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>> All right.
How's it going, everyone?
My name is Jimmy.
I'm here from the Sports Safety Program at Hospital for Special Surgery.
So make sure you're paying attention.
Okay. What we're going to do in this 15 days is get your body properly aligned.
That means we're going to get your body into the right position.
And then we're going to get your body stabilized in that position,
which means we're going to keep it there, right.
So we're going to get our body into the right position, and then we're going
to keep it in the right position.
And that's really important if we want to be healthy when we're playing sports
and we're being physically active or even just when we're doing different jobs
around the house, like lifting groceries or taking our dog for a walk.
We want to make sure that our body is in the right position.
For this program, all you're going to need are sneakers and a wide open safe space.
So if you've got a hallway, if you've got a little extra room inside your house,
you're good to go.
Every day, when you join us, we're going to have a five-minute educational component.
That means we're just going to talk to you a little bit about the different parts
of your body, just in little snippets so you can kind of catch onto all that information
without getting too much thrown at you.
After that five minutes, you're going to go through a 10 to 12-minute exercise program,
where we want you to use those lessons that you learned to help you perform those exercises
with the best technique possible.
Some of these days are going to challenge your mind, challenge you to learn new exercises,
to work on your technique, to do things as best as you possibly can.
Other days are going to challenge your body a little bit more, things that are going
to make your heartbeat go really fast
and maybe make your lungs work a little bit harder than you're used to.
But get through these challenges and I know you're going to be all right.
Okay. So the next topic, this is really important.
We're going to talk about aligning our upper bodies.
We've got three different parts of our body, our upper, our middle, and our lower body.
First thing we're going to do is get our upper body properly aligned.
So how we're going to do that, I want you to think about three points on your body,
your ear, your shoulder, and your hip.
When these three parts of our body make a straight line,
that means that our spine is in a relatively straight line.
You can see that these three are straight right now, and now, not so much.
So when they're straight, our spine is in a neutral and healthy position.
And that's good.
Then we want to keep our body in that position.
So how do we do it?
We're going to do something called two finger test.
So I want you to take two fingers just like this.
And I want you to lightly tap your head from side to side and front to back.
All right.
Notice how easy it is to take our head that was in that great position
and move it out of a good position.
Well, how are we going to keep it in the right position, right?
That's what we're here to talk about.
How do we stabilize our body?
Very simple.
So I want you to take those same two fingers.
I want you to stand up nice and tall so you're ear, shoulder, and hip are in a straight line.
And I want you to push, not as hard as you can, but I want you to put a good amount of force
through those fingers into your head.
All of a sudden, my head is not moving anymore.
Why is that?
That's because my brain is telling the muscles all up and down my spine,
my neck and in my back, don't let these fingers move your head.
All right.
If you can do that, if you can use your brain to control your body, you can keep yourself
in that neutral, properly aligned position even when there's other forces acting on your body,
trying to make it move in a different way.
The second part of our body that we have to get aligned
and stable is the middle of our body, right.
So right around our hips.
And I want you to put your hands on your hips, just like me.
And I want you to pretend you're holding a big bowl of water.
All right.
What I want you to do is try to dump some water out the front of that bowl.
I'll show you from the side.
All right.
Try dumping water out the back of that bowl.
And then why don't we try dumping water out one side and out the other side.
So our hips are usually -- they should usually be in this neutral aligned position.
But sometimes they get tilted forward, backward, one way, or the other way.
I want you to find somewhere right
in between those four different directions, so somewhere that's neutral.
So make sure your hips are in a good aligned position.
And we're going to do that two finger test again.
So I want you to take two fingers.
And I want you to jam them into your belly.
All right.
And if our belly is squishy, it's going to be easier for us to tilt our hips.
But if our belly is nice and strong, so if these muscles all around the front, sides,
and back of the center of our body are nice and strong,
it's much harder for our hips to be tilted.
All right.
So we want to keep good control right there.
All right.
So now we've got our upper body in the right position.
And it's going to stay there.
We've got our middle -- the middle of our body in the right position.
And that's going to stay there.
The last thing we have to do is make sure that our lower body is in the right position
and that it's going to stay there.
So to make sure our lower body is properly aligned, I want you to look at three things,
our hip right here, our knee right here, and your shoelaces or your ankle.
If those three things are in a straight line, we're in great shape.
All right.
That means we're not putting any unnecessary stress on any
of the structures inside these joints.
It becomes a problem, though, when our knees rotate in like this
or when we're kind of twisted out to the side.
We want to make sure that these three things always stay in line
because they're never out of that straight line.
So I want you to pretend that you've got an imaginary line running right underneath
your foot.
Maybe you're standing in a bedroom that has a wooden floor, you've got planks of wood,
or maybe you're on a basketball court and there's the sideline.
But if you're standing over that imaginary line and these three things are all
over the line, we're in good shape.
But if you're standing over that line and something is not --
one of those three parts of your lower body is not over that line, well, then we've got to fix
and you've got to get it over the line.
That's also true if we're kneeling, just like this.
All right.
So I've got that line running right under my shoe.
And you can see that my knee, my hip, my shoe, everything is still over that line.
And that's good.
And again, it becomes a problem when it gets rotated in like this and we're not in line.
So we're going to do that same two finger test one more time.
This time, looking at our lower body.
And I just want you to kind of tap your knee from side to side.
See how unstable it is?
Right. So we got it in the right position.
And just like that, with no effort, it moves out of that position.
What I want you to do, use these muscles.
Have your brain send a message to these muscles here so that even when I push with a lot
of force, it's not going anywhere, all right, just like that.
So now we're in the right position, and we're going to stay there.
All right?
We're going to use these principles of alignment and stability of our upper body,
the middle of our body, and our lower body over the next 15 days.
So if at any point you're thinking, "Am I in the right position or not," I want you to think back
to exactly what we just talked about.
Hey, I'm so excited to have you joining us for this challenge.
And I look forward to seeing you guys again tomorrow.
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