Playful Foundational Mat

Hi. I'm Lesa Logan, and I'm excited to teach this foundational Pilates mat class with you. I think it's important to really understand some of the basics, but also explore where we're gonna go in our pilates practice. So not all these exercises are gonna be easy, Hopefully, they are possible, and my goal is to help you have options to use in other classes you might take. When in doubt, you can leave it out and replace it with anything that we've already done. That was a challenge for you, or something that you already know.

That's gonna help you create the endurance and stamina for other classes. It's also brave and courageous. You can put that, pat yourself on the back. We're gonna get started sitting down on the mat. Place your feet and knees together if you can.

If you have any reason why that doesn't work, you can always add a ball or a pillow here, and you're gonna grab the backs of your legs for a half roll back. I like to take my feet and energetically push them down and pull them back. That helps get the hamstrings and glutes on. And it's gonna help these hip flexors from overworking. Okay? So with your hands here, you'll roll back till your lower back touches the mat, and then you'll roll back up. Now if it's too easy, you would just take your arms forward. And you can do it without the help of your arms. Right?

Joe Pilates gave us tons of exercise in the system, but all the exercises fall into five different spine shapes. And you'll notice the beginning of the mat work, Joe gave us a lot of flexion. So this half rollback is helping us find our center in the front and a flex spine. So when we go on to our stomach later, we have the strength of working in its gravity. Let's do one more. Hold it back here.

Take your forms to the mat. Now elbow slip. I love it as a good replacement exercise for other exercise you can't do yet, but it doesn't mean it's easy. It's gonna be difficult. You'll take one hand and you'll slip it forward to touch your thigh. You'll pull it back.

You'll take the other hand. And do the same thing. The goal is to not lean. So we don't wanna lean. Right? You gotta stay in the center. So if you are finding yourself in that leaning category, it's okay.

Keep going, you'll get stronger, the more you try. You can even if you're like, oh my gosh, Leslie, even as I just take my arm forward, everything falls apart, you can think about it. Just think about taking the right arm forward, and then left arm forward. And then if you want more, you can always do both arms forward. And one more, and then grab those legs and roll on up.

Alright. We're gonna roll all the way down. So the 100 is a fabulous breathing exercise. It's definitely meant to challenge your connections. And I like when you're new to it to either have your knees bent with your feet down, energetically pulling back, or your legs will go straight out on the mat. Alright. So you'll squeeze those legs together. Straight on the mat is the next progression, but if it pulls on your back, I want you to do bent knees.

So you'll take your legs, squeeze them together, whether on the mat or a bent, lift your head and chest up, and pump your arms vigorously as you breathe in, and out. Now if you start to feel this in your neck, it probably means we're using the neck to curl up. So just place your head down and keep pumping. Take a deep breath in, and then on the exhale, try to curl up, but from the stomach It actually feel nice and loose. And while we do 10 cycles of breathing, it's absolutely okay to just lower the head for a couple breaths, and then curl it back up.

As long as you're breathing for 10 cycles of breathing, you're gonna get that stamina and strength eventually. And while you're thinking about the pumps for this last cycle of breathing, let's think about the legs. Can they squeeze together more? And then go ahead and lower yourself down. Bring your knees into your chest to kinda roll yourself up to sitting.

So this tree exercise, I kinda borrowed it from the reformer, but I like it to help us prepare for a roll up. So you'll take your leg and you'll hold on to the back of it. You'll sit up nice and tall. And then you'll give me whatever version of straight you can. So if your leg gets to here, that's okay. You're holding on tight. This is helping you activate your upper back muscles. And then we're stretching this leg, the hamstring while we activate it. Now, why I like to do this here is because the rollup can be a difficult exercise.

It's considered beginner, but I think it's so advanced. So I love to do this to kinda help it, like, introduce the roll up. So you'll walk up to your ankle, pull your head to your knee, and you'll roll back. Then you get to use the strong leg you have to walk down, and then you'll walk up the leg pushing the leg into your hands that helps pull your chest up. Fun little cheat, right? And then walk down, and use the leg to help you lower yourself down, and then push your leg into your hands, pull your hands onto your leg to roll back up.

And then one more time. And roll up. If you're like, Leslie, have to throw myself up, that's okay. You have to use your abs for that too. You know, we gotta all start somewhere. We have to be kind to ourselves. Grab the other leg straighten and bend.

You know, the more you focus on what you can do, the more possible all the exercises become. So after you lengthen and bend the other leg three times, you're gonna walk up to that ankle. And then pull your head to your knee and roll yourself down, and then walk down. And we all have a different side. So my my left side is not my well, it's not my right side.

So I tend to kind of fall a little bit. There's a moment in there where I the gravity wants to pull me, so I have to use my arms more on my leg to help control the descent. Cause Pilyes was called Contrology back in the day, so we're just all here trying to control what we can and walk back up, and then stay up. Okay. So bend your knees. You can grab your ankles, or if that's not an option for you, you can grab your thighs.

