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Let’s take a look at Chris Cross, one of my favorite exercises, but oftentimes it’s a little unclear as to what we’re trying to achieve. So understand that, the way I’ll teach the crisscross is with flexion of the spine and rotation of the body. And, in order to make sure that we’re inflection and rotation, we need to feel that there is a connection of the rib on the side into the hip region or into the pelvis region and the rib on the front across. So we’re creating this vortex of energy. So A lot of times I see that people are having a hard time keeping that, so I have just a couple tricks to help understand how to maintain the mechanics of flection and rotation while doing crisscross a little more accurately. Let’s get started here.
So we’re going to begin just lying on the back. Settle in for a moment here. Take your legs to tabletop position. You can clasp your fingers together and rest your head in your hands. So we’re first going to make sure that we can fully flex the spine grounding through the low back when you do. So as you lift up, we wanna feel that there is a grounded low back here.
When I twist toward my bent knee and straight to my other leg, I’m going to look just beyond my leg here, and I wanna feel that one rib going into the back side of the pelvis and the other rib vortexing to that hip. So we have this energy toward my right side, and then I can change sides. So feeling that vortex of energy. Now we wanna feel also that the small part or the middle part of the low back remains grounded as you change directions. So that you’re not going down and up to change sides, but that you’re staying lifted.
Eye gaze is huge. So remember looking just beyond the knee, so that you’re not over rotating and going behind you. When you over rotate and go behind you, you oftentimes will go into lateral flexion. So let’s do that another time focusing on how to do it correctly rather than looking at all the things that were not correct. So let’s take the legs to tabletop, hands clasped. We exhale. We lift the head and chest.
The head is heavy in the hands. As we twist, we feel low back stays grounded, eye gaze changes, also be mindful of your pelvis staying weighted on the opposing side. That opposition from the pelvis really creates a beautiful base to rotate from. Hug to knees into your chest. Take a pause.
Chris Cross, it’s a great, powerful strengthening exercise. It’s a good idea to perhaps do, 10 or so on each side or as many as you can do with good mechanics.