Moving Environments

Hi, I'm Jared Caplin. I'm super excited to be here from New York City. We're talking about why space matters, space matters, movement, we know matters and design matters. And I'm here to talk about why design of space connects to movement, who you are and how you move only exist in space and the variables that can create in space, your identity, your movement, practice, and your sense of self and community are huge. They're just not talked about a lot. We tend to in this industry, get into studios that just were kind of randomly set up. And more and more I'm seeing that some of the most successful and most um, attractive places to go to workout, to have the best session with that amazing person, have space design as the secret sauce to what they're creating.

So today I'm going to share insights and strategies for how you can smartly use space design as your secret sauce to impact a better session. It can be things from neuroprosthetics of beauty and how you can use space designed to change someone's nervous system. In part two, we're gonna look at movement design, taking the same concepts of environment applied to physical practice. For today. We're gonna look at props and how you can use four different props to actually construct a smarter session for your clients to have a more impactful experience. The reason I care about this is as a dancer I learned really early that the space you're in completely changes the movement that you're making so you try to create choreography or if you're an athlete on turf versus grass, all the variables really change how you perceive and you resonate in space.

It's not separate. It's not some random thing that you just kind of walk into. It's a part of what you're experiencing and it changes who you are. I've seen in my own life how spaces that I move through can shift your identity as radically as how you see yourself in relationship to others, how you see yourself in relationship to community and how you are in the world in general. I want to share with you how these big ideas from shifting identities in space also relate to our super focused movement sessions. And the space is this big design idea that kind of cellularly cellular Lee comes all the way back into your body.

If you take a look at where you move in your practice, I want you to think about those places where you feel like you move really well. So if you're taking a hike in the country and there's a different sense of oxygen, or if you're running around New York city trying to catch up to three different studio schedules and get the next train to your next appointment and squeeze luncheon, there's was really different physical environments that we move through. And I would venture that though it's the same person who might be hiking. And then in the city your identity as a person is completely transformed. And if you pull back for yourself and you really think through where the places that you feel best as a mover personally and we or clients might feel best, what are the variables that create that?

So I want to kind of take you through some of the concepts of looking at variables for space design and how you can use space design as your secret sauce. Let's talk for a second about the variety of movement space options. Or if we say it more clearly, spaces designed for movement. Looking back to pictures of Joe plotted studio with these beautiful old oriental rugs and giant pictures of anatomy, pictures on the wall and all the exercises that had a certain vibe to it, and we looked at those archival photos and there's a feeling that you get and these days a reminiscence for maybe what was happening there. What were people looking to get out of this kind of interesting salon with some guy they didn't really know and apparatus they didn't ever experience crossfit boxes, giant warehouse gyms, really different vibe that really worked for that practice.

You kind of light the nervous system up. You're moving in a grittier, more forceful, more impactful way, or a really quiet, comfy, nurturing, you know, texture, full Shag Rug, home studio where you just want to kind of feel yourself and chill, but still focus. They're all really different examples of ways that you can use space design as an asset and if you think through and kind of pull back to deconstruct what are the things that make up those spaces, let's list them out. You've got this space itself, so if you're in a smaller, large studio, what do you want to create with that? Do you want a sense of comfort? Do you want expansion that has big vistas and light? Natural light is incredible.

It changes how you feel about where your center is versus if you're really dimly lit and you can't really see around and and things are not visible, that might create a different sense of precision. Maybe that's useful color. It can be huge for some people and really distracting for others and thinking about who the clients are coming in May play a significant role with how they're perceiving light. Do you have are on the walls or not? Personally, I chose to have really nothing on the walls because I didn't want that distraction in the context of New York City to be yet another stimuli my clients needed and I think everyone that was working in my studio needed a chance to kind of slow down. You walk into this space, there's a big plant wall that greets you, so there's greenery, nothing on the walls and we have, sometimes people ask me about, oh, you know, it'd be really great to have some art around Fairbanks in New York. You know that there's constant stimulus all the time. So to take that away was a really conscious design choice to give people a chance to actually get into their body when they walk into the studio. If you love art and you're looking at an environment to really get people to light up a little bit more and you want big colors, you want texture, you want visual, stimulate, great.

