Elephant

Let's take a look at the elephant, a lovely exercise with lots of variations. Regardless of which variation you're doing, the choreography or the intent of the exercise remains the same. It is a beautiful exercise about stability of the upper body while mobilizing just the lower body specifically the legs at the hip joint. So for this exercise, again, I'm on the middle foot bar, position here But whatever foot bar position you would be on for that is comfortable for you is where you you need to be. You don't wanna be too low and you don't wanna be too high. And then one good spring would be my recommendation. So a heavier spring, a green spring here in on this equipment, would give you the most support, and that would make this exercise a little easier.

A red spring would give you less support and a blue spring very little support. So my recommendation would be a green spring when you begin. Perhaps even a red and a blue, which would be one and a half springs until you're sure you understand the exercise, and you're confident in maybe lightening the spring, which makes it harder here. When you step up on the reformer, take care and be sure that you put your hands on first, your feet up, and then you'll walk back to flat feet. So it requires a fair bit of flexibility through the lower body in order to achieve this position.

The first exercise I'm going to show or version is with a flat back. So when I make my back flat, I'm looking for a straight line through my arms all the way up through my tailbone with my ribs tucked in and my abdominals engaged. Try lifting your toes up a little bit, but feeling your metatarsals really grounded, as well as your heels. Keeping your body completely still, we slide the carriage back a little. We slide the carriage in.

Now one could go further back, but I'm interested in the body staying very still. Ideally, the legs are straight. But if one needs to bend their knees to achieve this, that would be okay too. Also, the speed here is gonna depend on your comfort. Right? So as I get a little bit more confident, I might move a little faster. Now another option, a more classical version is to round the back here.

So I'm pulling up through the center of my back, but being sure that my shoulders are still where they belong, not up by my ears, maintaining that round back, we can do the same exercise at whatever pace happens to suit you. Noticing that my body stays completely still, and the movement here is at my hip joints. K? Now straightening out the back would be my preference for doing any single leg version or arabesque. I would recommend when you're gonna go into single legs to move your arms just a little bit over to surround the leg that you're standing on.

So if I'm going to lift my left leg, my left arm came in just a little bit. Ideally, we wanna sustain that same straight back position as you take your leg back to an arabesque. So the first option for an arabesque or an option for an arabesque would be to have the pelvis square and only lift the leg as high as you can keep the pelvis square. And then we could move the leg out and in there, meaning the leg that's on the reformer still would move the spring. Another option that people do oftentimes is to maybe go into external rotation and see how high you can lift the leg while stacking the pelvis. Try to avoid rotating your entire body instead, keeping your shoulders square to your standing leg as you then move the carriage.

Out and in. Carefully take your leg down back where it came from, and let's just do a couple on the other side here. So I've moved my hands just a little bit. Take the leg first in parallel alignment, square, pelvis. So try to keep your pelvis from lifting. In help, perhaps go back, exhale, pull in, moving just the standing leg body stays completely still.

And then I might turn my leg out stack my pelvis keep my shoulders square, lifting the leg as high as I can as I go in, and I go out. And then carefully come back standing on two feet. And that was the elephant.