Class #1175

Prenatal Wunda Chair Flow

45 min - Class
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Leah teaches a Prenatal Wunda Chair workout focusing on pure and simple awareness because it is so vital to the process of being pregnant and giving birth. By listening to the sensations in the body, you can feel the subtle movements that are needed to work on balance, control, and stabilization. Leah adds light Hand Weights to make this a gentle but effective full body workout.
What You'll Need: Wunda Chair, Hand Weights

About This Video

Sep 03, 2013
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Hi everybody, it's Leah here and I'm so happy to be doing my second prenatal. When is your class for you here on PyLadies anytime. So today for this one to chair class, you're going to need a set of small hand weights. Whatever weights feel good to you. Two or three pounds is probably sufficient. If you don't have hand weight successful to you at the moment you can use two water bottles, which would be fine or you can even use some weighted as small balls.

That would be fine as well. Or You could do it without anything. So it's really up to you. But you're just going to add a little extra arm work with those hand ways. So today in the one at your class, um, as I'm doing the second series of prenatal classes, replies anytime with my second pregnancy, I just want to focus on kind of a little bit more. We're doing a lot of squats, a lot of that type of movement and a little bit more freedom. Today I'd like you to just really kind of draw into your own body awareness and see how you feel.

The one the chair is kind of can be a little compact and we can kind of try to mobilize around it. But I really want you to feel that awareness in your control, your balance, and your stabilization as we go through this work. So let's go ahead and get started. So I'm gonna have you keep the bar or the pedal rather, just wherever you'd like. It doesn't really need to be up or down. But one thing that does need to happen is you need to be able to sit at the very edge of the chair in a comfortable position and not feel like the bar is hitting you. So go ahead and adjust that pedal to what feels best.

So I want you to be perched right on your sits bones on the edge of the chair here. I'm going to do some gentle roll downs. And as we do that, just go as far as you feel comfortable depending on the trimester that you're in. I just want you to start your breath and start that process of drawing awareness into your body. So taking your breath in, prepare with your exhale. Just gently roll yourself forward. You're not gonna go very far. And inhale, roll yourself at and Xcel rolling down. And Inhale, rolling it.

Let's do one more like this. And Xcel roll the down so that your arms fall forward. And Inhale, roll that. So now I want to add a little bit to it. Exhale, roll yourself down. And inhale as you roll that you're gonna let your arms come back behind you.

Grab the back of the chair and come up into a hierarch. And exhale, roll down, bong breath here. Inhale, rolling up and left. Exhale, two more. We need to change your breath pattern here. If you're feeling a little out of breath, you can add a four breath pattern, which is fine. And in lifting up, pushing your heel, the hands down into the chair, feeling that expansion of the clavicles, pulling your scapula together. And one more. Exhale down and inhale, pressing all the way.

So now you're going to come back to your vertical position and just XL. Circle your bottom around and spiral to the right and switch. Exhale. So why don't you to feel like your shoulders are over your hips and as you just spiral, I want you to feel like you're a NNC. The kind of the head is gonna go higher up towards the ceiling.

So it's just kind of feeling like you're kind of like you're doing the backstroke in the pool. So you're just swimming gently, feeling like you're moving through water and XL. Ah, and one more time. Exhale, putting the hands on the hips. Really gentle little pelvic tills. Exhale, okay. And forward. So as you go forward, I don't want you to be afraid of letting yourself come into an anterior tilt. Xcel, draw the energy up through the pelvic floor, the lower abdomen. Then inhale, reach forward as if you were spilling the energy forward and exhale when you do one here with just collecting that pelvic floor energy, collecting the abdominal energy, mobilizing that pelvis. Nothing too hard, nothing too intense, just very gentle.

Now you're going to do a leg lift with your right leg. So we're just going to gently march the legs back and forth. So I just want you to let that leg float up as if the leg was being drawn up by the abdominal energy. Exhale, and to fill that beautiful crease in the hip. As you bring that leg up, just work with your intention of just keeping that nice abdominal support, that pelvic mobility. I left leg [inaudible]. Now here I want you to widen your stance. You can even place your heels on the base of the chair here.

