Splits: Basic spreading of the legs

How to approach a challenging movement.

One Feldenkrais trainer explains it like this in the splits series:

How can you be comfortable in your discomfort? How much is too much? How much is enough in a lesson? If we overdo it in an Awareness Through Movement lesson, what happens?

We regress. It could be we pull something, or it could be we go back to an earlier state of disorganization because we did too much for the system.

Learning to work in the range that's appropriate for our own learning is the thing that we need to do with ourselves. What is enough for you in this moment? How do you discern that for yourself? In these more challenging lessons all the old stuff can come up: "If I could just do this, if I just do a little more, I'll feel something."

Well, today, do a little less and feel something. If you do a little less today, then tomorrow you can do a little more. Go for the lightness. Do less. Do less than you know you can. If you do less, you start to notice it's not just about the leg or the arm or the feeling of wanting to accomplish something, it’s about you relating to yourself.

For a complement to this pattern, see:

8 Twirling the right hip
11 Lengthen leg for an integrated hamstring
41 Twirling legs and folding spine, 36 min
287 Folding forward, lower leg to chest (excellent for right hip!), 36 min

This lesson begins to roll the pelvis over the hips. There’s no stretching, just many ways to rotate the pelvis and lengthen the legs. You begin to shift your weight in relation to the turning, feeling how you use the back muscles to activate the trunk.

You focus a lot on strategies in these lessons: How can you be comfortable in a challenging position? Can you move in a way that doesn’t strain? Can you smile?

AY211, part 1

In this lesson you start to increase the distance between the two legs. Then, leaning on both hands to one side, you slide the leg more and more behind you, rolling onto the knee and the top of the foot. It’s a gradual, slow process.

TIP: It will be helpful to be on a slidey surface without much friction for this lesson.

AY211, part 2

Sitting with the legs long you bring the leg in the air many, many ways. Then you start to swing the long leg side to side. This lesson invites you to:

• Practice shifting your weight to both sides of the pelvis.

• Practice swinging the leg at different speeds and distances.

• Practice with the same hand/leg, then opposite hand/leg.

• Practice using your trunk more than your limbs.

• Find new ways to roll into the hip joints and, finally, start to roll the back leg!

TIP: It will be helpful to be on a slidey surface without much friction for this lesson.

AY212, part 1

Here you refine arching and rounding the spne. Then you hold the feet and lengthen the legs on your back. Leave the legs long and wide while rolling side to side, a lovely massage for an achy low back.

Another cool move is where the legs are in the air on your back and you leave one leg out to the side and bring the other leg closer and further away. How far do you go to the side, toward the floor? How much fun can you have rolling across your back?

In sitting you play with more rounding and arching of the back, getting better and better. Then, with one leg in front you, swing the other leg behind with an arm long in front…who jumps like this? Legs spread, arm in the air?

TIP: You are still doing the lesson if you make successive approximations. It’s not black and white. You don’t have to be “in a position” to play successfully with the movements.

AY212, part 2