Class #2733

Rolling Mat

20 min - Class
127 likes

Description

Get ready to roll in this fun Mat workout with Benjamin Degenhardt! In this class, he offers ways to acquaint yourself with the tools needed to make the Crab work for you. He includes many different variations like Rolling Around the Clock and more!
What You'll Need: Mat

About This Video

Oct 30, 2016
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Transcript

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Hi everybody. My name is Benjamin. I'm here with penny and Nancy for a crab inspired workout crab and exercise. We don't see a lot in modern teaching, um, because it awkwardly seems to load some weight into our head and that doesn't seem to sit right with a lot of people. I will try to show you with this little workout that there's ways to acquaint yourself with what it takes to be able to do the crab well. And it's actually really super fun exercise.

So there's a standalone tutorial on the exercise as well. We're going to take it in a little sequence here that focuses on getting the skills you're gonna need to make your crab work well for you. Take your arms out in front of you for standing warmup. Uh, we're gonna focus on one component of the crab, which is really about crossing your legs and making sure that your knees and hips and ankles are okay. With that. We're just going to lower ourselves to the mat, crossing the right foot behind the left and try to sit yourself down behind your feet for just a moment without collapsing backwards. And then the same way you went down, you come back up, lifting your body forward and up, preferably without using your hands, but you might have to use them. All right, we'll try the other side.

Left foot behind the right. Sit down behind both feet. Hold yourself from falling backwards and then lift yourself back up the same way you went down. We'll try it one more time each way. And again, you might find that this is not available to you. In that case, maybe crowd is not an exercise to work towards just yet, right? There's plenty of others, thankfully. You know, lift yourself all the way back up from here and now starting to link that into um, our traditional math sequence. Take your arms out in front of you. Start the same way. Cross your right foot behind the left. Sit down behind both feet and then roll yourself into your a hundred position.

Reaching your legs out in front of you, stretching your arms out in front of you, using your center to wind up some energy. Lift yourself back up. Cross the right foot behind the left. Come all the way back up to standing. Do the other side. Left foot behind the right. Sit down behind both feet. Stretch the limbs out of your center. Pause and breathe. Wind up some energy. Lift yourself up. Left foot behind the right.

Come all the way back up to standing. Let's do one more each way or right behind the left. Roll yourself into position. Pump your arms 50 times reading into three, four, five. Exhale, two, three, four, five in with the air, pressing the legs together, Oud with the air, stretching the legs long out of your body. Inhaling and exhaling. Quick pumps. Deep slow breath. Exhale. It's one more breath here. Inhale. Remember it was the right for that cross behind the left.

Pick yourself up. Come all the way back up to standing and then we have a second set. I'm afraid. Bring your left foot behind the ride. Lower yourself down. Stretch your limbs out of your center and pump again. Breathing in. This is our warmup, getting our juices flowing, getting our breath going as well. Working on postural strength, looking forward, even lengthened curve in our backs. Exhale, two more breaths. Inhale, pump the arms a little high. Then you want to XR.

Press your legs into one another. Deep breath in and relax all the way down. Yeah, let it go completely. The legs come down. The head comes down. Oh, that is over. Bend your knees into your chest. Give yourself a squeeze in the hug. Roll yourself up into a seated position, and then from there, place your feet underneath your strap.

We're going to do a little bit of rolling up through, articulate the spine a little more strongly and to see how our back feels in that position. Take your arms out long in front of you. Try to create an enormous lift through your spine or without sinking onto your legs. Reach up and forward over your legs. Take a big stretch. Try to get your wrist past your big toes, lifting your stomach away from your thighs, and then connect with the strap as you roll yourself down onto your mat. We're just going to do a couple of here. Stretch your arms over your head and go again. Inhale, lift the arms up and forward. Exhale, stretch deeper than the first time.

Inhale, come back down, reach your arms over your head, and I go three times fast. Inhale, lift. Exhale, round over the legs. Keep the strap taught as much as you can. Arms overhead. You're in your last to lifting up. Take a big stretch. You Roll yourself down. Push through the heels. This will be your last one. As you take your stretch forward over your legs, lose the strap.

