Yoga Stretches! Healthy Mind, Healthy Body Videos with Kati Morton | Kati Morton

– Hey, everyone! Today’s video is a little bit different than my other videos. Today, I’m going to teach you
some stretching techniques, I guess, or ways to stretch,
that can be relaxing. And I am not a yoga instructor. I am not a physical trainer or therapist or anything like that. But these are things that I personally do to help me relax, so stay tuned. (piano music) So like I said, we’re
gonna do some techniques that I like to do to stretch and relax. So the first thing I always
do is get into child’s pose. Now, you want to have your toes, my big toes are touching back here. I’m gonna have my knees
as wide as my ribs, and then I’m gonna stretch
myself out forward. And you wanna rest this part
of your head onto the floor, and you can feel this stretch not only in my back, my low back,
up between my shoulders, but you can also feel it
kind of in your rear end. And so you hold this, and
you want to do every stretch for at least five full breaths. And so we take out time with that. And from there, I usually
move into down dog. And for any of you that don’t do yoga, I do yoga quite frequently, you want to put your hands opened down, thumbs facing in, you almost want to make an “L” with your pointer and your thumb, and you want to kick up into down dog. Now, for many of you,
you might be like this because the back of your legs, your hamstrings and your achilles tendon are gonna be quite tight. So you can bend your knees, that’s okay. But for any of you that stretch more, or are more flexible, you can straighten your legs. And you want to create
sort of an upside-down V or an A, without the line. And we hold this. And my favorite stretch of all time. We’re gonna come down onto
my knees from down dog. And we’re gonna curl our toes under. This is my favorite stretch, because I wear heels a
lot and my feet hurt. And I know I probably
shouldn’t wear heels, but I do anyway. And we’re gonna curl our toes under, and you wanna make sure this little guy, this little weird toe on the end, you know, you’re little
one, that he’s there too. So you want to curl them all under. And for some of you, like Kati, I can’t even sit back on my heels. And you can rise up and
have them like that anyway without any pressure. Or, if you’re really flexible you can come back into it so you’re putting more pressure
on your feet to stretch. And oh, sweet mother
of God, it feels good. So we can do this. And this one, you want to
hold for a really long time. As long as you can tolerate it. In yoga, they always say, when you run out of tolerance, it’s just your mind is
coming into it too much, and you’re supposed to not
let your mind take over. It’s like, mind over matter. But after you come out, you
kinda wanna flap your feet. Shake them out. And then we’re going to turn around, and we’re going to do some other stretches for different parts of your body. So this stretch is kind
of isolating our obliques on the side of our body. And this can feel really good, because honestly this isn’t
a stretch that we ever do. Like, ever, in normal bending motions unless you’re like reaching to the side. So we’re gonna grab, and if you can’t, then bend your knee, obviously. We’re gonna give ourselves more space. But for those of you
who are more flexible, we’re gonna grab our foot on the inside, and we’re gonna tilt. And you want your eyes to follow your hand and we’re gonna hold, like I said. And you might be like this,
because it might be really hard. Or you might be all laid out
because you’re a ballerina. But we want to make sure
that we stretch that. And this also stretches out your ribcage, and it can make you feel
like you can breathe better. And so we do that, and we’re going to switch
over to the other side because we always wanna
make everything even. Do the same thing, reach
on the inside of your foot, thumb facing down, and
we’re gonna reach over. Oh, feels good. Especially if you drive in a car a lot, or you sit at a desk,
or anything like that, it can feel really good. And so we’ll stretch there. And then we’re gonna stretch forward, because this stretches the
entire backside of our body. So we’re gonna reach forward. And like I said, you may not
be able to touch your feet so you may just reach like this and that may be all that you need to get. You may have no trouble
reaching your feet, you may reach past, you may lay down flat. And this also, if you
don’t have much time, I think this is why I love yoga so much, is we can double up. So I can pull back on my toes, like the other pose I was doing when I was sitting on my feet, and this is almost like two in one. Because I can hold this for
the same amount of time, I get two stretches. So, that’s kind of like multitask. So we hold that. So I always like this one too, where you kinda grab the
bottoms of your feet, they call it like the
butterfly stretch and stuff, and I forget, I think there’s
probably a better term for it, but that’s what we’ve always called it. And I kinda wiggle waggle myself into it, because you wanna bring your heels as close to your bum as you can, and you kinda wanna lean forward. And you can push. You can use your elbows and you
can push down on your thighs to give you more space
and to stretch out more. But you may be like this, and that might be as much
as you can get out of it. But that doesn’t matter, because we’re all getting
the benefit of it. So we do that, and we hold that, like I said for five slow breaths. And it ends up being about 30 seconds. But make sure you take your time with it. And if you wanna hold one
longer than another, do that. And then the last stretch
that I would have us do, and you can do this one, like I said you can multitask, while you’re sitting on your toes to stretch your feet like
I showed you earlier. But I’m just relaxing my
feet and sitting down, and then I’m gonna reach this hand out, and I’m gonna put my hand over my ear and just pull, lightly, pull. And you’ll feel the stretch. And you can even tilt
your head up and down, until you feel it stretching
a certain part of your neck, and oh, it feels so good. And then we hold that for five breaths, and then we switch over. We gotta do the other side. And so, some sides, like my left side is always tighter than my right. I don’t know if it’s
because I’m left handed or if I’m doing something
weird, but it always is. And so, we wanna make
sure that we’re breathing through every exercise, every move, that we’re holding it for five breaths, we’re taking our time, and this is just another great
way to do some self care. If you have time at the end of your day, take the 10 minutes out
of your day to do this, and I think you’ll feel a lot better. And like I said, we’re always
working together, right? Not only towards a healthy
mind, but a healthy body. So this is a great way
to start doing that. Let me know if you liked this
video and give it a thumbs up. I can do more kind of
relaxation techniques if you like those. But, you know, whatever
will help us to relax, to rejuvenate, and to get
back to our life, okay? So take care, and I will see you soon. Like, wow that’s intense. You’re getting pretty loud. I know you’re hungry,
I’ll feed you in a minute. It was like aggressive (growls). Okay, ready? Hey, everyone. This video, or, blegh. I don’t like that. I don’t like that, it’s just an intro. What am I doing? I don’t get this. It’s so different. It makes me nervous.