing I wanted to caution about. The hands are here and you're waving down when you get here, if you leave your arms straight, it will be very easy to elevate the shoulders.

Instead leave them bent so that you really do, we'll get this open in this area that so used to being dragged down by our car seats in our chairs. Okay, so let's do this again just for all the pelvis back. Really let the breath start to go out. Once you get down there, really blow the air out. When worry, inhalation, exhalation, lean forward a little bit. Slide the hands, push on the heels, and rather quickly push, push, inhale and settle where the front and back are about the same length. How does that feel? Not your head. Very good. Now from your hip joint, I'm going to have you hinge whole trunk forward. Okay, so from here, put your thumbs right there. Just as a good reminder. Just let your body fall forward. Yeah. And then push off your feet to come back and just fall forward into gravity and push off your feet to come back.

Now fall forward. But don't push off your feet. How do you get back back muscles? Okay, so here's the deal. We all know about gravity. It's not partial. It pulls everything to its center. However, anything that crosses it, it will pull on as well. So when we're aligned in that relationship, it's very different than if we were a person who needs a walker because there's so much flection in the body forward, they need that walker or perhaps that cane. So here what happens is that a lot of people don't know this opposing force to gravity. They know about gravity, but there's secondary force in, it's called ground reaction.

It is pushing from the earth toward the stars. And since we're on the earth, it pushes us toward the stars and we can maximize that if we know how to use it. So as babies, as soon as they can, and you're holding their little hands even on your lap and they're going and pushing up their feet, right? You put them in one of those little Johnny jump ups, they can entertain themselves for hours pushing up their feet and jumping, jumping. That's using ground reaction force. So what happens is a dancer, you learn very quickly as a skier, all these exercises we do where you're pushing off the earth to be able to jump. Okay?

So what I began to notice is a lot of people knew how to push up, but it didn't come through their whole body. I wanted to come through your whole body in a recycling way. So this is what happens when you're here. You push off the feet, you push up the hands and you get to a certain place at the diaphragm. You suck that area and that spring loads the thoracic up and you get unweighted toward the SARS and then you settle on to gravity into gravity.

Okay, let's do gravity phase again. Flection feather down. I'm going to interrupt you and myself. Come back to where you started. I want you to feel something. The reason I have you feathering is because the body is asymmetrical and when we move exactly symmetrically, one side mix, the other cycle on hold.

So you're not necessarily improving the side that can't move. You're just restraining the side that does have more movement. So I want you to do this symmetrically, the flection symmetrically to feel the difference of the range and how it feels and how far you go. Symmetrically flex, feel where you end and what it feels like and come out of it. And now go to this feathering, the slight asymmetry and settle into the weight in the spine and the fossette joints. Did you go any further? Did it feel any better? If you wiggle your head, does your body wiggle? Alright, now slide forward and use this year. Push out the hand, push off the heels of the hand, spring load, walk and set up right the front back or about the same length.

Very nice. Look at you. [inaudible] in your head and turn your head. I have one better. Turn your head to the, what did she say? I think you're right on cue is supposed to be exactly 30 seconds earlier, but I did stall. Okay? That's why I work with people who are unprompted it. Things just happen. But now let's play with this more or less. Everybody turn your head to the right, but before you do, push off your left foot to turn to your right. Push off your rifle foot to keep turning. Oh my goodness.

And come on back. You like that? Now don't push off your feet. Don't use Jira from the feet. Just use it through your pelvis. Push off your pellets. Okay, come back, push off your left foot to go to the right. Push off the right foot. Push off the pelvis. Go all the way. Very nice in come back. Let's do the other side.

Push off your rifle to your left foot to turn you like that. And good, very nice. So now with this elongated body, she's in [inaudible] zone. So with this elongated body, you're seeing her gravity just went up. Okay.

Allow yourself to let go into gravity and just fall forward across your hip joint. Boom and touch the floor. Spring low, your feet come back. I thought push this time pushed to get long and fought and pushed to come up. Very nice. Is that any different than that one that when you didn't in the beginning, go ahead and do that again and compare. You don't like that as well. It's true. It just isn't as dramatic. There you go.

Okay, fine. So then coming up standing is actually very easy so that your center of gravity goes toward the feet. You could rock a couple of times to get a little momentum and now come up just to your feet and fall back down. Sorry. Okay. Yes, I still, I would, it would have been good and just fall and come back down. Good. This time, fall, push on the ground and stand up. Go back to where you were and just sit down.

Can you remember how you did it before you were sitting back? Just a little bit more on the thighs. You weren't a lot on the thighs, but you were a little bit more, do that one again and feel what that's like a little more effortful to get out of the chair. Did you feel that because of that time? Yeah. I have so many charities. Nice. But, okay, so we teach people how to modify chairs. That's why I'm sitting on the, the deluxe, a set here, right here. Because the lower my center of gravity goes, Oh dear. If I do the way, if I do, the way this seat is designed, this is me. Okay? So my center of gravity is probably about here. Okay?

