How to Stretch for Belly Dancing

Video Transcript

"Hi Welcome to Expert Village. I'm Patricia Prata and now I'm going to teach you how to stretch. I cannot stress enough how important it is to have the stretch before you start any exercise, especially dancing. So before you start you're going to stretch, and the most important part of your body to stretch is your back because your back supports everything else, your feet, your legs too but your back is something that you really need to stretch. So we can start with the basic stretching. Okay stay in this position for about a minute and then you can change, and you can bend your knees, and then you can stretch a little bit more. Never bounce because when you bounce you can hurt yourself so make the stretch something that you can feel in your muscles. I'm going to turn so you can see better. And you should be doing this for at least ten minutes, any kind of stretching. And remember to breathe. Okay after you stretch your back because in belly dance we're going to be using a lot of hips, you should be stretching your hips too. Okay how to stretch your hips, you can bend your right leg and stretch you left hip okay in this position, and of course you're going to have to do the other side. And you must once again you must stretch at least for ten minutes. A couple months ago I didn't stretch enough and I had I sprained my muscles so you don't want to do that. Make sure that you stretch your hips very well."