Here we are at Body Works Sports Physiotherapy with Holly as our model. Holly’s going to demonstrate a technique doing arm slides and an arm lift while stabilizing her spine.

In our last video we talked about how to find the neutral spine in the hands and knees position, and how to activate breath and core in this position. If you are unclear on this, please view our previous video.

We’re going to walk you through the progression of doing arm movement with the core.

Breathe laterally into the rib cage
As you breathe out, think about engaging your core muscles and lengthening your neck, keeping the upper back strong between your shoulder blades
Slide one hand up towards the ceiling, first towards the front and then u, maintaining your neck.
As you breathe in, coming back down to rest underneath you.

Now we’re going to alternate

Breathing out, the left arm slides forward and then lifts up towards the ceiling, maintaining stability through the neck
Keep that chin tucked in and your neck long until your arm comes up
Breathing in, come back down

So, repeating every time you lift the arm. Keep thinking about resetting your neck position and engaging your core, because otherwise you get a little bit tired through the shoulders and neck.

In this case we would work to fatigue, which might happen quite quickly. This means that the trunk stability will fatigue, and when we lift the arm you’ll have a hard time maintaining a neutral spine.

It’s best to stop when you’re unable to maintain neutral spine, so you may find that you can’t do many repetitions right at the beginning.