How to Do Pilates Roll Up Exercise - Women's Fitness

  • 13 years ago
How to Do Pilates Roll Up Exercise - part of the women's fitness video series by GeoBeats.

Hello, we're Katherine and Kimberly Corp. We own Pilates on Fifth in New York City, and we would like to show you the Pilates exercise, Roll Up. Kimberly's going to lie on her back. This is a great exercise for the abdominal muscles, but please note that if you have a tight lower back, like we do, its very very difficult because no matter how strong your abdominal muscles are you can't always compensate for the tightness in the lower back. So the legs are squeezing together, feet are flex. Now Kimberly is going to reach her arms overhead. And just make sure this start position, go ahead and do this wrong, when you reach your arms overhead you don't pop your ribs. So she's going to make sure that her ribs are close and only take the arms overhead as much as she can maintain the nice integrity of the spine. And now she'll inhale, reach the arms to the ceiling and start to nod the chin to the chest and now rolling up, reaching forward. Really trying to get a lot of round, as you've noticed we don't have that a lot naturally but that's OK. And then inhale start to roll back and on the exhale rolling back very slowly squeezing the legs together. And again inhale arms lifted to ceiling chin not sliding, rolling up. So what's always good to do is when you're teaching this exercise and when you're doing the exercise for yourself, you really want to make sure that your abdominal muscles are working. So we'd like to go ahead and show you a modification here if you are having problems with this. She's going to reach her hands up, curling up and then grab her legs slightly. In that ways she can really fortify that curl there, and that's more important than anything else. You don't want to do a heave ho and get yourself into a bad position. You don't want to come up at an arch of your back. And as Kimberly did just now, go in really slowly on the way down as its a wonderful wonderful way to build your strength. And that was the Pilates Roll up.