Horse Stance Exercise

Horse Stance Exercise Vertical • Instructions

Follow these instructions for the horse stance exercise vertical:

• Start in your hands, all four position, hands and knees.
• Hands are placed directly under your shoulders.
• Your knees are directly under your hips and they’re hip width apart.
• Your hands are shoulder width apart.
• Now you want to ensure nice alignment by tucking your elbows in so that they’re facing your thighs.
• If you have a partner or a good friend, you can ask them to place the stick along your back.
• You can also tuck it down into your shirt or just slip it on top of your spine.
• You want to have a little space in the small of your back, and you want it to be in contact with your tailbone, mid-back, and the back of your hips.
• The objective of this exercise is to strengthen your spinal stabilizers. The objective is to not move your spine at all.
• Let’s start with a nice big tummy breath, and then slowly, gently tighten your pelvic floor, tighten your lower tummy.
• With everything in firm position, you want to slowly, gently transfer your weight onto the limbs that you’re not going to lift.
• I’m going to transfer to my left hand, both knees, and I’m going to slowly, gently lift my right hand, two, three.
• Go back into position.
• Breath in, and though you had a video camera just like I have on me right now, you don’t want anything moving at all, other than the arm or leg that you are going to lift.
• So keep everything tight, and you lift it, but nothing else should be moving, and back down.
• So remember to take your breath in.
• With the legs, legs are heavier, it’s going to be a harder motion.
• You start not lifting so much because you don’t have an elbow joint to lift off of, but rather sliding slightly behind you.
• I’m just going to re-position the stick and still take a breath.
• Gently tightening my pelvic floor and deep tummy muscles and I’m going to transfer my weight and start sliding just enough that I could slip a piece of paper underneath my knee and back down.

With the horse stance vertical, you want sole lifting vertically, hence the name. You want to ideally go around and be able to lift each limb individually.

When you get strong enough with the horse stance vertical, and although the time period, you know, you could start with one to two seconds, build up to a five and even a 10 second hold would be great.

You’re working those postural muscles which are endurance muscles. You want to eventually be able to lift the opposite knee and opposite hand in a vertical position as well. So hard exercise, looks easy, but good luck with practicing it.