Mastering Four-Point Flows

Hi. I'm Maria, and today I wanna share with you some tips for your client's wrists and also for their feet. Let's look first at traditional knee stretch. When your clients place their hands onto the foot bar, we want to keep the wrist as straight as possible. Thumbs with fingers ideally, wrap the hands around, and then use your hands vigorously, trying to minimize the amount of bend there is on that wrist. With the feet in this shape, you want to curl the toes under and feel a connection of the heel back towards the shoulder block Now that heel may or may not even touch.

The trickier part happens when we begin to lift the knees up. So take a look at my feet, my ankle, my ankle is not that flexible. If I were to stay right here and try the lift up. I feel like I can't because I can't transfer weight just onto my tippy toes. So I'm gonna make a tiny adjustment. I'm gonna bring my feet a little bit forward and now when I lift up, My heels are gonna lower.

And now I can actually transfer weight to the ball of my foot. Very important that you feel grounded in the feet. Let's take those same ideas and talk about up stretch. Same concept here. As we come up into the start position, we wanna try to have that wrist as straight as possible. We don't wanna be falling onto the wrist we wanna be using the hands to push our hip back and I'm vigorously using my entire hand on the bar. I'm not on my wrist.

I'm using my hand to create length in the spine. Same thing here with the placement of the feet. My weight is on my entire ball of my foot. Oftentimes clients come back too far And again, I I'm not able to transfer the weight onto my tiptoes. That's not even what I want.

You wanna be firmly planted through the ball of the foot. Then they can sandwich that carriage in tight. Let's move on and talk about these same concepts in plank and side plank. So these are untraditional setups. I'm gonna take the foot bar down And I'm gonna set up how most of you probably set up with the box in an extra short position.

There's many, many, many different approaches, of course, to planks and forearm planks, I'm gonna talk about the forearm plank. It's my preference with a forearm plank to set up with the entire hand set up on that box. And then I'm gonna vigorously push through my whole hand and my forearm into the box. So the more I press down, the more there's gonna be a reaction up versus just being on my elbows. So I'm gonna place my hands.

And now when I place my feet, first off, I need to make sure that I feel grounded. Right? So this also involves footwear. Are they barefoot? Do they have a sock? Is the sock slippery? What you don't want is them to feel like they aren't held in place with their foot. So you it might require you bringing their feet to the edge. And now also look at my heel placement I don't want the heel up.

Personal choice because I feel when the heel is up, it transfers even more weight into the upper body. So I like to keep a neutral ankle. So here is how I would place the plank. I have equal weight on my forearms and my feet versus here. And now That really gets compounded when we come to side plank.

Clients really, really have trouble with side plank to be successful in a side plank, you must be able to stand on your feet. So When I set up side plank, I will set up the feet further apart. I keep the forearms where they were to begin. I transfer one forearm right under my nose, and then we're gonna pivot the feet we're gonna place the feet down. So I'm really standing on the inside and the outside edge of my feet.

That enables me to get the lower side body engaged. What we see clients do is kind of twist, keep their feet, feeling uncomfortable, and then all of the weight ends up in the shoulder. The feet have to be planted. And then of course, it could be two feet. It could be one foot.

Whatever works for your client is fine. Just really look for that feeling of being grounded through the feet. And grounded through the upper body or the wrist.