That can be a huge asset for you with your populations. Maybe it's also about your staff and how you want to lead a team. Maybe it's about what you need personally to feel like. Can get through eight sessions a day or four classes and you need a calming or maybe more exciting environment. So looking at color, looking at your visual guides on the wall. Then in the actual confines of the studio, how do you have things set up?

Is it really obvious where everything goes? Is it kind of haphazard and you're just looking to find things all the time? Personally, I like things to be really organized because my model was that anybody could use this space. You could walk in, you could kind of figure out where things are in it and do your session and it's streamlined so that you could focus on the person in front of you. My work tends to be really focused with clients one on one, so to have everything readily accessible that I can pull it while I'm talking to a client as opposed to saying, okay, do two more of those and I'm gonna run down and find some prop I want it to use for the session. That didn't work for me. For some people they work really well that way.

If you also then think about texture, what are you touching in the studio? How does the equipment feel? What are the props are using cork versus foam versus cotton, like those have different input for different people and not just about special populations. Even a general pop clients are going to have a different sense of tactile information from the equipment that they're on and you can get into conversation around the equipment manufacturers. It's one of the things that I hear a lot is straps feel really different.

That impacts people and yet not everyone's taking it to the entire space. We just talk about it as the straps, whether it's leather or nylon, but if you look at the whole space, those questions are in the space as a whole as well. Other factors to consider, so little bias is greenery. For me, it was really important in the middle of New York City for me to create an oasis and greenery is one of the hardwired ways that we can do that through human evolution. There are studies now of neuro aesthetics, which is my favorite word from last year. Neuroaesthetics is just the study of how we visually take in information and what it does to our brain and as we know, if it's happening in our brain that's going to have impact through our bodies. So in New York City with the lives that people live, I wanted a space where you would walk in and right away you're met by a plant wall. You now have to, so when you're walking in the space, there's this kind of surprising look that people have when they come in. They're not expecting to see it.

They're used to kind of a hustle and bustle of collaborative space. They come in, they get right to work, it's very pedestrian. We left a pretty airy reception room by design for us in this location to have people have a transformation when they walked in right away. I've had people question that, so they've asked about maybe you can make more money if you put more machines in, but for the impact of a session, my personal choice was to say, we actually need this as an asset. So when people come into this space, they have a chance to shift from their life, kind of leave it over and then actually enter their session and focus. So greenery in lots of studios can be just a simple plant.

You don't have to do a whole wall. It's actually, I'll admit on camera that studies have shown that even plastic greenery or representations of green that aren't real plant life, Hamas civil have a similar impact on your brain, which I really wanted to fight was like how can that be? That's not possible. Like the looking at when you see a tree, when you're looking at a forest that has to register in some deeper way than if you look at a fake plant wall that's plastic. Like there's no way they can equate, but so far, and I'm hoping that this changes at some point as they study it, it doesn't matter. You see green, there's a response in your nervous system to that color. If you don't want to do a plant wall, then you could look at what is beautiful to you, what's beautiful for your clients and then for your clients. Understanding what the traffic flow through a studio is, is another thing that I just don't see people looking at. Um, it's profitable to have every machine stacked as close as possible as you can possibly get it. The quality goes down.

And I would say that if you could look at your studio and figure out what do you need, obviously for how the setup will work financially, but really what's the product you're delivering? If you want your clients to have a quality experience, how are you setting it up so that they feel taken care of if it's a private session, how you're sending it up so that they're maybe just close enough in a class so that they feel they're part of a community. Are they facing each other or nots? Is there noise distracting them because there's a group class next to a private studio. Those are all variables that really do change the branding, the experience, and the emotions that your client associated with your business. So if you take a minute and even were to jot down for yourself as yourself, what's important to you as a mover? What do you respond to best? What makes you feel like, yeah, I want to go work out.