I want you to place your hands on the right side and then wants you to reach forward. So we're gonna do an anterior tilt, but reach the energy out toward the so you're on a little diagonal. Then exhale, bring it in. Inhale. Now as the movement initiated from the pelvis and it trickles up the rest of the spine, I want you to feel how your eyes kind of reached forward and it should come into the curve as they might kind of come down a little gently to just feel that natural flow and rhythm through the body as you're drawing into that awareness. One more time and reaching forward. Inhale and exhale. Other sides. Remember my legs are a little bit wider. My heels are up on the PLA, the base of the chair here, and inhale and exhale and in how reaching and what I'm doing by sitting on the edge here is I'm really letting my pelvis expand forward.

And then as I draw an under some getting that wonderful motion far bringing it back. Now this time you're gonna lift your, you're gonna push your right hand down into the mat. You're going to lift your right, Alex's, me, your left arm and your left leg. You're going to Xcel over to the right. So doing a lateral flection, the side bend to the right and they are going to circle around and Xcel lift the left leg up and circled. So what it looks like here is exhale and circle so you can stay where you are, but I'm going to face you as you can see the exhale and circle two more Xcel. So just let that freedom of that movement start to happen. One more time.

Exhale and circle. Let's go the other direction. Pushing energy down through your left hand and exhale. Inhale, circle and just float that foot off the floor and circle and exhale, which is put a little smile on your face as you feel that rotation, that spiral, that lateral flection, and around one more time and up and around rolling all the way up. You should feel like you mobilized your spine a little bit. Got a little bit of connection through your abdominals.

And now we're going to go onto our footwork. I like you to set up your spring and whatever you feel most comfortable with. I'm going to work today on a three and a three or two of my heavier levels here, depending on the type of chair that you're working on. And I want you to go ahead and grab your weights. Now. We're going to work in our V positions today only.

So I want you to start in your small v, bring yourself as far forward to the edge as you can feel uncomfortable. And I want you to focus on lifting the pedal up as high as you can. So we're kind of mimicking our squat position. So bring those heels up toward the center body. As you push the pedal down, you're going to bring your arms straight up to a lateral raise to the side, so Xcel press and bring it up. So again, the emphasis is going to bring the feet up as high as they'll go. Exhale and bring it up. Exhale.

So again, feeling that postural control and just enjoying the hips as they open the pelvis as it expands, as you bring that paddle up, and then we're just adding the extra arm work here to more and bring it up one more and hold it all the way up. Keep your postural control as you transfer the right foot. Then the left foot to the wide V, they'll let the pedal come up as high as it'll go. Now this time you're going to bring your arms up, palms facing up. You're going to bring them overhead, exhale and open.

So it's really the ease centric movement. When the legs come up and the arms go down, that I want you to really focus on and enjoy bringing the pedal up as high as you can and just feel again that pelvis opening and expanding. Feel the size, reaching out to the side. Exhale and two more exhale. And last one down with the legs.

Now hold this position with the legs. Bring the arms down and if you can smooth really small movements. I want you to just lift your right foot off the pedal. Exhale, bring it down, left leg, exhale. So what I'm trying to do here is help you feel that deep fold increase in your hips as you deepen that hip flection. Again, this is a beautiful preparation for any sort of squat position or modifies what position that you may be using during labor and during birth. So just getting that hit mobility that you need.

One more time with the left leg up and down. Let's go onto the toes in this wide position. This semi wants your hands in front of you, in between your thighs, correct your postural position here, and we're going to press down. Arms come up in front of you and inhale. So once you feel like you're bringing, you're pressing your arms back towards your body and you're bringing your body up a little bit higher and you can see how I go a little slower. As I pushed the pedal up, uh, control the pedal up and inhale, exhale. And I'm feeling a nice gentle stretch in my adductors as well.

Exhale and inhale. Exhale, feeling that Nice postural control, this feeling, that rhythm, that full body awareness where I feel most challenged, where I feel most controlled in my body. Bring it in. Let's go two more XL and inhale last one and hold that lifting up a little bit higher, bringing the bar up a little bit higher, feeling that opening through your pelvis, through your thighs, and you can rest. Now we're going to transition into our single leg work. So really this is quite subjective, so it's kinda going to be up to you, but you can go down one or even two increments depending on how you're going to feel doing the single leg work. So on this balanced body equipment, I'm on three, three. I'm actually going to work down on a one one, which feels good for me. Some days I can go a little bit heavier if I'm going to go on that one one.

