Twisting & Side Bending

Carol Beringer's Amazing Movement Podcast | Ep. 6: Twisting & Bending (13+ min)

Transform your posture and spinal health with movements we rarely do in daily life! In this episode, Carol guides you through essential side bending and twisting exercises that address the planes of motion your body craves but seldom experiences. 

Learn Carol's signature "steering wheel connection" and discover how proper seated posture can improve your breathing, reduce tension, and create a stable foundation for all movement. These gentle yet powerful exercises help prevent injury by engaging your entire body properly. Perfect for anyone who sits for work, drives regularly, or wants to improve their core strength and spinal mobility from the comfort of their own space. 

CHAPTERS: 

00:00 - Introduction: Why Side Bending & Twisting Matter 
00:05 - The Steering Wheel Connection for Perfect Posture 
02:21 - How Posture Affects Breathing & Brain Function 
03:25 - Finding Your Pelvic Floor Foundation 
05:17 - Setting Up Your "Steering Wheel" in Daily Life 
06:57 - Seated Spinal Twisting Sequence 
10:14 - Side Bending Like an Airplane 
12:14 - Full Body Integration & Core Engagement 

ABOUT CAROL BERINGER: 

With 25+ years of experience, Carol combines expertise in brain-based functional movement, Pilates, and yoga to help clients achieve improved posture, pain relief, and lifelong wellness. Her compassionate approach has transformed lives of individuals aged 6 to 96. 

KEY TAKEAWAYS: 

- Side bending and twisting prevent many common injuries
- Proper posture improves breathing and reduces eye strain
- Your pelvic floor is the foundation of all good posture
- Small adjustments create remarkable benefits

SERVICES OFFERED: 

- Private Sessions 
- Group Classes 
- Workshops & Retreats 
- Zoom Sessions 

CONNECT WITH CAROL: 

Website: https://carolberinger.com/ 
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pilatesandmore110/ 
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@CarolBeringerMethod 

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-amazing-movement-podcast/id1801483560 

Subscribe for weekly episodes to continue building your movement repertoire! 

#TwistingAndBending #SpinalHealth #PostureCorrection #FunctionalMovement #CarolBeringerMethod #AmazingMovement

Transcript

00:05 - Carol Beringer (Host)
Hi, carol Berenger here and welcome back to another episode of Amazing Movement, and I call it Amazing Movement because it's very unremarkable movements with remarkable benefits. So it's simple, it's something that you can do at your leisure, it only takes a couple of minutes, it's not adding to like, oh I should do this. You know, we just we don't want to shit on ourselves, we just want to enjoy movement and enjoy our body and all the planes of motion that it's meant. Today we're going to focus on side bending, which we don't do really in life ever, except if we probably side bend and twist, fixing somewhere. Many injuries occur because we're not engaging the rest of our body properly. So we are going to side bend and twist and that means we want to have our spine. So if you're comfortable sitting cross-legged, that's fine. If you need to put your legs out in front of you, if you need to pop something underneath your knees, we just want to make sure we're sitting on our sitting bones, those bony protuberances at the bottom of your pelvis. So sitting comfortably. And a favorite way for me to have people get into their best posture is to take the pinky into the belly button and the thumb on the breastbone and pull those two spaces apart, and when you do that, you'll feel your tailbone go down, your breastbone lift up and your spine will fall into its natural curves. And when we get the breastbone this upper part of our body which is fingertip to fingertip across the breastbone and across the bottom of the shoulder blades I call that the steering wheel connection. So let's talk about the seated posture. So when people come into, I do have a Pilates studio in Wayne, pennsylvania, since 2002. And when people come in, I never know if they're going to come back after one session. So I try and give them many ideas and small things to do that will benefit them if I never see them again. So they drove in and they're usually going to drive out. That's a seated posture. We sit for a lot of things driving, eating, at our computers, watching TV. 