We know that compliance is one of the biggest things of the fitness industry for people actually getting to their goals. So doesn't it make sense then that if you create a space that's exciting and attractive and makes you actually want to show up, that you're probably gonna want to go more often rather than that kind of dirty, grimy, crunchy place that's like, oh yeah, I have to wipe my feet every time I come out of there, not so useful and clients are going to respond whether they tell you or not. So I also wanted to say that while all this is a bit conceptual, you don't need to be rocket science. Ask Your clients, maybe take your three favorite clients that you know will give an honest opinion and create a simple little survey. Say, Hey, what's the most important to you? Is it more important that you have a place to kick your shoes off at the front of the studio or do you want, uh, as many apparatus as you possibly can have? The questions are up to you, but I think we leave short sometimes that client input and feedback is huge.

One of the things that I did when I opened my studio is to make sure that I asked a couple trusted people what they really thought and what without my input they were getting out of the session. Like what was actually creating value for them. If you look at a restaurant and I was gonna make a hamburger and I was an amazing chef, the burger is really important. We know that, but what's it served on? Is there a plate? Is it a tray, and what's the menu look like and how are the seats arranged? Is it communal? Is it, what's the setup? And that is as much of the experience of that Burger as where it was cooked and who made it and what the ingredients are.

We're going to get to the movement stuff and we'll do that in a second. But if you just go back and in through what you think is important for you, because this is all about how you express. The other magic part of this is that you're not going to do it wrong. What your studio looks like, how it feels is going to completely express who you are. We've seen that unplanned is anytime you go to visits of people's studios, it's who they are. There's no ability to do anything but fat.

But there is a chance to actualize who you are in the space by choice, by design, renovate it, change the color, space matters. Okay, so now the fun stuff we're gonna talk about from why space matters to movement environments. So how you use moving environments to change a session for today, we're going to look at mostly props, but I want to talk you through also, uh, other ideas on variables you can use to actually instruct a different kind of session. We often get into the choreography and go through it, but we have way more tools at our disposal to change our client's experience of moving. We can do that for ourselves as well. At home for optimal motor control, we're going to look at three key variables, environment, task and intention. I'll take you through a couple of different ways. We can use those three with a bunch of different props and the intention is to look at how you can think through connecting the dots through props into exercises so that you really are changing someone's nervous system.

You're changing how they move with intention in different environments, so stringing together environment, task and intention for a different movement experience. Then as a practitioner, once you get the environment, the intention and the task mostly mastered. I want you to think as a practitioner how you use feedback, how do you use results? Did your client or you do what you expected or not, and then how do you repeat that? So really thinking with the variables of a movement session.

Once you have an environment set up, you need to be the practitioner or the mover within that to really look at what happened, what was the outcome and guide drive a little bit differently. If you need to repeat the thing that's working cause you're in the groove and you just want to get it going. The variables I want you to play with, and I'm thinking of listing kind of everything that goes into a movement session, so pulling back to deconstruct what goes into an exercise, things like the environment you're in. So you might have an incredible place to move in. Maybe you're on a mat and a busy studio and that's your setup, but the environment is also about your body, so the position of your body is really gonna change how you move, what the demand on your motor control system is, as well as your internal experience of your outward movements. Environment is not just about the space and a big level, but it's also about how your body is connecting in the space that it's in.

As we look at the environment you're in, whether it's the landscape of your own body or the space you're moving in. I also want you to look at the connection between the two and that's where the variables really come into play. What's the tactile setup? Are you on leather? Are you on wood growing cotton? How does it feel? And then with the tactile stuff you're touching, what's the tactile tasks?

You can use touch as a very different way to experience what's happening in your body. You can also intend touch and tactile cues to have a different outcome. So we'll get into that with some of the props. Stable versus mobile environments. We kind of take it for granted that the apparatus is what it is, but by intelligently changing what's stable, what's mobile, you've got to complete different result from the exercise.

Closed and open chain environments are huge. And I also see people under utilizing what can come out of a smart program. So a closed chain environment where you're using the ground force to go through your body, an open chain environment where you're moving freely from the ground out your extremities to think through those with props, with the environment you're in. Also create a very different experience. Load Springs, body weights might be external weight. Whatever the load is that you're using also changes your body.

