Hello everyone! Tutu Mora here with the Y bringing you tools to feel well in your body,
mind and spirit. Today, we're talking all about proprioception which is your body's
sense or awareness of where it is in space. So your proprioception plays a big factor
into your balance, your center of gravity and the way your body is able to move functionally
um in space. So today, we're going to do an exercise for proprioception using our breath and a
foam roller. So you can use whatever type of foam roller you have at home and as well if you
don't have one, you can still participate in this exercise and you can just lie down on a mat. So
feel free to grab the tools that you need and I'll meet you over on the mat. All right so first thing
that you're going to want to do is you're going to want to get onto your foam roller. Now I want
you to get on in such a way that your tailbone is going to be at one end and your whole spine
is going to be supported so the crown of your head is here at the other end. So an easy way to get on
is just to sit at the very end of that roller and just let yourself relax back
onto the end. Now while you're here, just take a second to find your breath, find your bearings.
We're going to be going through a couple breath exercises here using the roller. Now the first
thing that I'll have you do just to kind of feel into how your body is moving in a coordinated way.
So go ahead and let your hips sway to one side and then sway to the other side. Now as you move
your hips you may notice that your shoulders move with you, your whole trunk moves in synchronicity
or you may notice that just your hips are moving and your shoulders are staying behind.
But take this from side to side and just take a second and notice notice how coordinated your
trunk is moving as a whole. Now let's come back to center and I'm going to have you bring one hand to
your belly and one hand to your chest. We're just going to breathe. I want you to see if you
can breathe up into both hands at the same time so inhaling feeling both hands rise and fall.
One more here.
Now you can rest your arms at your sides and I'm going to have you now just bring your hands to the
sides of your rib cage and let's breathe wide into your hands so we breathed in the direction up,
we're breathing now to the sides so horizontally breathing wide.
Two more here.
Now you can rest your hands once again we're now going to be breathing down. So we breathed up,
we breathed to the sides so again let's bring our belly hand and our chest hand in.
I want you to instead of feeling both of your hands rise with your breath
I want you to feel like you're just gently puffing your body down into the roller as you breathe.
One more here.
And you can relax your hands returning to normal breath here for a moments.
Now the last direction we're going to breathe into is going to be lengthwise so as you're breathing,
I want you to feel like you're breathing through the crown of your head and out
through your tailbone so I'm going to have you bring one hand up to your collarbones one
hand down to your pubic bone and just breathe as if those spaces are moving away from one another.
And then you can relax your hands at your sides once again
and let's take that same exercise we took at the beginning where you shift your hips
down to one side and to the other just kind of rolling back and forth
and noticing does the rest of your trunk move with you. So are those shoulders moving with you? Is it
a little bit more coordinated moving together? Now to get off the roller you can just sort of glide
to the side and let yourself come down onto the mat and up to a seated position.
So after this, you can take a couple steps around
and just feel the difference in how your body is able to find its balance, what your center
of gravity feels like and as well how you're breathing because breath plays a huge role
in how we find our balance and our overall proprioception. So I hope you found this useful.
This can be just a really helpful aid in balancing and just working with your body in a different way
so thanks for joining and I'll see you back here next time on the Y's YouTube channel!