Hi everybody! I’m Hazel, thank you so much for joining me and welcome to my studio! Not many people are coming here at the moment, so it’s an absolute pleasure to spend some time with you today, taking you through some movements that you can do while hanging out in the kitchen! So we’re all gonna be spending a lot of time at home – we already are – and I just wanted to show you a few movements that you can do while you’re doing your daily life activities. And you can do all these while hanging out in your kitchen, washing the dishes, doing all of those great things.
Before we get started, I just wanted to remind you that you are the boss of your body – you are the expert when it comes to your body – so I’d like you to take responsibility to transition your body into new loads and new movements. You know what it feels like to be in your body more than anybody else so if any of these moves feel slightly uncomfortable, you can reduce the load, and I’ll show you how to do that.
So the first thing we’re gonna do is a top of the foot stretch – the theory is that you stretch – you’re just gonna stand up,and you’ll notice that I’m standing up with my pelvis in a neutral position, so for many of us we stand with our pelvis thrust. I’d just like you to start by pulling that pelvis back a little bit, and look at yourself in the mirror, you kinda wanna look like a straight line – this bone, the femur bone, wants to be straight up and down, not kind of tilting forward like it is here. So bring your pelvis back, and all you do is put your foot back! Like this – so top of the foot stretch, very key for the health of the foot, very key for getting the movement through the top of the foot, and while a lot of these movements will seem very simple for you, I just want to remind you or let you know how profound they are for the function of your body. And a lot of these movements will be new, they’ll be ways you do not move your body currently, so again, transition wisely.
If this is too much for you, and this will be too much load for some of you, you can do it sitting down! So you just grab a chair and put your foot like this, so now there is less load going through the top of your foot and you can still get a really nice stretch.
The second movement we’re gonna do is the calf stretch, again you can do this one, of course, while you’re doing the dishes or just hanging out yarning in your kitchen! So all you’re gonna do is stand up in that nice vertical straight stance and put your foot up on something! For many of you, a rolled up towel or something like that will be great, if you’ve got a yoga mat you can roll that up. And you can see I’m putting one foot up on top of it and just hanging out there!
We all have short calf muscles, because we all wear heels all of the time – many of us think we don’t wear heels, but unless you’re wearing a flat shoe, a running shoe has a heel on it these ddays. So spend some time stretching your calf muscles, it will help you out with your walking, and will also help many people with a sore lower back. So get stretching your calves! And you can ddo that on the other side as well, of course!
The next exercise you can do in the kitchen, when you’re sitting down having a cup of tea, is you can – instead of sitting with your legs in a normal position, you can spread them nice and wide and you can just massage through the groin here. So this is gonna help with lymph flow which is gonna boost the function of your immune system. And you can see that I am kind of turning my feet back, so they’re not in this position, they’re in this position here – we call that an externally rotated femur bone, this bone here, and again, really good.
The other thing here is that you’re gonna wanna make sure that your quad muscles, these muscles here, are switched off. So have a look at your kneecaps, I’ve just turned my kneecaps on and it feels all tight and tense, now I’m gonna turn those off. It feels good! This is the V-sit with the kneecap release.
So the last one we’re gonna do today is the hip shift. This is another way of getting good loads into the hips. So we’re gonna stand on the floor, feet as far apart as feels comfortable, and then shift your hips from side to side. Really nice and easy – put your hands on your hips and you can turn this into a dance move if you want! And just notice that you’ll probably feel a little bit tighter on one hip – you might wanna have a think about why. How do you sit all the time? What do you do with your body that might create that shortness in one hip versus the other?
So I’m just taking my feet a little bit wider, and I’m just shifting hip from side to side. And I can do that again – take them a little bit wider, and again, you can do this in the kitchen, and you can turn this into a dance party in your kitchen, it’s highly recommended to have a lot of dance parties in the kitchen over the lockdown!
My name’s Hazel, and you can contact me at hazel@mindinmovement.co.nz if you have any questions at all, and I’ll see you soon with a video on movements you can do at your Netflix party! See you soon.