You wanna squeeze those heels together. The toes and knees are slightly apart. And then it's easy to have our shoulders and our ears. So let's just roll them onto our back. Now I want you wherever your hands are.

You're gonna push your legs into your hands. So if you're holding onto your shins, you're gonna push them forward. Almost like they're trying to get out of your hands. Right? And that's gonna make you pull on your legs from your upper back. So it's really important that we have our upper back working and our legs working.

You should feel like at any moment, you could just, like, explode out of this position. Right? And you can just hold this. This could be you, or you can go back to that half rollback from the beginning. If you want a little bit more, use your breath, inhale back, exhale up. And if you get up to the top and you kinda lost and you fell right back, that's okay. Use the next one to get back up, lift your hips to sealing.

So if you can see your ceiling with your eyes, that's a little bit of a cheat. You wanna look at your stomach, roll back, look at your stomach to come up, inhale back, exhale up. Use the breath, inhale back. Exhale up. One more time. Awesome. Okay. We're going to take our right leg into our chest and roll ourself down.

And then take your left leg and just take it out towards ideally the level of your eyes, but when you're newer, you might wanna go higher, you might even wanna go to the ceiling. It's gonna depend on your back. Okay? We're gonna take this leg, and we're gonna pull on it two times. One, two, then you're gonna switch, grab the other leg one two. Again, if you start to feel this in your neck, take your head down, take your legs a little higher. Pull on this leg one two switch, pull pull. You can also grab behind the leg instead of the shin, so you're avoiding anything going with the knee, pull pull, pull pull. And if you can use your arms, eventually they'll help you lift your head and chest up, so you don't feel this in your neck. Pull pull. Let's do two more times each side.

The single leg stretch is a great exercise for stretching your hips and getting your arms connected to your back, bring those knees into the chest, lower it down. I like to look right and left, kinda like shake it out. So we're gonna go into double leg stretch, and this by far is like the exercise. Like, if you if there's one exercise in pilates, this is the one. So we wanna get this one well. Right? We wanna get in our bodies. So I'm gonna have you leave your knees into your chest. One hand on each shin. Not gonna move the legs right away.

What I want you to do is use your arms to curl your head and chest up, so you should feel nice and loose on the neck, and just take your arms up to the ceiling and back by your ears. Then circle them around, grab your shins. Pull them in. And again, inhale take your arms up and behind you, exhale circle it around. Let's do one more. Reach it back and circle it around rest.

If that was enough for you, if you felt like Every time your arms went back, you would, like, lose your chest. I want you to stick with that. If you can add on more, we're gonna add a little bit more. We're gonna have our arms here holding onto our shins. We're gonna inhale. Let go of the shins.

Arms will come down like they did for the 100. Lakes will go out to the high diagonal. Heals together toes apart. And then exhale pull it in. Inhale reach it out.

Exhale pull it in. One more. Awesome. If you wanna stick with that, you can. If you felt like your back pulled off the mat, take your legs a little higher. Now, we're going to put it together, lift the head and chest up because this is the exercise. We want to get it, right? When he'll arms go back, legs go out, exhale circle around.

Now if I was there and I could put my fingertips behind your shoulders. We don't get to rest on me, ready. Reach your arms and legs away. Your chest would still be up off the mat, exhale circle it around. Use those arms to even lift your chest up a little bit.

Reach for the ceiling to lift your chest up and circle it around. One more time. Reach and rest. Okay. Look right and left. That can be intense. Even when you do it more, like the more you do it, the harder it gets, but more possible.

It's weird how pilates works like that. Let's take the legs up to the sky. And then straight legs, grab as high as you can. So, of course, we're trying to get to the ankle, but if you have tighter hamstrings, and that looks more like the calf or the thigh that's fine, it's not the knee. So grab anywhere above or below the knee, and then take the other leg and lower it down only as low as you still feel your stomach. So I like to take my leg to the ceiling, and then just start to lower it, lower it, lower it, lower it, and when you feel like it's hanging off of you, that's too low. So if you'll find that spot, and then you give me two pulls on that leg from your upper back and switch.

So the pulls are helping you lift your chest up, and you have that moment in the middle where you have to hold yourself there. And if we only do three on each side, that's fine because we're gonna bend our knees and rest our head. Look both ways. And now place the feet on the mat with bent knees. We're gonna take our hands, interlace them. Place them behind your head, and bring your right knee into your chest.

Leave your left foot on the mat pushing down. Almost like you could do a bridge here. Like, you could lift your hips, but we'll keep the hips down. Lift the head and chest up, and I want you to push your head into your hands and push your hands into your head. So you get a nice support for your neck, elbows nice and wide, twist toward your gerbette knee. So you pull this knee in as much as you can from your stomach and push down with the other leg.

