F 08 Star Form EN

Standing with the feet about a meter apart, again this is going to change a little bit with somebody’s height, somebody has longer legs, it would be a little bit wider, somebody with shorter legs would be a little bit narrower, and most importantly people that feel any kind of impingement into the hips due to a lack of mobility and/or any conditions such as osteoarthritis would probably have to compensate maybe even less than a meter.

So please take that into consideration.

So with the arms down first, first stabilize through the legs by pressing the feet away from each other, checking from above too to see that the outside edges of the feet are parallel to each other.

So the toes pointing directly forward and those outside edges of the feet are parallel.

So activate the legs away from each other first here again.

Draw the shoulders down first, spread through the fingers.

And what you want to do is butterfly the arms up directly up to the side and align with the hips.

And as you do that, you’re bringing the arms up to shoulders height only, spreading out through the fingers and you draw down through the shoulders and you’re checking again here, making sure not to flare through the chest, opening the chest upward, we’re not doing this, and you’re also trying to remember to keep the pelvis slightly tucked, to keep the lower spine neutral.

So again, we’re not trying to arch the lower spine here at all, we’re trying to keep it completely neutral.

And again, if you feel that there’s an automatic arch there from the legs being too wide, then maybe you stepped apart too wide, you got to sort of narrow the stance a little bit, so that you have more control over keeping the upper part of the body separately from the lower part of the body, neutral and upright.

The legs are active here, the shoulders are drawing down, you’re spreading through the fingertips and again, check to see that the back of the neck is extending upward, the crown of the head moves up at the same time, shoulders draw down.

Again, you can always engage little micro movements here with the ribcage and chest to sort of try to explore or calibrate around all the different aspects of the movement here to make sure there’s not too much stress in any part of the movement getting in the way of what we’re trying to achieve.

So to release this again with the release of the arms down extend outward as you lower the arms down so the activity out as you lower the arms down and then when the arms come down towards the floor the shoulders continue to draw down again you feel a little bit the back of the neck extending up and that feeling that the feet are really grounded.