Kung Fu Back Arch 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 next stretch that we're going to go ahead and do is going to be mainly working on your abdominal region. OK, and your front hip flexors. This is a lying stretch. So Melissa, let's go ahead and lie down, and instead of lying on our back we're going to roll onto our stomach. OK, at this point you can lay nice and flat. The hands are going to be directly underneath your shoulders, palms down. Your feet, you can place them either together, or in the beginning it's probably better to have them about hip distance apart. Your toes are pointing backwards so that you're also stretching your instep, OK, it's through here. Now here, we're going to go ahead and keep our lower body touching the floor. So you want to feel your hips touching. Melissa's going to go ahead and slowly push herself up a little bit, OK? And so as you increase you reach up higher, feeling the stretch throughout your back arching. Your head pulls back, right, and you're pushing your shoulders down as you're elongating through your spine this way. You want to make sure to breathe in through your nose, out through your nose. If this is too difficult for you to do, a beginning position would be, if Melissa would go back flat again, and now place both of your hands into fists and place your forearms on the floor here. One here and then move this one here. OK, in this you'd work the same thing, but you'll see that this one you don't have to push up so high. So this is a good way to start the stretch and then work to the other one. This is how we do our back arched in Kung Fu for Health."