Visual Stimuli can also play a huge role, whether it's how you're accusing yourself visually, whether it's every time you come up from something, you look at a spot on the wall or actually seeing what's happening. So how many times you've been in an exercise and you realize you've done the modern dance thing and you're just staring ahead while moving and you realize that you haven't actually looked around for 10 minutes. So visual stimuli does have a deep impact, not only concentration, but higher systems moving. Think about the set up of where your eyes are relative to the rest of your body. There's a reason that we're designed this way and using the visual system is a huge way to change a session time.

So we know repetitions and we know rhythm in plots for sure pacing the duration that an exercise takes, not just about getting a couple of reps in and fitting the time of a class, but it's also about the fiber types that are [inaudible] our resulting excitation from the time under tension time. Under tension can be a huge variable that sometimes is under looked at in the plot is repertory to change how someone's actually connecting to different parts of their system. The quality who quality of movement also sometimes kind of is like the last thing we look at. We want someone's form to be really exact and we sometimes forget that the quality as a variable for what we want them to do as an intention is probably the thing that they're going to remember the most when they walk out the door. How did you move? How did you feel moving?

What's the intention behind the quality of motion? Then global cues like breadth for example, or axial elongation or maybe it's more of an emotional or psychological cuckoo. You want someone to crush the exercise or maybe it's about being really kind to themself and being gentle or generous. Those have a really different response to the person that's moving. And then I also want to throw in one more variable, which I'm calling the afterglow effect.

It's one thing to move within a session and you can get your clients to have an incredible experience moving to like nail that exercise. What happens when they leave the studio? Do you want them to leave it on the mat literally or do you want them to take it with you? I don't have an opinion on which is right, but I think you need to think through, do you want them thinking through all the cues that you just went through for the rest of their day and they're kind of self cuing the whole time? Or do you want them to actually not think about anything, have a movement experience and then just get out and walk. So the afterglow effect is strategically a way for you to think about what's the intensity of what someone experienced and does it stay in the studio and they just go about their day.

And it's about training in that one hour or the session that you had, or do you want them to be thinking about placement, positioning, breath please, principles while they're picking up their kid from school or getting the groceries or whatever it is, right? There's choices to be made there. I would guess that it's going to trend more about who the client is and you really listening to them. But think about it as a variable for yourself in your practice. What's the desired results? Where are clients meeting you and what are you asking of them as you set expectations?

So those are some of the variables that I want to bring up as ways you can really kind of hijack your session with intelligent reconstruction and using those variables intelligently is really gonna change how your clients feel, how they move. So let's now look at some examples of how we can use props as variables. Combining all the things that we talked about with tactile queuing, verbal cuing, using your system in different ways through the props that then tie into an exercise. Okay, so we're in movement land. My friend Marimba has joined us from New York City. We have four half rubber balls.

You could use a pair of set or you can use whatever version you have that's similar. I'm using this as both a stable and a mobile surface for her to move on, which we'll show you in a second. And it's also a very cool tactile input for her system to both feel where her body is and also mobilize some things that maybe don't want to move so much. So the first thing we're gonna have Marimba do is simply stand on these so that her metatarsal is, are domed over the front of the ball and her heel is supported on the back ball. So she's got four of them. She can really stand on there.

And the first thing I'm just going to have her do is feel her weight and she's going to track, is her weight more on the front of the back of the foot? Is it more in the inside of the outside? She also has four sensory inputs into how her foot is placed. Where does her weight fall through into the ground? She can wiggle her toes a little bit so she's not too gripped greats and I'm then gonna ask her to simply try to roll the inside of her front foot down the ball, then come back out of that and do that again.

Really trying to get the differentiation in the forefoot spiraling and I'm going to ask her to not move her heel at all. If you're doing this on the ground and she's going to keep going as I go, it's a little harder to feel right. The ball is really specific. You're not used to standing on a ball. He's, most of us are not, and as you're standing on that, it gives you a really different map of where your foot touches the ground. So it might give her a lasting impression of how her foot works. That goes onto maybe an exercise like footwork.

I'm not going to switch the balls up for a different moving environments. Thank you. So we're just gonna let the front balls over. So really simple. We just went from stable to mobile. What I love with this is that it gives clients really different sense of a fine tuned motor control experience. But within assistance, the balls motion is going to help her figure out, oh, that's where it's supposed to move. Instead of me trying to say lots and lots of things, all I needed to do is say, okay, move to the front of your foot.

