Strong Shoulders & Stable Plank: Lunge Twist Technique

Those are the three main cues. Hips up, hips forward, keep the shoulders stable, take a breath. Yeah, right. The head is usually cranked in some way.

So if you see that the hips are in the right place but the neck is in the wrong place, you emphasize the spine. Hips forward, hips up, keep the spine straight. Nice, you're allowed to switch sides. So from the lunge twist, which is really straightforward, keep the shoulders stable.

One other reason that we really focus on the stable shoulder in the twist is because we're moving into a position where the stable shoulder is even more important, the side plank. So if I know that we're doing a pose afterwards that has the cue, I say it, emphasize it in the pose before so that I can say keep the stable shoulder inside plank. That gives a nice flow to it. Lunge twist, side plank.

So where is the plank? Here I always say slowly and they fall into plank. So we say take another breath and then slowly rotate into plank. And then I'm saying the three main cues of a plank pose is keep your whole body straight like a plank.

So usually the hips are hanging or the back is arching. So I say keep the whole body straight. Engage your legs because usually the knees are slightly bent and the bent knees and the low hips really makes the plank a horrible position to be in. She can't even show it because it's so much harder to do a pose that is not integrated the whole way.

So your main challenge with teaching plank pose will making people actually be straight. Anything you want to add to that? The neck again. Oh yeah, always stupid of me to forget.

Of course, the neck is usually hanging because the hips are hanging. So you can say lift your hips and lift your face. Make the whole body straight, straight, straight, straight. So if you get the legs engaged and you get the spine straight and you get the neck away, then you at least help people to do a not super shitty plank pose.

But that's the main challenge is getting people to not be here and be more here. So they really need to push the floor away, straight arms, straight spine. If you did this right, it's going to be very easy to say keep all that on the next exhale, lower all the way down to the ground. And since some people are actually really weak in the triceps, they feel they might feel like they want to collapse.

Please come up and do it one more time. So I say slowly on the next exhale, lower down to the ground with or without the knees in the ground to make it okay to modify because some people with a lot of ego or macho macho chauquism feel that it's you're not allowed to modify because you're weak. So I make sure to help people feel safe that if they feel weak, that's part of becoming strong. So I always add in something like that, like with or without the knees in the floor, just to acknowledge that you're allowed to do it.

It's much better to do knees down like I did there than no knees down and like this. Yes, yes. That's a yes. We're going to emphasize that later too to talk about modification and how to make modifications acceptable.

Last pose, you are down on the belly. In yoga, this one is called the locust pose. I haven't studied the terminology of yoga enough to know why it's called locust pose. So I took the liberty to reframe it and rename it, rebrand it into skydiver because I think this looks much more like a skydiver.

Yes, you're on your belly, you're engaging the back, but you want to try to help people avoid the most common mistake, which is cranking the neck and rotating the shoulders forward like this. So you say engage your back and lift your chest. I don't say look forward because that engages the neck crank. I usually tell people look slightly down, but lift your chest as high as you can.

Now we should get lower back and upper back engagement. And now to take the, usually the, yes, usually the shoulder tips are almost in the ground so you can see the shoulder blades flaring. One of the things you do really want to help people with is to make the shoulder blades touch behind your back. So roll the shoulder back, get the, squeeze the shoulder blades together.

You need some of these cues to help the back to be really tight. You want to tighten the back to stretch the front area. Relax for a moment. Let me show from this angle how it looks like when people are doing it wrong.

This is usually what people do. They're lifting and they're crunching the lower back and they're not engaging their upper back. So you want to help people lift the chest, look slightly down, roll the shoulders back, squeeze the shoulder blades together. Not all of those, but a couple of those that you see that everybody needs.

You have to look at the room and figure out which cues you need to give for people to be more here with good posture than with crappy posture. And this is your eternal mission is to make people be here and be more here because gravity and society is making people be here. In every pose more or less, you want to help people to be more there for a hundred different reasons. One last thing with the skydiver is that the legs tend to flare out and be spread apart and that usually makes it harder to be integrated with the lower back and glutes.

So keep your legs parallel is the cue I would give. Keep your legs parallel and strong. Lift the legs, lift the chest, take a breath. Usually to teach a pose really well, you need to talk for two or three breaths and then you only have time to say take a breath and then lower down.

So this was the lunge twist, side plank, plank and skydiver.