Just flip it over your feet. Reflex your feet. Once you're free, roll yourself all the way down. Reach your arms over your head and pause. Point your toes away from you. Press your legs into one another. We'll take a transition into rolling like a ball and make it its own exercise. Float your arms up and forward. Lift your head, neck, and shoulders. Pick up your legs and bend your knees up into your chest at the top.

So the way that we get into the exercise becomes its own movement. Now keep your heels close with your seat. Try to lift out of your back so you're not collapsing into the round shape and then slowly roll yourself all the way down. Stretching your arms and legs forward to counterweight your spine. Arms. Reach back through that again. Float yourself up.

You visit your teaser here, you visit your a hundred again, you visit your stomach massage, you roll yourself back down, stretching your limbs forward away from the center. Reach arms over your head. Let's do one more slow like that. Arms up and forward. Chin over chest. Draw your knees and tightly with control. Roll back down. Get ready to do this three times fast. Arms overhead, XLF, back up. It's like your double leg stretch, except that you come up to seated in between.

Arms overhead. Two more times lifted up. Squeeze it tight. Inhale, come down, arm switching back last time. Inhale up, bend your knees into your chest and pause. Now that you've done all the hard work, have some roll onto your shoulders and lift yourself back up. This definitely is going to happen later in crab as well, right? So get comfortable with being on your shoulders with your hips. Suspending up towards the ceiling as well. Keep a strong lock of your feet, pushing towards the hands and your ants pulling back on your legs.

Try a couple more rolling back. Then if the sub high, suspend and lift back up. One more time. Roll yourself back. Lift yourself up now stay. Take your feet onto the mat as close to your seat as you can. Park your hands behind you on the mat and push yourself onto your feet so that your hips lift up off the mat ever so slightly and you don't even have to come forward or that much. Try to keep your feet flat. Instead, just letting your hips lift up for a second because we're going to need that uplift later in our crab. Sit your hips back down. Grab your shins. Roll yourself back into your shoulders and try that again. Land your feet, land your hands, and push yourself from your hands onto your feet. Very good.

Let's do that again. Sit down, roll back. We'll lift yourself back up. Catch your balance. Hold one more time. Sit down, roll back. Lift yourself up into your little squat shaped stay. Can you take one on forward from here? It's totally okay if the answer is no. Take that hand down. Try the other side. Reach the other arm forward.

Try to keep in evenly against the ground. Take that hand back down. Bend your knees, Grab Ahold of your Shins, roll yourself unto your back. One more time. We'll try that once more. Second time will be better. I promise. Lift yourself up or at least I hope so. Bring one. I'm forward here. Take it back down. Are there side that I'm thinking about as much?

See I told Ya, bringing the hand down. Take your right arm out. One more time. Stay. Can you take your left side out in front of you as well? All the adjustments that you need to make. Make them now lift through the chest and then transition into rolling like a ball. Just two more times. Hold your shins, roll to your shoulders, lift back up without the squad and then do it one more time. Rolling back. Lift yourself up. Now you don't want to stop squatting anymore, right?

I totally understand that. And Zoom one more time. No, squad. Hold yourself at the top and then from here released to your back, stretch you arms and legs forward, melt your spine onto the mat, reach your arms over your head and just give yourself a moment of rest, a lot of work, a lot of excitement, right that you have is rock from side to side a little bit here to release your back. Next up we're going into a very historical exercise. It's also quite hysterical actually. It's called around the clock. It combines our double x stretch with a little bit of rolling like a ball into a movement that takes us around the Cypress on an imaginary clock. We're just going to go about halfway and then make our way back. All right, we want to be in about the middle of our map.

Make sure that your hips are right in the center because there's only so much space we have to move around. Otherwise, bend your knees into your chest. Let's just outline the movement before we take it around the world. Bend your knees in, lift your head, neck and shoulders up. Use your arms strongly against your legs like you did in that rolling like a ball exercise. Now stretch your legs down in our press, your palms into your thighs rather than overhead. On the exhale, bend your knees in and give yourself a slight little rock back and forth three times without turning yet three, two, one. Bring your hips down and sends your legs out. Do that again.