Don't move the back and let's see what she does. So the environment is the balls. We have the front balls flipped over so that they're really mobile. We have the back balls steady. So she has both a stability and mobility component.

Now I'm not caring about what she does with the balls. I care about how it really impacts her body. What does she's sensing? Can she keep this heel really steady as she continues to move. And you might notice if one moves more than the other based on someone's history. Great. And then I want to do the same thing but flip it.

So we're gonna flip the balls again. She's going to put her front foot on the front balls first because it's more steady. And I want her to pay attention to how she really spreads out the dome of her foot. Yep. For this, I want her to think about her navicular and her cuboid going opposite directions. So it's the same spiral, right? She's going to keep her forefoot steady and she's going to really spin her calcaneus for the calcaneus.

I'm thinking about the inside of her heel rising up towards her head. She's going to try to keep her toes spread wide, especially on the right foot. Thank you. And then keep moving the heel. So she's Kinda ringing out the whole transverse arch and the foot. She's gonna come to a still point and we're going to have a little more fun.

We're going to flip the balls over one more time. So now we went from both stable and mobile to fully mobile. She's a smart mover and she can handle this. Some clients, this might be a little too wobbly, so choose wisely who you're giving it to and once you set up with her heel on the center of the back balls, her four foot spreads so that the metatarsal is are really well grounded on the front ball. I'm just going to have her stay still. I don't want her to move for this point anymore. I'm going to have her start to soften her knees and just do like a really simple standing squat. Does that to be a huge range, but I want her to track with the input of the balls where her weight is again.

So again, the environment is impacting her sense of herself as she moves. The task is simple, don't move your feet and the intention is to keep the ankle, the knee and the hip moving well together. So simple prop. Look in environment that in a couple of different ways changes how she perceives her feet moving. Great. Rest. Next up. One more thing with the balls. When you go back to this more steady environments, we talked about closed chain, open chain before she's going to come back on more stable again.

She's going to maybe feel that her feet are different. At this point. We did a little mobility work. It can be as quick as this and then I wanted to change the task. The environment's the same. The task is that she's just gonna rotate her spine to the right.

I want her intention to be stable feet. There'll be a little bit of a weight shift. They really don't want to see that she's losing the stability of the platform or her feet. She's going to come back to center and I want her to revolve to the left and you might notice a little difference or asymmetry on the sides. Then come back to center.

So just do that one more time so you get a sense of the experience of where she's great and she's going to keep her knees a little bit soft just as a way for her to sense her own body and space. Feet really steady getting that full rotation from a closed chain environment with some tactile input all the way up through the rest of her spine. So that's the ball series. Simple ideas for how you can use a prop like this to change from the ground up, how you feel your body in space, symbol environment, a couple of different options, intention that we change with the environments and the task that also shifted so we get to really different movement experience. I want to next show you a different prop and a whole different set of environment, tasks and intentions.

Now in sessions to go back and forth between things, I sometimes wish you could just kind of magically snap your fingers in a prop would appear and thanks to the movie magic. That plot is anytime provides. Here we are, we're going to take Marimba over to the table here. I want her to come to all fours. So now we have this magic devil. I'm just simply going to use it as input for her spine. Now she has this little button here.

We're just going to pretend like she didn't. It's on the back of her head. Simple to start. I'm going to help her keep it a little bit steady, but I'm not giving any force to this, right? Noticing right away where the Dallas sets, what I want her to do is to only have three points of contact along her spine with the dowel. There she is. So it's just a very simple kind of clinical way for someone to start to process where their body is in space. We can talk about posture till we're blue in the face and we do, or we have an external stimuli here, which is a light dowel for her to feel where her spine is from there, I really simply want the attack to be her tracking of this alignment as she moves so we could do any number of a movement tasks from here.