So again, go down one or even two increments in weight. You want to go ahead and just get rid of one of your hand weights there. Then I want you to sit sideways on your one two chair and you're gonna go on the heel. So here you're in this beautifully beautiful kind of open position. This side sitting position, you have external rotation of your thigh where your heel is up on the bar.

And I just want you to feel really nice and balanced and just sit on top of the chair. So what we're gonna do here is as you go press down and up into your leg, we're gonna do it five times and we're going to add some body and arm movement to it as well. So just holding here, go ahead and just place the weight actually in front of you and just make sure it doesn't roll off your chair. We'll do five with just no body movement. Just focusing on exp, extending the leg down. So exhale and inhale, draw it up. So once you think more like a hip opener, so as you draw that leg up, I want you to feel the external rotation happening in your hip. So you're increasing that opening if you will, an XL, she should feel at Dechter, a little hamstring, a little hip rotation, and two more keeping equal weight on those sitz bones. Last one. And now you're going to add some arm movements. You're going to go over exhale.

And when you bring the pedal up, you're going to inhale. You're going to bring that elbow to your hip and exhale and inhale, bring the elbow to the hips. We're increasing some lateral flection here. Exhale and inhale. Last two, exhale and inhale. Last one. Exhale. And inhale, bring it all the way in.

I want you to go ahead and turn around to do the other side. So the first reps are going to be without any movement of the torso on the heel. The heel should be slightly in front of your body and Xcel push down and draw it up. So increasing that rotation as you bring the pedal up, trying to really feel you're getting that femur settling down into your hip as you draw up. And two more and up. Last one, reach the weight into the left hand and go over and inhale and keep the movement controlled. And then he'll draw the elbow to the hip. Exhale.

Inhale, elbow to the head. Two more feelings that pure lateral flection marrying the upper and lower body. Exhale and bring it in. So I know we're doing a little bit of flip flopping here, but I want you to now come to the other side once again and go up onto your toe. Now for the toe, we're not going to do any movement without the body.

We're just going to keep the upper body. You're going to do what I call stirring the pot with your arm. So you're gonna have a little bit of rotation with your torso. As you push your leg down, you're going to rotate. Bend the elbow in and bring it out.

So little coordination XL rotate and out staring a big pot of something, Chile and bring it in. So just letting that beautiful spiral happen, but you're keeping your hips fairly square and you're still feeling that work through that leg. Let's do three more XL and we're getting the benefit of that extra shoulder work as well, and XL and in one more time and exhale and Gerard, and let's go ahead and turn around and do the other side so we can join that awareness into keeping the control of your movement and the flow of your movement, but still keeping the movement initiating from the right area. So exhale and bring it across and stirring the pot. Bring it across. So just let your shoulders rotate around on that spiral as your rib cage just turns around that spine and app.

Exhale, feeling nice and tall and lifted. Exhale, feel like you're rising up out of your body, that you're creating more space for that little one growing inside your body and rotate. Let's go. Two more exhale, okay. Around one more time and exhale and bring it in at all the way. Why don't you to turn facing forward again, just gently placed that weight down on the floor or next to you on the chair.

And I want to do really quick cab exercise here. So you're going to keep the same lightweight. I want you to push the pedal down so that we your size or level or parallel with the ground. Walk yourself forward if you need to so that you're sitting right on the edge of the chair. You're going to go into some prancing here. So you're just going to switch the feet back and forth.

Ah, so we still have the hard wheat here, but, and I don't really want that. I want you to just more to mobilize those feet as you just pranced back and forth. Now notice how my pedal is staying steady so I'm not moving the pedal up and down. I'm just allowing the feet to mobilize and articulate and find that rhythm. Three more sets, three and to and one and just nice and simple and that's all I want you to do.

So moving onto really kind of gentle little abdominal series. Go ahead and just take your weights and place them to the side. I'd like you to go down to one spring kind of light to medium ways. So nothing really too hard, and I love this exercise. I call pike to plea aid. So I want you to start in a small v position. This is kind of a version of our standing pike, so taking your breath in, you're going to exhale. Just a nice, gentle pike until your hands are on the pedal.

You're going to push down just a little bit. You can't go too far. You're going to drop your hips and come into a squat. Boom. So your back comes up and you come into a squat. Then you push your heels down, reach your bottom out, so you're in this flat back position. Then you curl your pelvis underneath, you extend your legs and you come back to your pike. So you'd go down, exhale, inhale to the squat. Exhale, push the hips out and roll through the inhale here.

