Chest Lift on the Physioball

Transcript: Pilates Chest Lift Ball Exercise

Hi! I am Lesley Powell, the director of Movements Afoot, a pilates wellness studio in mid-Manhattan. This is Mandy Chan, one of my Pilates teachers at our studio. She will be demonstrating the chest lift ball exercise.

Abs During Chest Lift

We are going to use a 65 cm ball. We are going to do a great exercise: the chest lift and then with rotation. All Pilates exercises you want to get the abdominals to hollow in. If you are bulging the abdominal muscles out, you are not going work deeply. Learning to hollow is what brings the abdominal wall in. The goal with abdominals is to train them to improve your posture. Better posture is key to better looking torso.

Pilates Exercise Ball Chest Lift Set Up

To start, sit on the ball with your legs parallel. Use a mat if the floor is slippery. Inhale and feel the breath move down. Exhale and feel the breath rise up. Adding on, inhale and feel your lower ribs expand. Exhale and lift your pelvic floor and lower abs up your spine. Inhale with new wide lower ribs Exhale, lift and hollow the lower abs so much, the abs press the lower spine towards the ball. Slowly walk your feet forward as if they are on railroad tracks. Once the upper ribs are on the ball, release your spine backwards on the ball. Your hips should be relaxed. The fold of the hip in front should be soft. If you are hardening this femoral fold, you are taking important work away from your core workout.

Exercise Ball Chest Lift

Raise your arms towards the ceiling. Imagine that you holding a ball in front of you. Inhale and feel your ribs expand into the ball. Exhale and hollow the lower abs. Inhale again. Exhale and bow towards your knees. Inhale lower the spine. Adding on, exhale and bow forward. Inhale and rotate your upper body to the left. Feel how your left rib imprints more. Exhale and bow center Inhale and twist to the right Exhale and bow forward. Inhale and lay backwards

Chest Lift Tips

Remember the movement is initiated from the spine. Feel how the ribs roll on the ball. The arms should stay in the same relationship to your shoulders. Otherwise you are initiating through your shoulders and taking work away from the abs.

Avoid Moving Shoulders

See how Mandy is moving from her shoulders. This bad version takes the work away from your core.

Around the World Exercise

Now we are going to do ‘around the world.’ Inhale your ribs into the ball. Exhale and bow forward. Inhale and rotate to the left and the lie backwards. Exhale and rotate to the right and bow forwards. Inhale and rotate to the right and sequence to lie backwards. Exhale and rotate to the left and then bow forwards.

The lower body should remain still throughout this exercise. The action is the ribs pivoting on the ball using all of your abs muscles.

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My favorite way to get people to understand their pelvic floor muscles (PFM) is using the physioball.

Lateral shifts on physioball

• Have them sit on a physioball.
• Moving the lower spine in flexion and extension, drawing a line from the pubic bone to the tailbone.
• Now draw a line from both sitz bones.  This will cause a lateral shift.
• Draw a circle from the pubic bone along the rames  to the sitz bone to the tailbone and then the other side.  Make circles clockwise and counterclockwise.
• This get the client in touch with their pelvic floor bones.
• As if you pelvic floor bones were a circle, narrow to a smaller circle. Practice that a few times.
• Add with narrowing the pelvic floor bones, lifting the surface of the pelvic floor off of the ball.
• You also could use a chair or sitting on a chair.

A great image from Marika Molnar, Physical Therapist for New York City Ballet,

“Pick a raisin up with your PFM.”

Remember the squeezing of the gluteals will tuck the pelvis.  With the pelvic floor lifts, the spine is in neutral.  Eventually you can take the pelvis in posterior tilt through engaging the PFM.  Using the gluteals is using the superficial muscles to engage.

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Just yesterday at Movements Afoot, a client complained about not working her abs hard enough in a Pilates class.  Pilates is alway about the core and it coordination with the limbs.  Most clients are not working correctly.

Decades ago, I was the movement trainer at a high-end club.  Clients would come to me after their sessions for stretching or to help with an injury.  A man came to me about his back.

I had just observed him doing a hundred crunches.
His form was terrible with his cranking his head to perform the crunch,
bulging his belly out and activating his hip flexors.

I asked him to pull up his abdominals in standing to improve his posture.
He DiDn’t have a clue how!

