Tutorial #1952

Double Leg Kick

5 min - Tutorial
70 likes

Description

In this tutorial, Jennifer Golden Zumann breaks down one of her favorite exercises - Double Leg Kick. She goes over common corrections for this movement, and she explains how it is good to develop extension. She then brings the exercise up to speed by flowing through a few repetitions because the pace is part of the work.
What You'll Need: Mat

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(Pace N/A)
Dec 07, 2014
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Transcript

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Hello. My name is Jennifer Golden Zuman and I today am going to break down one of the traditional Pele's exercises from return to life. I'm going to focus on the double leg kick exercise. This is one of my favorites. I think it's a wonderful exercise to develop extension and to develop our ability to lift up from the ground.

So the first step that I want to think about in this exercise, and I'm going to have Amy here to help me out with the demonstration, is to think about the hips in the sockets so we can get a nice sturdy base through the pelvis. The first thing that it's nice to do is just to allow the head of the fire bone to fall towards the floor. Just let gravity take that. When that happens, it helps to release some of the tension you might be holding inside the pelvis. I also want to see that there's some space between the tailbone and the pubic bone. Yeah, like the top and bottom of the pelvis has adequate space as well. That's going to give us a sense that it narrows towards the spine.

Good. Now another piece, and if you look at the pictures of Joseph [inaudible], he's doing the exercises. You can see that the points of contact that really are on the ground is the pelvis, but then also the front ribs. So it's important that the front ribs are open and connected to the floor. So they become a fulcrum for the upper body to lift up from, okay, the starting position here, she's going to bring her hands behind her back. Hold one hand with the other, actually hold the fingers of one hand with the other and let the elbows drop towards the floor. This is a nice moment to stretch the shoulders out. So the first time I teach this to people, I always teach it rather than doing a triple or double kick to do a single kick and find some connection here.

So the first challenge is can we bend the knees without the hips popping up? If the hip flexors are tight, then the effort to bend the knees is also going to flex the hips. Can you demonstrate that? Right? And we don't want to do that. So you can only bend the knees as far as you can keep that pelvis anchored. But don't tuck the pelvis to do it because that inhibits the organic force transmission that happens through the back body.

So she's going to bend the legs in. Now it's gonna fire up those hamstrings. The hip extensors are working to open the hip flexors at this moment. I like to pretend that the heels have connected to the hands. See that imaginary cord heals to hands.

So as these heels pull back, it pulls the arms with it and the head looks forward. And now Joe, his instructions, Mr Pilati says the chest is thrust forward and the head is thrown back. Some extreme words like that. Let's come down right now. Now obviously we don't want to shorten the back of the neck, but consider a big part of our survival as humans is our ability to look up to see what's above us that we can eat or that could eat us. And as a baby, what are those first things we developed is that ability to lift our head and neck. So don't fear, don't fear neck extension.

Just make sure you're not bringing the skull to the, to the shoulder blades or anything like that. So let's try that again. I'm going to have her exhale in this position. So she's going to exhale as the legs come in, all the air, the lateral sleeves of the body to squeezing the air out than the very active filling the lungs pulls the chest forward and the arms back. The spine is going in that away. The arms are fired up this way and if these guys are not on fire, they're not working hard enough so we come back. Good arrest down for a moment. Let's talk about the arms too for just a moment here.

It's tempting to flip those elbows inside out. A lot of us when we get there kind of do that. Then the shoulders end up turning forward so as they go back, it's important that we keep them to where I can still see the elbows and I don't all of a sudden see the inner elbows. Amy Shoulders don't do that anyway. We don't really have to worry about that, but at this point we can bring the shoulder blades towards each other and then deepen the valley and imagine sort of a fish hook and get pulled. Four words forward, forwards more than upwards.

All right. I think that that gives us a lot of good information here. So let's go ahead and take it in rhythm because pace is part of the work. So she is going to do three exhalations with those legs by the time that third exhalation is done, she's created a vacuum in the lungs and she will burst open into this bound open chest stretch ready and we go one, two, three and we burst open forwards more than upwards and come down to look the other way. The hands must come up off the bottom. Good. And last one, I'm going to give her one more thing to think about and that is what is making contact with the floor? What is pressing down to let you come up? I don't want it to be the soft stuff.

I want it to be the hard stuff. So we're going to think about our lateral slings. So without her coming up with her legs, cause she'll kick me. I'm going to just put my hands at her sides to create a little bit of a brace here for a moment. Now take your inhale and then take your exhale and feel yourself draw away from my arms and don't push into them. If you start to squeeze too hard, it will push out. Now on your next inhale, she's going to slide her hands back within the confines that I've given her here. So she might not come up as high as he checked that out.

She's not coming up as high because she was allowing the pressure to be too great in the abdomen. Yeah. And so hopefully that feels a little more cinched. We're going to do it two more times with rhythm, with the lateral slings also in play. All right, and here we go. One, two, three and four. Gorgeous chest out and one to three. Fire up those legs. Yes, way up there.

Last one and re sure. And control the return back down. And that was absolutely gorgeous. I think that looks great. Thank you so much, Amy, and I hope that shed some light and gives you some extra excitement when you're practicing your double leg kick at home. [inaudible].

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Comments

1 person likes this.
Thanks for all the wonderful detail. Had not thought about the lateral sling.
1 person likes this.
Very helpful, in so many ways. "Don't fear neck extension"!
Erica V
1 person likes this.
Great!!!
Eat or Be Eaten, nice explaination, haha!
Thanks so much.
1 person likes this.
Love! Thank you!
1 person likes this.
Jen, you were wonderful... peace and love to you dear! (PDX style!)
1 person likes this.
Jennifer, love it and love your energy and cuing!!
Cynthia G
Wow.  Thanks.  Am inspired to do this exercise again. 
just wanted to say this was one of the most inspiring explanation of the "the Double Leg Kick". Thank you !!

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