Exhale, push the pedal down a little bit. Inhale, squat. Exhale. Push the hips out and inhale, roll two more. Exhale. Open the pelvis, extend the spine up in health or that control x, reach the hips out and inhale. Now you can do the same thing, but you're going to do it in a wide B position. You're not going to go as low because I want you to keep your heels down. So exhale. Inhale into the squat. Exhale, bring the hips back and inhale, curl x. A little bit of a pipe, just curbing and slightly, not too much abdominal contraction. And Inhale, hips down, body up.

Exhale. Bring the hips up here on the diagonal and inhale two more down. And inhale x, subbing the hips up. And inhale one more time, and now, and inhale, and x. So you're gonna hold here, you're gonna do your pelvic curls. Exhale, come into your rounded position in hell. Extended out. Exhale, just two of these because then we're going to take the hips to the right.

We're going to exhale around and inhale, reach the is. That feels a little funny. So you're going to attack the pelvis underneath you and then reach it back. So we are getting a little stretch and mobilization through the pelvis, through the inner thighs and reach. So what I'm doing is I'm tucking my pell. This is, I come through the center and then I'm reaching my right hip back on the right diagonal here. It's basically stick the beauty way out. Get that nice extension, bring it under, and then stick it out. Isn't that elegant?

Queuing and bring it under and then reach it far away. Exhale. So you're gonna get a little bit of more of a bleak work and reach to more exhale. Feel that freedom, fill that awareness, that stretch, that lengthening you. Get through your pelvic floor, through your inner thighs. This is your last one. Reach. Come back to center, extend the legs. And I want you to walk your feet back into your small v.

One more time. In the small people edition, we're going to go down, you're going to reach up, you're going to give me just a little bit of arm movement here. You're gonna push the pedal down XL one and you're saying, oh my goodness, she's balancing and she's pregnant. Yes, it's a challenge. But I move arms are moving just very slightly and I'm actually using the bar, the pedal for a lot of support here. Ah, I just want you to feel the legs. I want you to feel that you can balance in a squat position.

I want you to feel that you can have control. Hmm. Hold this position. Take your hands down and carefully get yourself down into a position where you feel comfortable. Now here you can continue with the same weight where you can drop it a little bit. My suggestion would be to work on a light spring, so I'm going to go down one spring on one, but if you feel like you need a little bit more weight, please work a little bit higher. Whichever feels best for you.

Why don't you to extend your legs and I want you to do continue with that movement. Push Down, press down, and all you're doing here is filling that elevation through the body. You're going to lift the spine higher and higher as you push the arms down. Last one here. Now, the reason you might've wanted to choose the lightweight so you can do single lung, put your hand behind your head and exhale. Don't expect the pedal to go as far, which is totally fine. Just get that nice single arm work.

Now as you do your single arm and your arm is in the center, your hand is in the center. Don't be tempted to shift your weight over to the opposite side. Keep your weight equal through the most sitz bones and reach. So we're getting some nice lat and tricep work member. The hand goes right in the center. That beautiful, calm through the body.

Yeah, and dad filling that. Lift that elevation. Three more that nice coke and traction through your torso. Just feeling proud and strong here. One more time. Now I want you to come a little bit closer and under grip on the pedal. This is a very small movement.

You're going to bring your elbows back towards your hips, so kind of like you're doing a row, like a low row, but it's really small. What I like about it, it just works the lots a little bit differently. You can feel the scapula naturally gliding, very a small toward the spine than away from the spine. I just want you to feel that peace and that calm even in those subtle little movements. Yeah, and last one [inaudible] holding there. Now here you're going to break your feet up.

You're going to slide back just a little bit. Now you're gonna open your legs as wide as you can [inaudible] and you're going to reach forward. So this is what I call my spider back extension. So I'm in this wonderful open position here and I'm going to lift up into my back extension as I push the pedal down. So we continue with this theme of shoulder extension and lifting the back up so you get this beautiful back extension that's very pregnancy friendly. And then reaching forward, this is kind of like a version of swan on the floor.

