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Pilates Mat Warm-Up | Quick-Fix Energizer

Pilates Mat Warm-Up Video
14 minutes & 36 seconds
9.3 Megabytes

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Stuck at your desk all day? Hunched over your computer with your shoulders up almost touching your ears? Feeling stressed out and out of energy? Bent over the shopping cart or steering wheel? Try this!

1. Sit in a chair. Drop your shoulders down as far from your ears as possible and then squeeze the two big bones in your back (your shoulder blades) back and together.
   
   
2. Press every bone in your spine into the chair, as if you were lying on a bed of hot sand and when you got up you would see an imprint of your spine.
   
   
3. Lift your rib cage up and lengthen your spine, sitting as long and tall with as much space between your ribs and your hips as possible. Tip the bottom of your rib cage down into your waist.
   
   
4. Draw your navel back towards your spine, as if your belly button had a string on it and was being pulled right through the chair and anchor it to the wall behind you.
   
   
5. Extend your arms out in front of you, in line with your shoulders, slightly above your heart. Your palms are facing down, fingers are glued together and reaching long from your shoulders to the tips of your fingers. All joints, knuckles, wrists and elbows are locked out and rigid, not moving.
   
   
6. Rigorously pump your arms, not moving any portion of your body except your arms at the shoulder joint.
   
   
7. Inhale for five counts (inhale, two, three, four, five), then exhale for five counts (exhale, two, three, four, five). Repeat ten times. Ten times ten equals one hundred.

You've just done "The Hundred," the first exercise of the Pilates workout. You should feel energized, pumping blood flowing to all your organs and tissues.

Congratulations, you’re on your way!

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