Hundred

Let's take a look at the 100. The 100 is a traditional breathing exercise that includes 10 inhale breaths and 10 exhale breaths totaling 100 breaths. So on the reformer, it's done with your hands in the straps, and the spring tension can be anywhere from lights to light would be like one red. Heavy would be two reds or you could go into the middle and use one red and one blue. It's an abdominal exercise that requires a lot of trunk stabilization and also because the arms will be pumping.

It requires some focus on shoulder stabilization as well. Let's see it. So coming on to the reformer, reaching the hands into the straps, bringing the arms above the shoulder so you have tension on the straps as you're preparing. The legs come into a tabletop position and we'll begin with an inhale to prepare. On the exhale breath, the initial exhale breath, we come up into our 100 position.

We then inhale. And we begin our count exhaling for five. And inhaling for five. And as we continue to inhale and exhale for five, you want the feeling of reaching forward with the arms to achieve two goals. Number one, to stabilize the shoulders and number two, to try to hold the carriage fairly still.

The arms are doing like a flattering action. And the breathing is into three, four, five, out to two, three, four, five. Once you've completed your 10 breath cycles, you can bring the knees in on the final exhale, lift the arms, and bring the body back. And at the end, I'm I still have the same amount of tension that I started with. So that I'm still engaged in my upper back and shoulders and then I can place my feet down and return the carriage all the way in.

Important in this exercise is that people have enough abdominal strength to get high enough in the curl position so they're not creating a lot of neck tension. And then once again, the focus on the abdominals and the focus on the shoulder stabilizers of a 100.