Hi, my name is Chell Garcia-Trias and I'm a modern dance instructor in Austin, Texas. I'm going to teach you how to do some standing stomach exercises, way that I would do them in Modern Dance. So what I'm going to do is just let my head and my shoulders hang over, like this. I'm just dropping my head and my shoulders, but I'm keeping the rest of my body straight and parallel with the wall or perpendicular to the ground. Now I'm going to imagine a wave moving through my stomach and I'm going to use it to lift this upper part of my body. So, I'm using my stomach muscles and nothing else, they're undulating to bring me up in my upper body. I'm going to do this a few times. You could do about, I don't know, ten of those and then come up, you could bend your knees to just relax. And then if you want it you could do those in first position, so I would bring my feet together, open my toes up into first position and do the same thing, drop my upper body, use my stomach muscles, to come up and over, up and over. And then I would come up and then you could do them to the side to work your side stomach muscles. So come over this way, turn your shoulders so that they're more parallel to the wall, not exactly but they're turning that way, drop your upper body and use your stomach muscles again, only this time you're working this side of your stomach and up. And you really want to, as much as possible only use your stomach and not your shoulders to do this. And you can do them also on the other side. And you might want to take a few plies in between each exercise just to give yourself a moment to rest. So that's the way that I would do the stomach exercise as standing in Modern Dance.