02:21
So once your body gets into a better posture you'll feel better. And it also puts your head back over your spine, where it ought to be, because if we have forward head hanging all the time which we all have because everything's in front of us that this puts a lot of load on the spine and that once we bring the head back over the spine properly. Our windpipe is like a straw If your head's forward all the time, it's got a little kink in it. You're not getting all the air you could possibly get. And also there's tension. There's tendons that go from the back of your eyeballs to the back of your skull. Where the skull meets the neck, is called the occiput. There's tension. And so the chewing muscles also for size, they're little are the strongest muscles in your body and they're really close to your brain. So all of these things, because our head makes everything happen, whether it's, you know, snapping your fingers or wiggling your toes, everything starts here and travels through to your mechanoreceptors, which are the what moves your body, the mechanical parts. 

03:25
And so we're going to start with seated posture. So the bottom of your spine, where you stand on legs that are wobbly stilts, is your pelvic floor. And to get engaged in your pelvic floor, if you're sitting in this position, or you're sitting in this position wherever you're comfortable, just rock side to side and find those bony protuberances. And if you're looking at a skeleton, the bony protuberances are down here and sideways. Your pubic bone and your tailbone are up a little higher, protected by those sitting bones, and they should be even across from each other before you have proper posture. But most of us tilt one way or the other way, or sideways, and we freeload into a spot so that our foundation of our spine and our posture is often not even with the earth, which means we have a wobbly house. So if we start here, so think of your pelvic floor as a diamond shape a tailbone, a pubic bone and sitting bones. 

04:23
We're going to find the sitting bones first. You're perched on top of those bony protuberances. Just pull your belly button back a little until you feel the weight shift. Where that shifts and ends is your tailbone. Now your tailbone is not touching the floor because, again, it's protected by the sitting bone. Then if you just pitch forward a little bit, where that weight ends is your pubic bone also protected. But the muscles there are the foundation to stack your spine. So in order to engage those, pretend you have a handkerchief, those four bony landmarks and just you're going to lift the center of the handkerchief. So if you're sitting here and you pull up, you can see that gently I've pulled up and it also engages your thigh muscles. So if you put your hands on your thighs and you just pull up, you'll feel a little bit of engagement and lightening. So the more that we lift up from there, the lighter we are on our feet, the lighter we are when we're sitting. We're lighter and lighter feels better. 

05:17
Now in between and this one is the one if you don't remember anything else the pinky and the belly button, thumb and the breast bone. As you pull those away, your abdominals, which go all around your torso, come in towards your spine and lift you up, and then we have this 12 to 15 pound bowling ball on top of a toothpick, on top of the upper body. So I call this a steering wheel connection. So the next time you get in your car, even if you're a passenger, you're forced to sit forward in your car. So find your sitting bones, find the breastbone up off the belly button and then even hold on to a pretend steering wheel. And then I tell the clients to fix their rear view and side view mirrors and if they can't see as they're driving home, even if it's five minutes, they've collapsed. And the more that you hold yourself up, the more you create endurance and the more you feel better here than here. All right, so that's our connections. 

06:12
So now we're going to use that for our side. Bending and twisting because we're going to use that for our side. Bending and twisting because we're going to lift up now and if you have your ankles crossed, what I want you to do is recross them, because we always go to our favorite side. This is going to feel weird. All right, sitting bones, pubic bone, tailbone, pull up the little handkerchief, breastbone, up off the belly button and then another way to find this upper body, the steering wheel connection put one hand and then the other behind your head and push your head against your hands and hands against your head, and this lifts everything up so much your head feels so much lighter. It aligns the windpipe, it, you know, pulls the head back over, takes attention out of the eyeballs Lot going on here. Okay, so now we're just going to keep that posture and rest the palms on the knees. 

06:57
The first thing we're going to do is twist, because we twist more than we side bend. So we want to find that endurance and intentional movement first. So we're going to pretend we're one of those spiraling barbershop things that starts at the bottom and infinitely goes up. So the sitting bones are the base and we're going to start from the belly button, because normally if I said turn to your right, you'd turn your head. So we want to start working through the core, moving the spine. The head should always follow the spine. So we're going to go to your right. We're going to turn the belly button, then the breastbone, then the shouldersbone, then the shoulders and then continue with your nose to look over your shoulder. 

07:40
Exhale here, take another breath, inhale, fill with air, exhale, see if you can grow taller with all those things in mind belly button, breastbone, shoulders and nose. One more breath, inhale, exhale all the air out and, as you inhale, bring back the belly button first, the ribs, the shoulders and the eyes. You'll find you're going to want to lead with your head every time. Okay, so now we're going to the other side. Prepare with an inhale and move the belly button, the ribs, the shoulders and the eyes and exhale all the air out. We're going to take. Make sure you have the weight equally distributed on your sitting bones. Inhale and exhale, lift and twist even further. Gently inhale and exhale, lift and twist. 

