Hello, my name is Debbie MacLeod and I'm a Pilates instructor here at Horde Healthcare. Today I'm going to take you through some standing Pilates exercises which will help to improve the strength in your lower limb muscles and provide stability for your pelvis and your hips, therefore helping to improve on your balance skills. Before we start, we just need to make sure that we've got either a chair, a bottle of water and also a wall or instead of the chair, a wall behind you, just should you need it in case of balance. If any of the exercises tend to feel as though your symptoms are worsening or you're going to receive any pain while you're doing them, stop, contact your GP or our Outpatients Department here at Bordeaux Healthcare and speak to one of our physiotherapists. We're going to start with our setup. So let's just bring our feet together and focus on our length through our spine. Now turn your toes outwards and then pick up your heels, separate them so your feet are hip width apart. This is a good place to be for your balance because your pelvis and your knees need to be in alignment and therefore your balance will be better. Bring your hands down by your side and you can either close your eyes or keep them open, but lengthen through the crown of the head and just feel your chin drawing in towards your throat. Imagine you have a magnet on top of your head drawing up towards the ceiling, softening the shoulders down, feeling the openness across your collarbones. Now referring to our lateral breathing, if we place our hands on the side of our rib cage, breathe in through our nose, you should feel your hands expand or your lungs expand into the side of your hands like a helium balloon inflating and then deflating down through your pelvis, softening down through that ribcage. In through the nose and out through the nose. Good. Bring your hands back down by your side. So keeping your ribcage nice and soft throughout the exercises as much as possible. We're just going to set up our neutral pelvis. If you Pop your hands on your hips. We're going to turn sideways on so you can see our pelvic tilt. What we're going to do is just to soften our knees and we're going to allow our fingertips to push our hip bones back and then our thumbs to push the back of our hips forward. So we're just tilting the pelvis. Imagine you're sloshing a bucket of water backwards and forwards. You're feeling that water moving through the pelvis and then we're going to find a neutral position so that water sits nice and level across your hips. You may also imagine a seesaw, so keeping your hips nice and level. Softening down through the shoulders, keeping that spine nice and long and we've got our breathing in place. To centre our pelvic floor muscles, what we're going to do is imagine that we have a piece of string on either hip bone. So we're going to imagine those hips being drawn away from each other as we pull the drawstring bag out to the side or your belly button coming inwards. There's two ways of doing that. You may also imagine that you're walking into cold water. As the water level rises, you can feel your core muscles just drawing up gently to keep away from that water for as long as possible, maybe on a cold day. So that's another way of looking at it and I will refer to that through the exercises just to make sure as we connect with our breathing, we also need to connect with those muscles. So let's start our first exercise. So just bring your hands down by your side and now we've got our feet in the right position. We're going to start either with our hands on our side or you can pop your hands on your hips just to inhale and as you exhale, float your left heel away from the floor. Inhale as you release down, keeping that hips nice and level, keeping the head up and the chin slightly in. And we alternate between the right and the left side, leaving those hips still, thinking about what's happening through your pelvis, making sure we're not locking our knees, breathing out as we float that knee up in as we go. Now you can use your chair if you want to take this now into more of a balance challenge. You can use your chair to the side here, put your hand on the chair or if you're quite advanced and your balance is good, then you can just keep your hands on your hips. So this time we're going to breathe in to prepare. As we breathe out, we're going to float that knee up. Inhale as we lower down, keeping your feet hip width apart. There's a certain feeling of transference of weight and that's quite normal. Try and keep the shoulder blades away from the ears. So lifting that foot up, lowering that foot down. In through the nose, out through the mouth, lifting up, keeping those hips nice and level and lowering down. And then if you want to, you can always add an opposite arm float. If your balance is good, you can add on a double arm float and create a little bit more work there for those core muscles. So this is our one leg stretch. Good. And you'd repeat the exercise ten times on each leg. We're going to move on to the next exercise now. Now the next exercise is our scissors in Pilates, or better known as a lunge. Again, we start with our hands on our hips. So quick setup, just to make sure that the shoulders are down, still lengthening through the crown of that head with that magnet drawing up towards ceiling, softening