Why don't we call it spider on the floor? So reach up and our extra benefit here is that wonderful opening through the hips and the pelvis, which I'm focusing so much on in this series of prenatal work. Okay. And up. You get that nice strengthening through your back extensors and reach up. Inhale and xls. Go for two more here and inhale.

Just feel that expansion of your chest. Feel that work just trickles down from your upper body all the way down to your lower body. It feels wonderful and hold it, hold it there. Reach the pelvis further behind you. Reach energy out through the crown of the head. Fill the awareness of your triceps through your last, through your back, through your pelvis. Feel how your knees are up high toward the ceiling and great, well your self up and now you're going to sit facing side. I'd like you to place your forearm onto the pedal here with one hand behind your head. So we're going to do a little bit of lateral flection here.

I'm still on my light spring. I'm on my lightest springs that I have, so my forearm is down into the pedal, meaning the elbow is going to be intact, so is the heel of the hand. I'm going to push it down to the side as far as I can go. And then lift myself up with an inhale. So this is our lateral flection here in this one to chair class. We're getting that nice contraction on this right side.

It intensifies it when you engage the lats with it as well, it really intensifies that lateral flection and lift up. Let's go for three more XL and inhale them. Plus you're getting the benefit of that great stretch in that right side and opens up your rib cage, allowing you more space for breathing and for comfort to not feel like everything's jammed up into your rib cage. Especially if you're in your third trimester. That's such a nice feeling to relieve.

Then you're going to add a rotation to it. So you're going to rotate and come into a slight pike. I'm not going very far ladies. It's just very, very subtle. So just bringing up and over with my upper body. Ah, okay.

And bring it back. So I'm rotating and then going into the pike. Yeah. And bring it back in you two more here please. And Xcel. Wow. And bring it back and one more time, exhale and bring it all the way back and holds and wants you to turn around so you're gonna face the other way.

And we'll do the same thing lateral flection, setting yourself up for on the Bar Elbow and heal the hand connected and pull that left rib cage down and lift up. Adjust yourself to where you need to and pull the left rib cage down. Just feeling that contraction. Really imagine that those oblique muscles, particularly along with the muscles on the left side of the spine, are going to literally pool the spine and the rib cage down in that direction. Keep that right hip really intact and heavy down to your mat as you go into that lateral flection. Again, making the movements small but so powerful in its effectiveness.

And we'll go into the rotation and you rotate. You pull the pedal down into a small pike. Now being aware that you need to keep your shoulders controlled. Tier two. So as you pull the peddle up, you don't want to take the pedals so high that it makes you shrug your shoulders in an unnecessary way. You want to keep them nice and level and enjoy that east center control.

As you lift the pedal. Two more just feeling the rhythm, feeling where you feel the contraction, where you feel the movement last one and bring it up. Now here we lease it. I actually want you to take the pedal all the way down very gently and now you're going to sit. So you're facing away from the chair. Place the heel, the hands into the lowered pedal, and simply walk your hips for a little bit and simply draw your scapula together as you lift your sternum and then relax. And actually what I'm doing is I'm thinking of externally rotating my shoulders as I lifted my sternum up, creating a little bit of an arc through my back.

Feel like you're sitting outside and you're just basking in the sun, lifting yourself face up toward the sun and then relax. So you're getting that extra back extension work. You're getting that stretch through the shoulders, the opening, opening, and lifting the top of the rib cage away from the belly. And a safe way to feel like you have a little more space to breathe. Now here, making sure your legs see nice and tight. We're going to bridge up with our hips through simply going to lift our hips up as we go into the stretch and then sit back down three times and lived up.

Then the stretch should the quads opening up those hip flexors and bring it back down slowly. One more time. And lifting up, pushing up, pushing up, feeling that extension and slowly bring it down. So that's our little sitting series who should be willing and I say open and feel that nice arm connection. So we're gonna go into annealing series. You don't need to move your chair, but I'm going to go ahead and move it. So we're gonna move into a kneeling series. I went ahead and moved to the chair around here, but you definitely don't have to, but you may want to move your mat around so that you have a little bit more space. And cushion here. So I'd like you to load up your share a nice, you know, light to medium weight.

It's really just going to depend on what your preferences. That's just how the chair works here. So I'm on this balance body, I'm on a zero two and I kind of enjoy that resistance. So what I would like you to do is come into a quadrupedal position, but you're going to take your left arm off and you're going to place your entire forearm on the pedal. So your elbow to the heel of the hand are going to be connected. So here in this position I want, we are, we're just going to isolate by doing the arm first.