When you watch an elder person trying to get out of a chair, they come here and right about here, you are so concerned they're going to fall on the floor. Something's going to happen and they're going to injure themselves. So begin to play with your elders with this one idea. Just have them scoot forward, have them scoot forward and do this rocking thing. Let's do it together again. So on a low seat, I have to use more momentum to get my center of gravity over my feet so I can push on my feet to come up. Good.

Okay. Take a moment and just remind yourself of what we've done with the arguing exercise, the breathing, the feathering, the gravity, and GRF. We started with you doing the exercise at the seat of rollback. I had you stand and feel the weight bearing on your feet, which we're going to do right now in just one moment, but I've also had you teach yourself to compare between one way of sitting, one way bending, one way of inhaling. So just for fun, do one more exercise just on your own. One more flection, arking exercise.

Slide your hands up, come forward, and then settle where your front and back are about the same length. This is what we call your starting position. Neutral. It doesn't have to stay with you very long if you're doing something where it rolls or dens, but the point is, it's a great starting position. Okay. So what I'd like you to do is just come to standing just behind your chair again. One more moment.

Yeah. And just check the weightbearing on your feet. Is it the same? What's different? More even more centered. I was this way. Okay. Okay. More centered and less right to left, more friend and back even.

Okay. Very good. So let's go down to the floor to do the seated roll back one more time. So just to take this same arking exercise that we did on the chair, let's take it to the floor. So bring your news like so. Okay. And just start to roll back with your, think of your sacrum going back. There you go. Okay. So you set it with the sacred in your mind as opposed to the lumbars shaken first there. Now from there, come forward, push off the feet, push off the pelvis and let yourself come into extension.

Okay. Abduction. Okay. Abduction, flection, exhalation. Come forward. Push out the feet, push out the pelvis so it gets all the way up to the top of your head. So we're looking at having more even flection throughout the spine in the body, and more even distribution of extension. Go ahead and come on out of it. So that's something you could just do before you do this exercise. One little, two little times perhaps. Okay.

Do this one more time and then come on out of it. Now. Apply that if you'll call it out for people. Okay. So starting again with the feet flat. Um, slightly apart, holding on, just like the beginning. We'll sort of tall and leading with the sacrum. Roll back, flowing out your air. Take your inhale. When you get at your low point, start the exhale, pull the abdominals backwards, rolling forward and pause after one.

And then when you feel yourself over your hips of history. Okay. And then let's supply the second thing we played with, not only the gravity and the GRF pushing into the food or the sacrum or the pelvis, the rocker bones [inaudible] oh, the issue of tuberosities. Lastly, let's add that third piece, which was the asymmetry ever so slightly, almost imperceptible to anyone watching. Okay? So inhale to prepare. And as you exhale, gently feathering your way down. Inhaling at the bottom, start at the exhale and roll back up.

Ah, I shot the feed in the pelvis. There you go. That's it. One last time. So exhaling as you feather your way back. Okay. Filling up on the inhale. Exhale. Come forward.

Push off your feet and sit up tall. Okay. So how is that, could you feel the difference there? Yeah. Feathering is working. It really, I think when you look at the video, you'll see, thank you so much for your attention. Thank you so much for your attention and thank you for inviting me.

Comments

It's so good to have different but complementary approaches on PA! Love it!
2 people like this.
Awesome points for fine-tuning movement!
Thank you Robert. I appreciate this feedback,especially from an experienced practitioner like you. We all enjoyed this class and Judith so much. I personally look forward to a return visit to see where her work can take me. There is a pretty tutorial/mini class coming soon too!
Thank you Kristi, it's just another evidence of how this website is a valuable and useful source for teachers all over the world. Especially for the non american ones. Looking forward to watching next classes!
1 person likes this.
I agree with Roberto... Besides a class like this is a useful tool for us when teaching Pilates, movements such as the articulation of the spine with less tension as usual in client's mind . Thank you PA.
1 person likes this.
Oooh delicious micro movements really make a difference between the pre and post test positions...feeling much more balanced left and right. Thank you for such an effective gentle tool.
What a wonderful experience Judith, thoroughly enjoyed it. Such simple movements yet what a difference it makes. You are fantastic !
What a fab experience, moving with ease, yet with effort and no tension. Would you suggest that the final stage of the assisted roll up as stacking the spine becomes the movement, that there be an inhale, or just continue the exhale with thought to the lift, using memory of the practise moves and the press into feet and pelvis cue? Sit to stand requires that extra attention, but maybe not simply uncurling and stacking as in this exercise? Any thoughts? Thank you for your class.
Thank you so much for bringing Judith Astor into our community! I have been curious about her and her work for some time and am even more so now. I noticed a huge change in my seated roll back. For me at the beginning I get a very assymetrical adjustment in my sits bones on the way up, however adding the feathering in, no adjustment. Interesting! Looking forward to more with Judith. Thanks Kristi and PA!
1 person likes this.
Judith's tutorial provided the perfect blend of theory and practice.
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