through the rib cage and drawing in those two notches on your belt. So inhale to prepare. As you exhale, we slide our left foot forward along the floor, at the same time transferring the weight, lifting the back heel, lowering the back knee, keeping those hips nice and level, keeping that bucket of water still so the water level remains. Inhale as you lift up, exhale as you slide back. Let's do that again on the other side. Inhale to prepare. Sliding the foot forward. Exhale. Lowering down as far as you can. Any pain for the back knee, then you don't need to drop any lower than this. Make sure those hip bones are nice and level. Inhale to lift, exhale as we slide back. Inhale to prepare, exhale as you slide forward. You might want to come a little bit further forward each time. Start to notice, if you can, just take a quick look at your toes, make sure you can still see them and your front knee sits comfortably in the centre of your foot. So we don't want the knee going to the side. Inhale to lift, exhale as you slide forward, keeping your feet hip width apart. Inhale to lift, exhale as we slide. And for those of us again that are a little bit more advanced or you prefer to, use this perhaps as a balance challenge, you can also use the chair if you need to, pop your hand on the chair. We lift the front foot as we step forward and then we lower down. Breathing in as you lift, exhale as you step back. Inhale to prepare, exhale as we lift and we step forward making sure both knees are still facing forward, that pelvis hasn't moved out of neutral. Inhale to step back. Inhale to lift. Exhale to step forward. Inhale to lift up. Exhale to slide or step back. You can also think about your core muscles working a little bit harder by adding an arm float. So let's try that now with our arms, starting with the left leg, our level one position. Inhale to prepare. Exhale as we slide that foot forward and we float our arms up in front of us. Inhale to lift. Exhale as we step back. Again, ten on each leg. Inhale to lift, exhale as you step or slide that foot forward and then keeping your shoulders down, inhale as you step back. And again, if you want to make the movement a little bit more challenging, you can lift your arms higher above your head or if you had some weights, a can of baked beans, whatever it might be that you have available, you may use the weights just to add a little bit more intensity to the exercise. But just make sure those shoulder blades don't come up. So that's our second exercise. Our third exercise is a little bit less dynamic, nevertheless just as important and it involves improving the strength in our hips, back of our hips and our muscles in the bottom. So again, we have our feet hip distance apart. Soften your hands down by your side or if you prefer, pop your hands on your hips, remembering to keep that seesaw nice and level and pelvis in a neutral position. So let's just connect with those core muscles again. Just take a nice deep breath in, expand into your rib cage as you breathe out, lifting those pelvic floor muscles or just drawing that belt in by two notches. Softening through the knees and let's start with our left leg this time. So we're going to lift the heel away from the floor, keeping the nice neutral position through your pelvis and try and keep your foot as still as you can, even if you have a slippery floor. So what we're going to do is to rotate, as we breathe out, the hip to the side. Inhale as you come back to the centre. Exhale as you rotate that knee to the side. If you have any doubt as to which muscle you're working, going to turn sideways on so you can see. If you pop your hand in your back pocket, making sure you're not leaning towards the opposite thigh and then you should be able to feel these muscles tightening. We're to look to do ten on each side before we change over. We're working to a fatigue. A repetition of ten would suffice. So let's do the same on the other side. Keeping these hips nice and level, take a breath in and as you breathe out, feel the rotation through the back of that hip. Again, you can pop your hand in your back pocket, so keeping the foot as still as you can and the watch points are just making sure that you don't tuck your tailbone under or start to arch your back to aid the movement. We'll move it to come again from the back of the hip. So let's try level two now. So if you've managed to perfect that movement and you can feel those muscles working, but you need to work a little bit harder, Let's try lifting again, a little bit more of a balance challenge, so you can use your chair if you need to. Let's try lifting our left heel away from the ground and placing it on the inside of the ankle or the calf muscle. It can also be done on the floor. So we do exactly the same thing keeping those hips nice and level and we rotate as we exhale, inhale as we close. So you can see why we call this exercise the clown. It's an opening but it's not an easy opening. It's quite hard work for the hip muscles and you should feel the muscles working individually on the moving leg. At the same time, of course, we are working the stabilizing muscles in our hip on the opposite leg. So between seven and ten on each leg, especially in the second level two option if you need to. Once you've done let's try five on this side. Once you've done one