So make sure the shoulders over the wrist, you're going to push the pedal down. Now the elbow will come off as you push the pedal down, which is fine, but your hand of course remains on. Then inhale, slowly bring it up. So going to get a little pictorial work, little tricep work. You may even feel a little bicep can work here as well, which is fine. Xcel, little external rotation of the shoulders. Well in hell up just fi, the these two more exhale. Then we're going to add some movement to it. So just nice and short little sequence here.

Yeah, so I want you to Tuck your toes so that they come forward. And what's you're going to do is you're going to hinge back as your elbow is up. So I really want you to open your pelvis here. As you draw the arm down, you're going to hinge forward and come into a posterior tilt, kind of like a cat stretch. So exhale. Inhale, articulate the pelvis out toward the neutral hinge back so your bottom comes down towards your heels and bring the pedal up. Then exhale drawed underneath you as you come forward.

It's a really lovely little addition to this simple exercise, challenging for coordination. Of course. Ah, that was three. Let's go ahead and do three more. Inhale and exhale, but it just is beautiful marriage of upper body and torso work. And then here we're adding the mobilization of the hips and the pelvis, which is just really lovely. Exhale one more times, a total of six and exhale. So I want you to bring the pedal up. And then just to finish it, just for kicks, we're going to do a single arm push up, but you're going to keep your support on your left hand here on the pedal and just bend your right elbow. Inhale, exhale that I keep that right scapula under control. And then when you go down, I just caught myself trying not to arch your back too much. Try to keep yourself as one solid neutral piece and you lower down toward that diagonal and up just six of these three more and up.

Just some fun ways to add some extra arm work into your one, a chair repertoire and all the way up. So let's go ahead and turn around to do the other side. So we start very simple, which is five of the arms. Then we add the cat stretch, then we do the pushup. So making sure all your ducks are in a row here, your alignment is correct.

Pressing energy down to the heel of the hand and push. Exhale and ring it up. So this is our full body work with our arm work. Okay. And as we draw that full awareness into how our body can coordinate the movement, trying to coordinate it seamlessly, but naturally bring your toes forward, hindering yourself back, feeling that stretch and that opening of the pelvis. It feels so good.

It feels so great. And then the energy and pelvic floor abdominal wall, as you push the pedal down, come into the pike. Then inhale, articulate and reach it back. Fill the stretch. So we're getting this beautiful balance of stretch and contraction, which is so good for healthy musculature. And again, just hinting forward and back. Just filling those bones. Glide and move with ease and reach back and exhale. So again, another movement they can really incorporate into your laboring, this kind of hindering forward and back. Very cat-like, very instinctive kind of primal. Last one. Yeah.

And enjoy that last hinge and then come back to the neutral. You can release your toes underneath you. And we finished with the pushup. Inhale XL single arm pushup. So now you can walk around saying, yeah, I do single arm pushups when I'm pregnant. And inhale. Exhale. Again, try not to dip your pelvis, which is really tough. I feel that challenge on my own body and inhale and push.

Beautiful tricep work. Last one and hold it reaching and to release. And that is our little kneeling series. We're gonna finish the class in a standing stretch. Very simple. I want you to come.

Either way that the chair is facing is going to be good for you. I'm just going to keep the chair this way. I want you to place one foot right in the middle of the chair and kind of slide that other foot back. Now I'm going to open my leg a little bit to accommodate for my eight and a half months belly here. Now push the heel down behind you. And again, we can't emphasize just enjoying as much hip flexor stretching as we can. So here I'm just balancing by keeping my fingertips on top of the chair and I'm really pushing energy down into that back hill and feeling that hip, open that chest open and just breathing here.

Feel that calm, kind of wash over you with that breath. Now with control. So to hinge the body back and flex the foot in front of you, keeping your hands on the chair and flex stuff, but you can even grab the foot if you wanted to. Um, come into a nice hamstring stretch and try to square off those hips as much as you can. Align the spine, reaching energy out through the crown of the head and the sacrum simultaneously. Just feeling the whole posterior chain open up from the glutes all the way through the calves. Enjoying that breath, slowly release. We're just gonna do one time.