As teachers, we all know how important training the transverse abdominals.  To get to them, they are never going to feel like the physicality of a bicep curl.

So what do we teachers do?

Keep teaching what we teach.  Make sure in the lesson you include something that requires more endurance like the hundred.
Keep emphazing

” Are your abs hollowing or bulging? “

” How’s your hip flexors?”

“Are you breathing?”

“Come a little higher in the hundred (or whatever you do)?

Kathy Grant at the PMA conference had us to a rollup that took about 5 minutes.  She would allow no momentum to get up.

So teachers in this hard times of recession and needing to keep clients.

Hold the poses a little longer.

Give a little burn at the same time make them aware of their form.

Send them home to practice.  Go to our podcasts to deepen their use of the transverse.

As Doris Pasteleur Hall says, “Abdominals comes in different flavors”

Give them a little of the flavor that they are used to and introduce the others.

I have been talking with some of my teachers who are also singers.  Amongst some singing teachers, pilates is not recommended.  A lot has to do with past training about locking the ribs down to solve the problem of hyperextended ribs.

The great change in Pilates and knowledge about the body is the importance of the movement of the diaphragm.  As in our past post, we talked about how the diaphragm moves 3 dimensionally within our torso in a healthy person.  There is a real inter-relationship between the diaphragm, the pelvic floor and the transverse abdominus.

Using sound is a great way to get in touch with the breath and discover the quality of your breathing.  Many systems like Yoga’s OM inspire the deep breathing necessary for core support and freedom of the spine.  Irmgard Bartenieff used our Western vowels, a,e,i, o, u, to get students conscious of their breath.

At the PMA conference this November, Kathy Grant had us do roll downs reciting our full names, addresesses with phone numbers and then whistling.  By having your clients speak as they move, will force them to breath.  You can not talk and not breath.

Using sound is a great way for students to become aware of their breath.  Deep breathing will create a sound with resonance.   Poor breathing makes the sound strained and coming from tension of mouth and throat.

When the breath is not moving 3 dimensionally, you will see sometimes the client moving the spine with breath. Usually the pattern is they hyperextend the ribs on the inhale and compress the ribs down on the exhale.

One of my favorite images of breath is from the Franklin Method.  See the breath spiral down to the pelvic floor on the inhale and spiral up on the exhale.  Think of the breath going up and down like a spiral staircase or spiral straw.

The cue in dance and Pilates, that closes the ribs, does not connect us to our deep core muscles.  In many ways, that cue creates more problems in the organization of the spine and shoulders especially in standing.  Finding full breath in all positions; supine, prone, quadriped, sitting and standing, will enhance how you use your core muscles.

One of the biggest mistakes is not taking time out of your busy teaching schedule for your practice.  I never consider the time teaching and demonstrating as my practice or a workout.  One is not focused on one’s self.  Demonstrating is usually one sided and missing the necessary warm-up and repetition to develop good muscular strength and flexibility.

I try to put aside time everyday for some kind of practice.  Practice does not always mean a heavy duty workout.  It is about getting in touch with my own bodymind connection.  Since I have my own studio,  I have the great fortune to take classes with my teachers.  Even taking a basic level class helps me stay connected.  A basic level class keeps the foundations in your body alive.

It is important that we as teachers stay fresh.  I once had a renter who taught the same class with the same music for three years straight.  It was deadly to take and the class never grew.  For instance, in teaching for BBU,  I go over the material for the workshop with a physical practice before teaching the weekend workshop.  Even though I know the material, I want to reawaken the sensations of each exercise.

Taking with other teachers is also a way to stay fresh.  It is inspiring to see how other teachers organize a session and how they cue different clients. Sometimes your studies can be in other practices such as yoga, somatics or even taking a tango or art class.  It is also about training your eye, your sensations and observing how a teacher works with other clients.

Each time I do my practice, I aliven my mind/body with new sensations, images and possible ways to organize a session.  Sometimes I have a problem to solve in my own body or an issue in an upcoming class or session.  This leads me into finding a different organization of possible exercises/movements to do to solve a problem.  Sometimes I create a theme such as the pelvic floor and how it works during a pilates mat class.  Creating themes is also a way to keep your clients interested in their workout.  To workout mindlessly, real change cannot happen.

So set time aside to take care of yourself!