side, you can then have a march in between just to loosen up those muscles. Just make sure that you are spreading your toes and you're still feeling the length through the crown of the head. So muscles working through the back of the hip, keeping everything nice and level, Breathing out and inhale and then rest down. Just lift your nose, feet up, have a little march out in between if you get a little bit stiff through the hips, especially perhaps on one side more than the other. If you have incidentally had a recent hip replacement, it's recommended that you keep your foot quite low, so you wouldn't be lifting your foot any higher than the calf height. So you've got to keep that foot fairly low, rather than lifting the foot higher up and rotating from this position. Good. So hopefully we're feeling a little bit warmer through our legs now. We're going to work into our bottom muscles now. So I'm going to start by turning sideways on so you can see what's happening. So if we have our feet hip distance apart and you can use your chair or again you can pop your hands on your hips. We're going to relax our shoulders, start to soften our knees and then we fold forward from our hips. The top of the head lengthens. Imagine you have an arrow going from the top of your head, the feathers of the arrow coming out from your pelvis and you're keeping that head up and then we push up to stand. So inhale to prepare, exhale as we come down and inhale as we come up. So that's just a simple squat. What you can do is you can use your arms once again or you can use your hands on the back of the chair if you feel that you should need the support. So if you bring your hands down by your side, let's take a breath in. As we breathe out, we're going to reach those hands down towards the floor and float them forwards as our bottom goes back. Inhale to rights. Exhale to sink. So again, just looking at your knees. Have a quick look as you go down. Just make sure that you can see your toes. Another way of doing this with support might be to stand about one foot away from your wall and then you can feel the support from the wall behind you. You can push your hips back to touch the wall as you come up or again, you may use the chair or you can pop your hands against the wall. Make it a little bit less of a balance challenge but just get that feeling of movement coming through the back of the legs as you float the arms up. What we want to avoid is any pelvic tilting accentuating that lumbar spine curve. So we want to keep our ribcage nice and soft, drawing the hip bones back. Inhale as we stand. Exhale as we float up. So that's a fairly functional exercise which can be performed anywhere as the other exercises with very little or no equipment at all. The next exercise we're going to do would seem quite dynamic. It will seem quite intense for your calf muscles. Nevertheless, we are working the bigger muscle groups as well, so it's all really important when it comes to stabilising to help us walk up the stairs, down the stairs, get up and out of the chair. So really important exercises. So again, start with our feet hip distance apart and you can keep your hands down by your side. If you do need to use the chair, this is now a really good time to have it close to you because we are going to be coming up onto our toes with both heels lifted. Again, forward either with your hands on the chair or you can turn and face the chair or take the balance element out of the exercise and put your hands against the wall. So thinking about your knees, keeping them nice and soft, we breathe in. As we breathe out, we lift and we float our heels away from the floor. Inhale as we lower down. So you might feel as though you're tipping forward. So think about peeling your heels away from the floor. You're trying to take a label away from a bottle, a little bit at a time and then you're going to try and place that label back down on the floor in the same position as it started. Lifting and lowering. Now adding that breathing, inhale as you exhale we float up. Inhale as we come down. Good. Think about that rib cage being nice and soft and also, of course, the pelvis staying in the neutral position. And if you want to add an arm float, you can do a single arm float up or you can do a double arm float. And for those of us that are looking to work a little bit harder, a little bit more dynamic challenge that stability, then we raise our arms up. You're keeping your shoulders down and inhale as you lower. You'll find that you'll calve fatigue fairly quickly with this one. So try and do between seven and ten and then of course if you need to and it's a really good idea to stretch afterwards, you can turn sideways on, pop your hands against the wall or the chair and then step one foot forward, the other foot back and just gently draw that heel down towards the floor as you bend your front knee and you should then feel the stretch through the cold muscles. And then perhaps in between times you can do this in between any of the exercises should you feel any tightness through your calves because obviously in standing for the whole time it's quite intense for the calf muscles. So I hope you've enjoyed the exercises that I've shown you today and that you'll be able to perform them, as and when. Please visit our website for further exercises and we hope to see you soon.
