Kung Fu Butterfly Stretch

Video Transcript

"Hello I'm Sifu Mallon with the Clearwater Kung Fu Center. This is my assistant Melissa and this is Kung Fu for health stretching. The stretch that we're going to be performing is called our Butterfly Stretch. This is going to be a seated stretch. "Now go ahead and have a seat on the floor Melissa". Very good. Now this stretch is going to be working your inner thighs, as well as loosening up the ligaments and tendons in your joints and ankles. So to perform this, Melissa is going to go ahead and bring her legs out and bring both of your feet together. Now in this position, right, you want to put your feet nice and close to your body. Now, you want to make sure to bring your mind right, to make sure you choose your toes, your pushing together this way. And what this does, this allows you to open up your hip joints a little more. You want to maintain a very straight posture throughout your back and now as you're pushing here, you want to make sure to breathe in and breathe out. Every time you exhale you want to feel your thighs, right, relaxing and pressing down with little bit more. Now you'll see some people do this stretch and they allow their legs to come up and down very fast. Okay. We don't want to really do this in the beginning, as just beginning with your stretches. You want to work your stretches very slow and very smoothly. You don't want any jerking or any fast movements. It's very easy to pull a tendons or joints, so you want to make sure just to move nice and easy through the stretch. To increase it, you can keep your feet where they are and lean more forward from your lower back, this way, right. And you'll feel the stretch more throughout your lower back and more spreading through the upper hip, the upper thigh and outer thigh as well. This is our Butterfly Stretch, Kung Fu for health."