Just two more times. XL three, two, one. One more time. Little hips down the legs out. Bend your knees in. Give it a squeeze and hug. Rock back and forth and then release for a second. Release your head down. Release your legs out long. So that is the basic movement. Feel free to stay with that, right? We want, we are going to try now.

So take this movement around on a diagonal, then perpendicular to the mat, diagonal, and then straight backwards, 180 degrees. Then we pause and we laugh and then we do the whole thing to the other side. Yes. Game. Bend your knees into your chest, lift your head and controllers up. Let's do it. Stretch your legs out long in front of you as you bend the knees in rock three times on a diagonal from your mat, your legs out long and low, pressing to your thighs. Exhale, turn to perpendicular. Your three o'clock.

The hips down, lakes out. Exhale. Bend your knees in rock two three. Find the low diagonal here. Exhale, bend your knees in. You're now all the way facing the back of your mat. Switch or one more time. Rock for three, four, two, four, one release from here. Release your head down.

Find the middle of your mat and we'll take a moment here. Shake out your legs. We reset the brain. We'll do it one more time. Going the other way. All right, that was great. Bend your knees into your chest. Get ready. Lift your head and controllers up. Give yourself a squeeze in her. Reach your legs, down and out. Exhale, bend in. Rock towards your left. Two, three. Find the diagonal past the corner of your mat. Rock in two, three and now. Perpendicular be wise with where you put your hips. Are Hot, easy to fall, easy to get into each other's way. Two, three, two, one. You're now straight back again. Rock once more, three and two, lift yourself up to seed it on your last rock and then be done with that. All right.

All of those will serve as later when we need to use the pole of our hands to make sure that we stay centered, right. Good way to wake up the size of the body to now into something more familiar. Open your legs as wide as your mat for the legs, your feet. Place your hands down right in between your inner thighs. Press your fingertips down to lift the spine.

I will take three spine stretches with the exhale. Slide your fingers out between the feed, round your spine evenly. Head to tail. Dig Your heels into the ground to lift your back up towards the ceiling. Inhale, come back up. We'll do that two more times. Think of this as a warm up before you open leg rocker. Chin over. Chest.

You rolled down visiting a shape that we will be in and that exercise. Inhale, lift yourself back up, round yourself down one more time, and then we'll transition into our open lake rocker. Lift the spine up, lift your arms, point your toes, roll halfway back, pick up the legs, hold on tight, and then go right back and forth. We've now rolled back and forth quite a bit, right with all those previous exercises with the long leavers of your legs and arms, give yourself more suspension in both directions, both on your shoulders and both in your balance as well. Take one more here, rolling back, lifting up, and then we'll play. Roll yourself back one more time as you return. Cross one foot your right leg over the other. Roll over your feet onto your knees and come to a kneeling position and crossing your feet. Stretch your arms out in front of you. Amazing.

Hold it there for a second. Keep pushing your hands forward and charge the arms forward. We'll take a thigh stretch and you're just for fun, right? Creating a nice little sequence here because why not lift yourself up in front of you? Stay Cross. You're right for back over your left, behind you. Sit down behind both feet. Lift your legs, grab them, roll back again.

We'll do the other side. Left. Override. Rock yourself onto your knees. Stretch your arms out long in front of you. UNCROSS knights. Take your side stretch here, right clear transfer as to what's going to happen later in our crab left override. Go right back down. We'll do that two more times. Roll back lifted up. Now try to turn that into one motion. You lift yourself up onto your knees and back. You sit. Hold for a breath.

Lift yourself up. Right over left. Sit down behind your feet. Grab your legs, roll back one more time. Nice. It looks like you're having fun and I have over ride Rockies up onto your knees. One more thigh stretch because we want the front of our body to open you as well. From here, Cross your left over. Your right. We're not going to roll back here. Just sit on down. Bring your legs out long in front of you.