She could do a nice circle. So if I have her brain, just one knee off of here without changing her spine, she's going to bring the right knee and she's going to circle it around and we're just going to monitor and see what she does because it come back around and back to center. Let's try the left side also. Again, the environment is simple. She's in quadruple Ed. She's sensing where the dowel is along her spine, trying not to change those points of contact and I'm adding a challenge to her that she actually moves her hip. So can she do those two things at once when she does the right side, I'm going to have her think of really not changing this lower point of contacts and just restricting the motions that were hip joints so she doesn't push me away over here and it comes back around. Nice. I have to think about reaching through her head a little bit, giving her an extra little touch cue that she can really reach long keeping with the dowel Rod, swinging the left knee around. She might kick me, but I'll get out of the way and back around. Great.

So a couple of quick other ideas for this same environment. If she were just decompress her right arm and her left knee. Again, no change with where she's touching here. I want her knee in her hand, maybe an inch off the ground. So come back to me. Bring it forward and deflection a little bit just there. Perfect. And I want to be able to slide a piece of paper just below her hand. So I'm just gonna ask her to feel her spine again in this setup.

She is going to breathe nice and easily. She's going to think about her collarbones and her shoulder blades being really wide and she's still gonna feel her spine. Good. Try the other side. So really simple. But the sense of where her spine is is in space as she changes positions on waiting, decompressing. What I noticed is she's trying to use her right lumbar a little bit.

So if we could open up that right waist a little, great. And then come back down. Cool. So that's one environment with a dowel. I want to show you another environment, same idea, but really different intention, so remember is going to lie on her back. So from that kind of dowel as spinal reference, which is a bit of an interception idea, she's really sensing her internal space and then how she's challenging that. I want to go really external with this.

What she's going to do is threaten her left leg. I'm going to help her out by placing this right at her patella and a pretty vertical setup and I'm going to ask her to do so. The environment is right here. She's supine. We have the Dowel as just a simple external guide for where her knee is tracking in space. Simple recipe for movement is she's going to roll her pelvis to the left and I want her to not change this position at all.

Good. She's going to come back across the table. I'm not going to tell her much. I'm going to have her move. I'm going to see as a practitioner what she's doing naturally on her own good and she's going to come back across the table taking care of that. She really doesn't change her sense of where this dal is in space for her. One more time please.

Great. As she comes back, I'll also mention that in a standing position it's a very different sense of loads. You can change the variable and you changed the experience. Great, thank you. And come on up. So that's two different environments with two different props. And the point that I wanna make is that the specificity of using props for someone's moving experience within an environment is why I love them so much. In New York, even in a gorgeous like this, people's ability to focus on their body moving is really challenged these days.

So if a space is beautifully set up and it's and everyone's dream version, to have someone still be able to focus on their body in space is really, really important. They're not always going to have the kinesthetic awareness that someone who's done a movement practice for 20 years is going to have, they might have been well trained as an athlete to be a coordinated mover. But simple tools like the two that I showed you in the two that are coming up can be a really important way to get someone to focus in New York City. When people are coming in and they have their stressful lives, we call it a bone to chew on. So they're not actually chewing on the stick, but we're actually giving them a very specific way to focus on what I want them to experience as their practitioner. But they then get the juice of that within a space that we've designed for them to be able to focus. So the secret sauce is not only the space, but using props or other variables smartly is a way to get them to have a more rich movement experience.

So next I want to show you two more environments. One is going to be with a bumpy ball. And because we made a little bit of a mess here, we wish the magicians, that plot is any type could just do that magic snapping thing again. And there we are. How cool is that? This is a slightly air-filled bumpy ball. Um, you can get these in various colors, various sizes.

I like it cause it just has a little bit of a tactile input on the ball itself. We're going to use it for some spinal awareness. So Marimba is going to lie face down. We're gonna place the ball comfortably at her sternum and we can look at how you can use this ball to get her spine to move a little bit better. So prop yourself up on your elbows to start in.

Find a comfortable place where you can rest on the ball. The first thing I'm going to have her do really simple. So here's the environment. Let's try the ball a little bit lower so we can get little more emotion. Great. And then hands a little forward so you have some room to go.

She's going to relax. I want her head to just rest. She might be on the ball. She's going to let her shoulder blades broaden. Head resting. I'm just going to check as a practitioner that she's well set up. So the only thing I want her to focus on is where her pressure goes into the ball. See if you can drop your head a little more. And the next thing I'm gonna ask her to do is simply allow her sternum to press first down into the ball and then forward rolling the ball towards her fingertips. Simple task, roll the ball.

