04.02 Key Points: Safety 1 — Transcript

04.02 Key Points: Safety 1 — Transcript (English)

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Transcript

Hi, welcome to another Key Points lesson.

We’re going to talk about the principle of Intensity Modification with the concern for safety.

And in the upcoming practice lesson, you’re going to perform a sequence of three forms.

In this case, we have quite a bit to cover for the Key Points.

So we decided to break the Key Points lesson down into three lessons, one for each form.

So in this lesson, we’re going to talk about the form, which is called Z-Lunge.

And you will start in a standing position, then you will bring the hands onto the floor, which will probably require bending the knees, and then you will bring one leg far back, and then from here we’re going to take a look.

So you can see that Sadako’s left leg here is far back, first high on the tiptoe, and you will bring the leg back as far as you can without momentum.

It’s gonna be a very controlled movement.

So from here, she brings the knee onto the floor very carefully.

And here she shows that the ideal position that we want to achieve is the knee should be right above the toe.

Here you can see that because she’s very flexible, she landed in a position where the knee is a little bit in front of the front toe.

So first she’s going to bring the top of the foot onto the floor and in her case, she needs to slide the leg a little bit back so that the front knee is above the toe.

And you might have to do that, maybe you won’t have to do that, maybe you will have to adjust the position in the opposite direction.

Just once the knee and the top of the foot are on the floor, you need to look at your front foot and you need to make sure that the toes are just under the knee and make the adjustments.

And then she shows here that her hips are pointing forward.

So the shoulders, the hips are pointing forward, the principle of Gridlines and Symmetry.

And to activate the legs, we’re going to be pulling the legs in.

And the back foot is actually pressing, the top of the foot is pressing into the floor, which almost removes the weight from the knee entirely.

You could be doing this form with the knee just floating in the air about one centimeter.

So because this lesson is about the concern for safety, I’d like to point out that the concern here is not about the knee.

Of course, maybe you have explosive knee injury, you fell off your bicycle or something like that, and maybe for a limited period of time it may be a little bit painful to touch the floor.

However, even in that case, if you press the top of the foot effectively into the floor that shouldn’t actually be a concern.

And one of the reasons why this form shouldn’t be a concern for the knee is because of the leg position.

So if you make sure that the front knee is above the foot and also you’re leaning forward like what Sadako is doing right now, this actually means that almost the entire weight of your body is on the front leg and because the top of the back foot is pressing into the floor, the knee is not actually pressing it into the floor.

So if you perform this form correctly, the back knee should not be a concern.

If you feel a lot of weight placed on the left knee, this means that either your front leg position is incorrect or you are not effectively pressing the back foot into the floor.

So the concern for safety in this form is actually in the lower back and we will get there soon.

So let’s see what Satoko is going to do from here.

So she is activating the legs.

She shows how the back foot is pressing into the floor.

So you don’t have to keep the knee of the floor at all times, although you could, but that’s not a requirement.

But that foot should continuously press into the floor so that there is almost no weight on the knee.

This helps to create the foundation.

So then you can see that the foundation is so strong and active that when she lifts her hands off the floor, the pelvis doesn’t move at all, right?

So we fix that foundation, it becomes like a rock, it doesn’t move from here, it doesn’t change its shape.

And what she does is that she lifts her upper body just a little bit so that she can place one arm on the knee.

And this way we want this arm actually to just, you know, slide like this.

The knee will not move, but the arm will slide on the knee.

And the shoulders will remain facing forward.

And so then from here, as we pull the legs in, so the left hand goes on the hip.

This way you can also kind of feel the position of the left hip.

She begins to wiggle the ribcage or wiggle the spine from side to side and while she keeps the leg position as is, she is going to start lifting her ribcage.

So she is easing in into this movement where she is lifting the ribcage.

So the key point related to safety here is that how much are you going to lift your ribcage - only to the point where you feel no compression in the lower back and of course no pain.

All right, so in Satoko’s case, she can bring her upper body almost vertical to the floor.

Also, you can see that her back thigh is quite at an angle.

Not everybody is as flexible as Satoko, so it’s very likely that you’re not going to achieve a shape which will look like this.

Maybe your back thigh is going to be at this angle and maybe your upper body is going to be at this angle.

So the key here is that the legs don’t move and then you ease in into the movement, you move the ribcage, move, move, move, only to the point where there is no compression in the lower back.

The moment you start sensing compression you tilt a little bit forward and of course you draw the shoulders down, you continue to pull the legs in and you micro-move the ribcage.