If each stretch and carefully switch your legs, bring your other leg up onto the chair, pressing the pelvis forward, anchoring that back heel down into the floor so you can try to get a little extra calves stretch there, and then just fill that femur of the latest ups that really nice and deep, tucked into the depths of your pelvis and pull the pubic symphysis forward. Lift the chest and just fill the front of that hip. Just open, expand, stretch, just gradually and naturally. As you breathe that fresh oxygen into those muscles as they start to just stretch for you an open fill your chest, nice and lifted. Feel proud, full aware of where you feel it. Where do you feel the stretch in the body? Where do you feel the heat, the warmth. Then slowly start to extend that front leg.

Reach the hips back, flex that foot, square the hips off again. You can grab the toes if you want to or you can keep your hand down and just gently pull your chest forward as you feel that nice deep stretch, keeping your other hand on the chair for balance, being aware of one side felt tighter than the other and just feel that stretch happen so you're being good to your body. Healthy body, strong body, healthy minds slowly come up and just come forward for me, sitting on top of the chair just whenever it feels natural and good for you. Hands on your thighs or hands down by your sides and I want you to take a moment to close your eyes. And again, I tried to talk a little bit about just the importance of drawing awareness in and then wants to do two things for me. As we end, I want to take just a few seconds. They want you to think of several sensations that you notice in body right now. Thinking of nothing else.

For me, I feel I'm a little vibration through my thighs and through my pelvis, but a heaviness through my shoulders [inaudible] and now as you draw that awareness into your body, I want you to think about the awareness of your surroundings and think of what you hear that isn't related to your body. Don't put any emotion with anything, just what your, what your awareness is and that can be hard to do. I heard a train, I hear waves. What do you hear that surrounds you? Just pure and simple.

Awareness is so vital and so important to the process of being pregnant to the process of giving birth and just trying to bring in that information and let it go. Not Holding on any serious emotion with it, but just letting it be present in the body. And really when we move while we do is with that awareness, what sensations we have. We really train ourselves for that. Not that emotions are wrong, but sometimes we're in the grunt of something very difficult. We just need to be aware except those sensations, acknowledge them, and then continue on. So thank you so much for joining me on this really fun little one to chair class that you can do if you happen to be pregnant. Thank you so much.

Comments

1 person likes this.
As usually your classes are wonderful. Excellent work, I loved it!
Thank you so much, Arlette! I really love this class
I love all your classes since you pay so much attention to the spine. I love how the arch and curls make my body feel, and I am not even pregnant I also teach prenatal yoga and pilates to mammas, so your my inspiration. Very grateful, thank you.
I'm not prenatal but took it anyways since it has been so long to have taken a new class from you. Great ideas. Back opening felt very good. I'll use this when I want something more gentle.
Please come back with level 2/3 classes too (apparatus). I've been doing all your Cadillac classes over and over.
Praveena - yes, the arch and curls feel so nice!

Pele - I'll be back up to PA next month, in addition to post-natal Pilates classes, I hope to do a non pre and post natal related class as well
Love this video - one of the best I've seen so far for a good workout for both my prenatal and non-preggers clients to enjoy together =) It was such a relief to find such a variety of moves that can be challenging but safe for my prenatal ladies! Thanks for posting!
You and this class are so FANTASTIC. I love the spider on the floor and the awareness at the end. You look fabulous at 8.5 months---I haven't looked that way at the end of a pregnancy since baby 1. I am only 8.5 weeks along and due to ridiculous home improvements that I have been rushing to do and getting hit hard with "morning" sickness, I haven't been practicing pilates for over a month and it's been making me MAD to miss this beautiful movement. I have had your classes all cued up in a playlist and suffice to say, I AM FEELING SO GREAT after that class. THANK YOU SO MUCH!!!! I will be doing this one a lot. Thank you!!!!!!
It's a beautiful workout it flows seamlessly. It was wonderful to do not pregnant but I can't wait to incorporate into my pre-natal classes. You looked phenomenonal at 8.5 months. I hope your birth was great and now you're surely working on a chase after 2 year old routine!
Thank you Shannon and Emily! I am so happy that you feel great after this class, I love when Wunda Chair sessions leave you feeling mobilized, gooey (yes, it's a technical Pilates term and free - such a treat!!
muy linda la clase, voy aplicar estos ejercicios en mis clases de embarazadas, fue un aporte muy valioso, gracias!!!
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