Author: geobeats
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How to Do Pilates Bicycle Exercise - part of the women's fitness video series by GeoBeats. Hello, we're Kimberly and Katherine Corp. We own Pilates on Fifth here in New York City, and we're going to show you Bicycles in the Air. This is an advanced exercise that strengthens the abdominal muscles, strengthens the core, and helps tone the muscles of the buttocks and the legs. So here we go, we'll have Katherine lay back to start, and the first thing we wanted to do is to find a nice abdominal connection, can be called Imprint, can be called Supported. So you want to roll the hip bones up closer to the ribs, hands are resting on the mat. Then we'll inhale. Pick one leg up into table top. Exhale. Pick the other leg up into table top. And then we send both legs out on the diagonal. On the inhale we'll hinge the legs towards the body, same inhale, takes the legs over the head and you will bend the arms so that the hands support the lower back and reach the legs up to the ceiling. So this is the position we also use for Scissors in the Air. From here we'll go into a Bicycle. So we're going to inhale. Split the legs. Now exhale. Bend this back leg and bicycle it through. Inhale the split, exhale and bicycle. Notice how this leg never goes lower than the horizontal line. So do it wrong real quick. We don't want it to go down there, when this legs ends up pointing at the ceiling. You want to think equadistant from that imaginary point. And then you reverse it which is always a little mind teaser. Yes! So you bend the leg you're looking at and thread it through. Bend the leg you're looking at and thread it through. Make sure you reach that extended position. Now here's another thing we don't want. We're going to go back to the other Bicycle. When you have this leg reaching out, when you... go ahead and straight it. When you bend it, don't bring the thigh up first before you bend it. That ends up looking like that old 1950s exercise that women did where they just bicycled in the air. Yeah, that doesn't do much for you. So the work comes from keeping this leg reaching long and then bending, and of course you never want to extend the spine. To finish, we bring both legs up to the ceiling, hands come away, and we roll down one vertebrae at a time, bend the knees in, and one leg down, the other leg down. And that is the Bicycles in the Air.