Find the strap for your feet because we are going to neck pole, right? Just like in our boomerang class and in our control balance class, we want to make sure that our head and our shoulders are okay taking some of our load and some of our weight right. So the neck pole is a great way to get used to that. Take your hands behind your head. Remember the strap is there for you to use to press your feet outwardly and to pull your toes back. Let's go down right away. You push the elbows forward, rounding over your legs, press your head up into your hands, lift back up, and then take it onto your mat key. Kicking the heels out and forward.

Release your head. Open the chest. Come right back up. Take a big search over the leg. Sit up tall, going for a quicker pace. Now Roll yourself back down. Crab is a very dynamic exercise, so let's move a little quicker through these positions. We've visited a fully flex phone and so many exercises already, so hopefully the battery is ready for it. Lift up, exhale, come all the way back down. We'll just do one more. Lift yourself up. Take a big stretch. Over the lake. Sit up super top XL.

Roll yourself all the way down and release. Bring your arms down by your sides. Let your feet slide out of the strap. Bring your knees in towards your chest. Give them squeeze and hug for a second. Getting ready for a shoulder bridge. Now, just another way to get used to being on our shoulders here just to make sure our, he's still okay with that. Feed down on the Mat. Close to you. See, try to touch your heels. You might just get to touch. Deborah. If you really read your fingers out in front of you. See I knew it.

Lift your hips up. Stretch your knees up and forward. Open the chest. Know that this is very much the same shape when in our thighs stretch, right, so go for that same sensation, the stretch in your quadriceps, muscle, your knees without touching, pulling towards one another, your neck nice and long, and your breath while it's flowing, taken the eave. Inhale. Exhale. Start to melt your body down. Hips towards the heels. We'll just do that one more time. Press your heels down, lift your hips up, articulating up, stretching the knees forward. It's also a way to make sure that the way does end up in your shoulders.

Make you heels. Press down harder than your toes to fire up the back of your seat. Slowly roll yourself all the way down, down, down. Bend your knees into your chest. Give yourself a squeeze in the hug. Roll yourself right back up. Getting Ready. Now almost into our crab.

We just have one more exercise here. Bring your legs out long in front of you. I'm going to combine teaser with the crab position, right? It's a good place to maintain that lifting our spine and then see if we can get into that very complicated, crossed shape. All right, we start seated. Arms out in front of you. Give yourself a lift out of your seed, out of your waste, out of your lower back, and then begin to curl yourself back like you're transitioning into your open leg rocker. Again. Pick up your legs into your tees or shape and there's a stake.

How far can you lift yourself up? How round can you make your spine without having a sense of collapse. Keep the lift. Keep your eyes where they're now looking. Bend your knees, grab onto your feet and pull them apart without collapsing into your back. Take a full breath here. Then unfold your legs and arms back into your teaser. Take a moment there. Lower the legs down. Take a stretch forward over your legs.

Empty out your lungs. Very nice. Let's do that again. Lift yourself up. Curl the hips under. Pick up the legs. Take the other leg on top. This time. Hold on to the outsides of your feet. Actually, it's the insides of your feet. You pull them apart with both hands. Bring your knees closer to your shoulders to force your back into a deeper round, and then lift yourself back up, up, up. Lower the legs.

Take a big stretch forward over your legs. We'll do that one more time each way, right? So that's the position that we will begin our crab out of. Sit yourself back up. Earl yourself back. Find that lift. So if you can keep your knees almost on that same height as you, bend your knees, pull them apart and towards your shoulders. Exactly. Continue to lift yourself up and out of your waist. Unfold the legs from there. Lower the legs. Take a big stretch over your legs.

So that's a really good way to do teaser without thinking that it's a teaser. Lift yourself. I've one more time. Curl the hips under. Lift your legs up, other leg on top. Grab the inside of your feet, pull them apart. This already super hard and a great exercise in and of itself. Now release into your teaser shape. Lower the legs down. Take a big stretch forward over your legs, and then sit yourself up.