08:27
We can always get better. We don't want to go to where we're uncomfortable, we just want to feel the body movement and and then inhale, come back belly button, ribs, shoulders and eyes exhale. We're going to go one more time to each side. So pull up through the pelvic floor, belly away from the shirt, head back over the shoulders, belly button ribs, shoulders and eyes. Exhale all the air out. Inhale now as you exhale. 

08:56
Now think of taking your eyeballs to look back over that shoulder or even out the corner of your eye, and you might not even move, but it will feel like you moved and then inhale again, exhale, bring all the air out of your lungs and then come back belly button, ribs, shoulders and eyes, last time in this direction. Belly button ribs, shoulders and eyeballs and then look out the sides of your eyes Maybe try to see your nose with the front eyeball and actually moving the eyes and it, like this, resets your nervous system. So belly button, breastbone, shoulders and eyes. So that's our twist. So you just think of growing taller and taller and it just keeps moving and it strengthens your core because every time you exhale air is meant to press the air out of your lungs and squeeze the stuff out of your lower intestines, but also by sending more air out next inhale brings more breath in. So when we do that driving posture and you're driving home, whenever you come to a stoplight or traffic light or a stop sign, even just inhale through the nose and exhale through a soft jaw and that's like a mini meditation. 

10:14
Alright, now we're going to switch the legs to go to the side bending and, again, if you're sitting with your legs out in front of you, just sit where you're comfortable, but you're that you're equally distributed on your sitting bones. Okay, I have to go to my not favorite side. Okay, we're going to take the hands out to the side. We're reaching. Now. We're going to see our thumbs and our periphery because if they're back here, we're taking our spine into a different posture and we want to keep the neutral spine with the curve behind the neck, through the rib cage, low back and the tailbone naturally curls under, unless it's been broken. So we're going to looking forward out of the periphery, see your thumbs wiggle and then lift your breastbone off, your belly button and then pretend you're pressing down on maybe two balls or a table top. But you want to feel the engagement, and so we're reaching as if the fingertips are touching the opposite walls. 

11:05
We're going to go over like an airplane. So you're going to go to your right by lifting the left side up and you're going to find your hand to touch the floor mat wherever you are, and you'll just keep reaching this arm and it'll eventually turn. The top of the arm will turn in the shoulder socket, which will turn your palm to face downward, then reach from your armpit up so you're reaching through the top bone, which is called the humerus in the arm, and as you pull yourself back through center, the arm will naturally turn down again. So our habit would be to go with the hand. Because we work from our extremities, you would turn your hand. Well, you can see that when I go this way, if I lift up through that side and go over and I just keep reaching the arm straight, because if we bend at the elbow or wrist it turns into an arm movement versus a whole side you can see that my palm turns somewhat down. So we're allowing the arm to turn from our center, which people refer to as their core, because my story is that your core goes to your elbows and knees if you're moving properly from your center, and we'll cover all those things in detail in further episodes. 

12:14
I don't want to overload anybody. I want to keep this simple so that you want to come back and do more, but just keep lifting the breastbone up off the belly button and following your body through space to the side. Now, here you might have this up. Just soften the bottom shoulder, reach through the crown of the head, reach from your hip socket down there through your armpit to your elbow, to your wrist, to your fingertips, and then lift that up. We're going to go one more time to each side, just because we don't side bend very often. So we're taking another movement here. Now you might find, as you go over, this elbow is going to come down towards the floor maybe, but you're not collapsing. You're reaching through this top side, which will actually bring the bottom side in and up. So when we move with good body mechanics, the body invites everybody to the party All the intrinsic muscles, the tendons, the ligaments and fascia. 

13:12
And if you're not familiar with what fascia is, did you ever think how your body is held together? Do you think your skin holds everything in? Nope, there's this stuff called fascia that goes. It's around every muscle fiber, every muscle bundle. It's everything, I think, except your teeth and your tongue. All right now here, just float your arms down and that's it for today. See you next week.