The intention I'm looking for is to see how her thoracic spine moves. Great. That's plenty for now. And then grow back down again and again. I like this particular ball because these little nubs kind of show me visually as a practitioner, they're helping me as a mover. They're helping Marimba sense her body again in space, not just specifically with her thoracic spine, but she gets a broader sense of movement in general. As she goes forward. I'm simply going to ask her to try to touch my hand with the ball.

So she gets a little visual stimuli as well. Good. So while she's having this moving experience, I'm of course checking out where she's moving from. Is that what I want to see or not? Back to the idea about results. Feedback. She's a good mover. She's doing really well with this. What I'm going to ask her to do is think about really letting her chest wall descend to the ball first so she gets a real clear sense of local motion before she goes all the way up. There you go.

And I could keep my finger here as a reference if that's useful for her. I'll see as we keep going and it's around this point where I see her cervical spine start to take over. So I'm gonna ask her to pause and instead I'm going to send her attention right back to the ball. And again, trying to move the ball. If you look down Marimba just to, there you go. So really small change but different experience. Great.

And then relaxing again back down if you want to. Challenge clients a little bit more so she has a pretty mobile thoracic spine. If she was stiff, I'd maybe rest with that. She's a good mover though and she can do this. I'm going to have her bring her hands behind her head, a little more weight, little more load. She's going to uncross her fingers. Great.

And she's going to go back down, resting the weight of her torso again. So women, just be careful where you're pressing on with the ball. You can always adjust in the exercise. She's going to, again, same intention, just a little more weight, reached down into the ball and roll on the vector where she goes down into the table and forward just trying to move the ball. I don't have to talk to her about her thoracic spine and how it moves. I'm giving her a simple recipe for within this environment and space that she's in. How to keep the task simple.

I might also want a sense with the ball for myself, if that's an easier place for me to sense where she's moving. When do I feel like the ball moving? When is it not? And I can see visually it's a great position for me to see her body. That's plenty. And then push into my hand. There you go. Keep going. Nice. I'm going to see. Yeah, like right there again, she kind of stops, which I wouldn't have picked up visually, but I can use my sense to feel it and we'll have her think again.

Go right back to the ball. Marimba. Go into my hand if you can. Nice. And then relax back down. One other completely different way. You can use this ball. She's going to come off of their rest for a second. Maybe shake it out. She's going to lie on her back. So different environment. She's now supine.

Gravity unloaded. Takes the weight off. She's gonna ring her pelvis up onto the ball. Now instead of the ball acting as an assist for her to mobilize her thoracic spine in this position, this environment, the ball is gonna act as a challenge to her stability. So very simple. She's going to go into a knee fold. I'm simply going to ask her to track her pelvis and not move it at all.

I can choices about whether I want both arms down, if they're over her head, if it's one leg or not. For today, I want her to just simply descend one heel to touch the mat. It's also a beneficial in place for me to see what her lumbar spine is doing. So I can have my hands come underneath if I want to. She's going to switch legs. Great. She's gonna start to go a little faster. She gets the feel of it. So again, same ball, tactile sensation for her, sacred to feel where she is in space.

She's moving her hips, she's stabilizing her lumbo pelvis on the ball. Great. And then bring both feet back down and rest. Okay, great. So I'm going to have Marimba come off the ball. Good job. So that was three props using a couple of different environments to show different variables, how you could use them for stability, for mobility, for different input from the ground up, uh, for sensing internal and external space within the larger space. The point I also want to make is that from fine tune things like moving on the ball to more global patterns like hip folds on this ball, that our job as moving professionals is to help people connect the dots.

Our clients need that desperately, especially today, and using both space design. The design of a session with intelligent use of either cues or prompts like we looked at is one of the best ways to take our work and really apply it. So we're giving a rich movement experience to our clients. We need that more than ever. And I would say that in our Instagram age where there's tons of social media content, we can enrich all of that. We can look at how space design, how movement design can really affect who someone is.

Thank you so much for joining me.