And then set the foot down, bring the other knee in, and twist. And again, if you need to rest in between, that's fine. The goal is to stay curled up. So just know that eventually you'll wanna try to keep yourself up, even if it's just for one to each side and then rest. So by taking one knee and have other foot down, it helps us keep our hips stable. It allows us to twist without rocking to each side.

And when you're even, bring your knees into your chest, rock and roll up to sitting. Spine stretch forward. So ideally, this is leg straight. If you have tight hamstrings, it might be a little bit bent. One thing I like to do is dig my heels down and kinda squeeze your seat.

Just a little bit. When you're sitting on it, it shouldn't tuck back behind you. It should just help you get out of this tight hip flexor. Right? Take your hands between your legs, and then sit up nice and tall, inhale here exhale round forward, reach your hands along the mat, and pulse one, two, three. Lift it back up. So we're going for a stretch of the back. It's called spine stretch forward, as opposed to the leg.

So try to dig those heels down and focus on how much can you pull your stomach back to stretch your back versus how far your hands can go forward past your feet. Let's do that one more time. Reach. So we'll have to do three, maybe five of each exercise because they layer on themselves. Right? So you can leave your legs like that. I'm also gonna give you the option of bringing your feet together for a version of the saw.

I like this version because it helps us get more of our glutes on. So you're gonna push those feet together, and that's gonna help you get your feet on. Also gets us out of these hip flexors. Then you're gonna take your hands behind your head and push your head into your hands, hands into your head. Again, we want that upper back working the whole time. Then we're gonna twist to the right, just like we did in the crisscross, and we're gonna bend bottom elbow towards your feet, top elbow towards the ceiling, twist, and then roll up in the twist and take yourself to the other side. If hands behind the head here kinda bothers your shoulders, you can take your hands on your shoulders like this, so your elbows are still bent.

Right? Eventually, we're gonna take our arms to straight. They're gonna reach out wide to the side, but we're gonna build our shapes here. So I mentioned that there's five spine shapes. We've done tall, we've done flexion, and we've done the twist. We'll get one more spine shape in this workout today.

The side bend one is the hardest ones. We have gotta build ourselves up to it. Last time each side. Hopefully, you're feeling a nice stretch through your lower back. It's where a lot of us need it.

Okay. We did all of that so we can work against gravity. So we're gonna do a swan prep. I really, like, I hate the word prep because I think sometimes we're like, I gotta get to the big one. If you can do the swan prep well, You can do any swan. Okay? Most of us will do the swan prep a little incorrectly, until we build up our strengths. You're gonna take your hands and layer them one on top of the other, and then you're gonna take your forehead onto those hands.

Now you're gonna take your legs and this is gonna feel really weird, but you're gonna pigeon toe your femurs, like you're internally rotate your femurs. So a lot of people like, what does that mean? It means your toes are probably pointing towards each other versus apart. Then I want you to take your tailbone and reach it towards your heels. So you're gonna feel like you're tucking, but you can't because the mat's there. So don't worry.

And then we have to relax our shoulders. Let them come out of our ears. Okay. Already, this should feel like work. You should feel like your legs are working, your hamstrings are working against gravity. Now we're gonna try to reach our tailbone towards the mat more as we lift the hands head and chest up, and then lower it down.

And by up, I mean like a hover. So if you lifted your hands head and chest and you felt your lower back pushed down, Right? And your tailbone stick up, we kinda lost the goal. So reach the tailbone away. And remember, you can even think about doing this. Reach the tailbone away and think about lifting your hands head and chest or reach them across the room and actually get like a little inch or two hover.

And lower back down. And again, lift and lower. It is so small. Anyone walking by you is gonna be like, what are they doing? And inside, you're working really hard, and you can feel it one last time. Alright. Bend your knees.

When shield wiper your legs, it's a nice little, like, way to reduce any work you might have done over in your back, and then come up onto your forearms. Now if this position doesn't work for you, you can go back to being on those hands. We're gonna use the forms. I love the single eight kick to teach some foundations because you can use your forms to actually put you in extension. Alright. So it's easy to hang out the beach, but we're not gonna do that.

We're going to push into our forearms and pull our chest forward. And then I want you to lift the front of your hip points up. So you got those bones here from your pelvis. We all have them. We're gonna pull them up. So we're not gonna let them hang down. Right? The difference would be you feel like your lower back's hanging like a hammock, or it's lifting away from the mat.

So you do that, and you can just hold it. This might be where you are. This is a lot of work, or you kick one foot toward you two times. Set it down other like two kicks. And kick kick and kick kick.

One more time each side. It's all we need to get a nice little stretch of those thighs. And then we're gonna flip onto our back and do a little bridging to continue to stretch the front of our thighs. So your knees are bent, feet are parallel. Arms are down by your side. Push the feet down and energetically pull them back.