“I have a training question for you. I have a client that has come to me with SI Joint problem. She is seeing a doctor who wants her to get an injection to diagnose it and at this point doesn’t know of any underlying cause for it.

I want to know what movements and exercises will be best for her. Should I work to strengthen the muscles around the SI joint? Also she is a fitness instructor who is pretty flexible & mobile in her joints. Is there anything I can do to bring some sort of stability to her ligaments/joints etc?” BBU Student

I have SI Dysfunction. I primarily got it from my dancing. Especially dancers and gymnasts are prone to this because of movements of extreme range such as splits, arabesques and attitudes can stretch the ligaments of the sacrum.

Lumbopelvic stability is essential and relieving for this condition. I have to work on this all the time. Pre-Pilates, BBU movement principles and/or Bartenieff Fundamentals(tm) are great to address this.

1. Pelvic clock. Observe in 6-12 how both sides of the pelvis/sacrum is sequencing evenly on the floor. Sometimes the pelvis is rotated. The pelvic clock can educate your preferences of movement of the pelvis. Put attention to the sides not grounding as well.
2. Pelvic floor, transverse abdominal & multifidus training
   Thigh lift/toe taps/marching Look how they lift their legs. Many people are not gliding the thigh bone in the hip socket well. This will give the appearance of hip hiking or tightening around the femoral fold.
3. Foam roll training is great for this.
   It also addresses the stability of the legs.  Other ideas on foam rolls
4. Bridging- getting the legs to do the work. Observe if the hips rise at the same time.
   neutral bridging-pelvic shift forward
   pelvic shift lateral-typewriter, figure 8’s, bridging with thigh lift
5. Sometimes mobility exercises such as full short spine are not great for my sacrum.
6. Observe how they do foot work and standing. Is their weight on the outside of the foot. Training of the medial lines of the legs are also helpful.

When I think back three years ago… I can’t believe all the things I couldn’t do.
My joints were congested and so was my mind. I had no space in my body for movement and freedon, thus no space in my mind for positive thoughts and emotional well-being. My movement practice at Movements Afoot has given me space…has decongested me. I move with freedom. Confidence has filled my new space in my mind. Of course there are always times of emotional set backs, but I know staying with my Pilates practice will ground me, and keep me loving my body at any size.

I love the new Jenny Craig add. Queen Latifah, the current spokes person, emphasizes herself as being a size healthy. That losing up to 5-10% of your body weight and increasing your movement activities decreases your chance of Type 2 diabetes and other life threatening illnesses.

Even prior to my 80-100 pound weight gain I always had a negative tape playing in my head. I knew I had to finally stop the negative dialogue in my mind if only for a little while to start positive changes in my life.

I realized that moving from the inside out was giving me the chance to get to know myself. I never knew what that meant. I never knew that you could really be nice to yourself and really be your own friend…but you can.
• It is so liberating to quiet that negative voice
• to focus on my tailbone
• to actually narrow across my hip bones,
• to feel my back widen from my breath
• to feel my strong hand scapula connection as I open the reformer carriage in control front
• to finally be able to press myself up from the reformer for control back
• to execute long back stretch and twist
• to lift my leg up high while feeling my femur bone roll in the socket and keeping my hips level
• to be able to do a hand stand and a walkover again.

That is the way I have been getting to know myself. My true self. The self that I wake up with and go to sleep with, the self that is with me all the time. A self that is a size healthy and always getting healthier as healthy as I can be.

I have been teaching a class, PilatesDancing, for the past year. It has been amazing how many changes are happening in my students. I combined Pilates, Laban/Bartenieff and the Franklin Method to create this class.

The structure of the class consists:

1. Foot training includes releasing tension, strengthening the foot and the mechanics of the foot in movement. We bring the new foot connections back to standing. As the foot become better connected and grounded, alignment and core tone changes.
2. Pilates mat and floor barre includes strengthening the core three dimensionally in a dynamic movement routines on the floor. This includes challenges of balance and level changes which demand more core than doing exercises on your back.
3. A standing warm up, we use a block to challenge balance and understand the importance of the standing/working leg. I also bring into principles from my training from the Franklin method and Amy Matthews, a BodyMind Centering practioner, about rhythms of bones in the leg to enhance standing and function.



4. We end with an adagio. The purpose of the adagio is to practice the themes of the class that day.