So Satoko shows that we’re not trying to back arch and this approach to extending the spine and extending the hip is what we refer to asthe EXPAND focus in Baseworks.

So in Baseworks, we don’t do things like back arching, rather we’re thinking about having the front of the body engaged and we’re trying to keep the lower back as extended as possible and we work on the hip mobility.

So the back foot is pressing into the floor and at the same time the weight of the body is pressing down so your hip flexors are engaged.

Which means that you are elongating a muscle which is engaged, which is a way to increase flexibility in that muscle, right?

And at the same time, the lower back is completely neutral.

And rather than thinking that you want to kind of fall back and just hang on your lower back, you’re thinking that the rib cage goes up and then you’re trying to tilt your rib cage.

So it’s a very different feeling of how we approach building this expansive potential of the body compared to just thinking of it as back bending.

Satoko is able to bring her upper body to this position but it’s very likely that you will not come there.

It’s very likely that you’re going to just stay here.

And so then, to come out, we just with control lean forward, we bring the hands onto the floor, and from there you are going to change the legs.

So I’d like to show you a couple of clips related to this form.

This is a very clean view of what the back foot should be doing so that there is no weight placed on the the back knee.

Let’s take a look.

Even when the body is relatively upright, you still continue to pull the legs in and press the back foot into the floor so that there is no weight onto the back knee.

This clip is related more to the principle of Fixing-Separating-Isolating, where Satoko will first show how her upper body is going to move with a fixed foundation, and then she’s going to show what sometimes happened when the foundation is lost and the legs begin to move together with the upper body.

So let’s take a look.

So, you can see that her front knee doesn’t move at all and that allows the arm to just slide on the knee.

So you really want to get that feeling.

And of course as I said many times you don’t have to come all the way upright.

Maybe you will stay leaning forward.

And now Satoko is going to show how the legs move.

See?

This is what sometimes happens because sometimes people think that they need to bring the torso up, back knee bending slightly, front knee extending.

And look at this position.

This is what we really don’t want to see, not just only because of the concern for symmetry and Fixing-Separating-Isolating, but because if you imagine the weight which goes onto the back knee in this position, actually there will be weight placed onto the back knee and it may become painful and uncomfortable for some people.

Because this way the weight is more or less evenly distributed between the front leg and the back leg with the knee on the floor.

And this is something that we do not do in Baseworks in these kneeling lunges.

So you can even see, just imagine how the weight shifts as she does this movement.

When the knee comes above the front toe and you’re leaning forward the weight is on the front leg rather than the back knee.

And then I’m going to show you two clips which show the view from the front and from the back, also to discuss something that we want to avoid.

So here it maybe doesn’t look as clear because of the camera angle because it looks like the back leg is a little bit to the side but that’s because the leg is closer to the camera.

But the idea is that both the front foot and the back foot they are on these hip width apart lines.

And also the back top of the foot is pressing down and it’s really the heel which is looking towards the ceiling.

So here Satoko is going to show a couple of things that sometimes happen with the back foot.

When you actually perform this form you might want to look back and confirm that your heel is looking up and the top of the foot is really pressing into the floor and that your leg is not coming off this line of shoulder width apart.

So see this is when it comes to the side.

Also she shows that the tendency sometimes is that the ankle line will be broken like what she is showing.

The foot, instead of being like this with the heel facing up, it’s gonna twist so we will lose the straight line here and the heel also may not be pointing up but it will be pointing at an angle.

And this last clip is going to show the Gridlines and Symmetry from the front.

So the shoulders, the hips are pointing forward and we really want to feel the midline.

And sometimes it may happen that the shoulders or the pelvis are going to lose this orientation.

So Satoko is showing how that sometimes happened.

And then she returns to a position where her shoulders and the hips are facing forward.

So these were the key points for the Z-lunge.

Just to remind you that the key point of concern for safety here is the lower back and we don’t want to experience the sensation of not only pain but compression in the lower back.

And the back knee should not be a concern if the position of the legs is correct.

So in fact, when the thighs in this position and you’re effectively pulling the legs in, you’re not even putting pressure on the knee- -kneecap when the leg is touching the floor because the kneecap is behind and what’s actually touching the floor is the very very bottom of your thigh bone.

So if you’re performing the movement correctly there should be no pressure on your kneecap here.

And let’s move on to the next key points lesson to look at the next form in the sequence that you’re going to perform.

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• Transcribed by: Auto-import
• Reviewed by:
• Date: 2026-02-03