Sometimes they're a little too close to the seat. So just double check that your heels aren't touching your seat or your fingertips are a little further away. When they would be like in a yoga class, then pushing down all four corners of your feet, roll the hips up, and roll the hips down. Now I want you to pay attention to what you do with your feet when you roll your hips up. It's important. As you roll your hips up, do you push more into your heels, or do you feel your big toe, pinky toe, inner heel, outer heel working, and roll the hips up.

Roll them down. Roll them up. Do you feel the hips higher than your lower back, or do you feel like your lower back's higher than your hips? You wanna get those hips higher than your lower back and roll it down. Just one more. And roll it down. Eventually, that's gonna build on itself to a thigh stretch, into a leg kick. So you wanna get into all four corners of those feet. Now, we're gonna lie on your right side, and we're gonna bend our knees. So I like this version of sidekicks when you're building your foundations because it's easy to sidekick from the quads, but let's develop strength in our hips.

So you'll bend your knees in line with your hips, your feet are in line with your knees. You're gonna take your top leg, lift it up. And you're gonna lower it down. I know it looks simple, but your feet, a foot, and knee have to stay the same level. So it's like you're lifting up a tray, and you're putting it down. We're gonna do five of these. Again, with that foot, in line with the knee. Hopefully, I'm doing a good job, a good example.

And we're gonna hold the leg up on the one, and then you're gonna take your knee and draw circles. Like, you're drawing circles all across the room. So it's not coming from the foot. It's coming from the front of the knee. So it's the whole thigh is circling, and then we reverse it.

And you're starting to feel a little something around here. I am. And then bring the feet together, and you're gonna take the top leg and you'll leave the foot on the the the foot together, but the knee's gonna come up. It's a little clam. So we're working that external rotation. We'll need it for where we're going.

One more. And then we get to do on the other side. And it won't actually feel any easier on the other side. In fact, it probably will feel harder because believe it or not, the bottom leg is doing some work. That's the thing I love about Pilates is that the bottom leg is actually working to help top leg, do what it's wanting to do. So lift that top leg up, knee in line with foot, lower it down, and lift, and lower, and lift, woo, let's do our one, hold it there, and draw circles.

Remember when you're like, I wanted to do more than three. Well, we did five, and maybe we're regretting it, and reverse. Those little reps, they add up. And then after your circles both directions, feet together, and top knee opens and closes. Okay. I've got two more fun things to do together.

We're layering things on. So remember that rolling like a ball? Well, Joe Pilates gave us a teaser exercise, and I don't teaser to go well for us today. I'm only introducing it to you so you know where it's coming up, and you know you have options. So you're gonna go back to that rolling like a ball position, and then remember our double leg stretch. It's kinda like that.

So you're gonna roll back and you're gonna come up, reach your arms and legs forward, and then bend it in. Okay. Roll back and just try to reach across the room and bend it in and roll back and reach across the room, bend it in. And if you're like, and everything falls apart, it's okay. I promise you there's muscle strength in it falling apart. We're not here to be perfect. We're here to be in practice. One more time. Now if it's safe for you to You're gonna roll up to standing.

If it's not, you're just gonna come up to standing. So if you rock back, plant your feet, and come up. Alright. We're gonna come to the top of our mat. Here, he'll see other toes apart, take your arms up, and then hold them by your ears and round forward.

Alright. We're gonna walk out into a plank. So this will help stretch those hamstrings. Work on our balance, work on our feet, and we get to plank, you can put your knees down. Okay? And then you're gonna take yourself back into a plank, head in, walk your hands back. Arms by the ears, roll it up.

Again, roll it down, arms by the ears, and then walk it out, try to look at your legs, come out into a plank. Hold a plank if you need to put your knees down. Head in, walk it back. If you have to bend your knees to walk it back, you bend your knees to walk it back. Alright. Last one, arms by the ears.

We're getting ready for the roll ups in our future practice. Just by standing there and rolling down and rolling up everything. Adds up. Hold it. Place your knees down or leave them up. We're gonna do one push up, one elbow bend, bend your elbows back. Lift them up, head in, walk it back, and pat yourself on the back.

You did it. Look, the mat work is actually quite hard. So I just wanna, like, acknowledge that It is one of the most accessible things we have in Polai's because you just need room on the floor. You actually don't need a lot of props. You just need your body, but if you're new to flexing, extending, sitting tall, using your whole body to do these movements, you have to be kind to yourself and be a beginner. And be curious. And what I suggest doing is just writing down which exercises felt impossible, and which ones felt really good, because the ones that felt really good, that's where your body is naturally strong, and they will help with the ones that felt impossible.

The ones that felt impossible, they will become more possible in time. It just becomes just requires a practice and consistency. So come back, try it again. Thank you so much, and have an amazing day.