Relax your legs for a second and then do this for me. Just pack your own head. Seriously. Yes, this is about as much weight as you want on your head in the next exercise, right? It's not a headstand. It might become one later in the future. I don't know. For right now, this is the amount of weight you're going to feel right? Remind yourself of your neck pole and how you traction to your neck in that exercise. Essentially we're putting our head onto the mat, create a similar traction through the neck, which just looks very elaborate and kind of crazy, but it's super fun. Are you guys game? All right, let's do this. So from this position, cross your feet. Find that position.

You're just fat with your feet crass holding on. Let's do the right over the left and then pull your knees in towards your shoulders. Pull your feet apart. Feel how naturally your spine begins to round, right? I'm just going to do the first portion of crap. Roll onto your shoulders. Find your shoulder stance. So come the other way, Nancy. She can hardly wait and then come back up. Keeping the legs in exactly the same position. Let's try that a couple of times.

Suspend yourself onto your shoulders so it's just like rolling like a ball, except you're holding your feet in a funny way. One more time. Roll yourself to your shoulders. Let your sitz bones up and then come back to the top. Stay. Pull your knees apart to switch your legs over to the other side, so left on top of right, and then do it three times here. Roll to your shoulders, lift your bottoms up and find your balance. Again, see if you can maintain that lift you experienced in your teaser throughout the exercise. One more time, rolling back, lifting up, and then again, instead of just crossing your feet, try to pull your knees apart in order to switch. So now right back on chuck.

All right, now we're going to add that switch when we're on your shoulders, right? Step two, roll yourself onto your shoulders. Pull the knees apart to switch the legs. Lift into your bounds Pars. Go right back down. Switch the legs again, right is on top, and lift yourself into your balance. Two more times. Roll it back. Open calls. Lift yourself back up. One more time. Rolling back. Switch the legs. Pull yourself back up and pause. All right, we're going to take it a step further. Pull your heels really close, wise decision against your seed so that you can roll over your knees like we did in so many transitions before all the Unis roll yourself forward.

Land your head down and then angel lift your hips up super high. Your feet can either come up to your seat or they can stay down on the mat. Whatever your level of comfort is. Can you say your name loud and clear? All right, good, so they're not compressing into their next. All right, we'll go back again. See if you can roll onto your shoulders. Do the full movement. Now switch your legs, lift yourself back up quickly.

Pull your heels against your seat. Lift your hips up nice and high. Lift out of your back, traction the neck, and then go full flow. Two more times your own timing. Now switch, switch lifted up. Find your gentle traction through the neck as you lift the ribs up. Take one more. Rolling back, switch, switch. Lift yourself up.

Land your head down on the mat. Roll yourself back one more time. This time we not ending in a headstand. Come to standing. Lift yourself up, swing your arms out long in front of you and lift yourself all the way back up to standing that your arms come down by your side. You guys are amazing. That was it. That's our crap. There's a tutorial on the exercise where we break it down in a little more specifically. Um, hope you found more success in the exercise during these few exercises leading into it. Thank you guys so much. Awesome work.

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Comments

So happy that you taught The Commando exercise *happy smile*

This class was all I had time for in a busy busy studio day and it turned my mood around in no time.

I even managed the treacherous Neck Pull (my nemesis). Thank you xxx
1 person likes this.
Never fully understood this exercise. I now love it!!!
Myriam Kane
What a wonderful progression and unfolding (and refolding) of Crab, Benjamin! Big fun!!!
Hahahaha that was great!!
sandyjgrant
1 person likes this.
It is so fun to just watch your videos - they are so inspiring and I can't wait to actually get on to the mat and do them! Thank you for such clear teaching skills - it has given me more confidence to start teaching the more advanced exercises as well. The way you link and break everything down is so helpful
Absolutely stella. Fast and fun, wonderful combinations andre I surprised myself by actually managing to do the crab.
1 person likes this.
I adore Benjamins 20 min workouts! Give you a great new perspective on building up a routine with an end exercise that is challenging! More to come please!
What a great way to start a morning! You are an inspiration Benjamin, so thoughtful and precise in your cues-and your love of the work is infectious. Thank you
Fantastic energizing easy flow session! Loved it!
Love the tough transitions and pace. Thanks!! Only got to m daily workout now (9:35pm), but boy do I feel like I'm going to sleep well! Thank you.
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