Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
These foundation exercises are designed to make your cycling more efficient to enable
you to use your glute muscles and your posterior chain muscles more efficiently and take some
tension off of your lower back. The founder, feet just a little wider than shoulder width
apart, just soften the knees ever so slightly and slowly bring the arms up above the head
what this does is build the tension into the lower back in through the lats, in through
the erector spinae muscles in here at the same time as engaging some of the flutes,
so the weight here is on your heels and make sure you breathe through that so as you start
to engage the lats in here helps to get some stability and rigidity into the posterior
chain which is your glutes, hamstrings, and the lower back muscles and lats up here. So
you hold this here for about 10 seconds and then you bring your arms down by your side,
you open up the front of your chest drive the hands down and towards the floor and slowly
internally and externally rotate the arms there. The Windmill, slightly different and
quite similar also, so feet a little bit wider apart the weight comes onto the heels, arms
come out in front of you and as a counterbalance, it looks quite similar but the feet are a
lot wider just soften the knees ever so slightly, so fold forwards towards the floor, so at
the moment you can really feel the burn in the glutes and the lower back but you're trying
to keep the lumbar spine in neutral until it gets right back down there and then bring
the left arm towards the ceiling, ok and up the other side, ok so typically you can do
10 one side and 10 the other or you can take it up there and hold it up there for 10 seconds
and what you'll feel is on the opposite side on the abductor muscle here which is an inside
muscle of the thigh, you'll feel a really deep burning sensation. The glutes are firing
up here the abductor muscles are firing up here you feel a really deep stretch and you
can hold this on either side for ten seconds, repeat that about 10 times on both sides.
So the third exercise we're going to do is the lunge stretch and this is more to decompress
some of the joints in the back as oppose to the other two which were more to activate
some of the muscles, so we take a big step forward and then feet, both feet are pointing
forwards here and then you reach up as high as you can, now from here lean all the way
over away from the standing leg and what you're going to feel is a big stretch through the
front of the psoas muscle here so reaching up in here and you feel the stretch across
the front of the thigh and right through that psoas which is your main hip flexor and you
lean away from there and what this does is help to decompress some of these areas of
the spine here and helps to offload that psoas muscle. Ok and the from here you come back
forwards and then up onto your tiptoes and you lengthen through that posterior chain
there and then back down and what you're doing is you're trying to reach up as high as you
can and just helps to take some tension off you're lower back from the joints in there.
Hit that about 10 times and that helps you just to offload the spine there. So the last
exercise is called the Woodpecker, so you take a big step forwards like so again make
sure your pelvis is pointing forwards, both feet are pointing forwards and your arms come
out in front of you like here. Now from here what you're doing is just gently squeeze your
fingertips together, keep the knee straight and what we're learning to do trying to teach
yourselves to do is to hinge at the hips so we're not folding the lumbar spine so from
here just bring your arms out forwards, lean forwards, lean forwards, lean forwards and
you'll feel that tension build onto that glute muscle here, do you feel that building up
there yeah, hold that there for about 10 seconds and then just back of ever so slightly and
do that 3 or 4 times, it really helps just to wake up the glute muscle on that side.
Nothing below the hips move, nothing above the hips move we're just hinging right through
here, so we hinge through the hip lean forward, keep coming, reach out, reach out, reach out
hold that there, the further you lean forwards the more you're going to feel the tension
build up in your glutes and this is where you should feel it in there as well as the
posterior muscles at the back. For more videos like this go to GCN