🩵 1 minute gratitude exercise

Teach this research-proven micro practice in your NEXT session! 

Today is Valentine's Day, and whether you like Valentine's Day or not, the reality is, you can't walk into a store without seeing floating red and pink balloons. SO, you might as well roll with it and celebrate in a meaningful way, incorporating the one vital organ ❤️ keeping all of us alive. 😊

➡️ In your next class, take clients through this 1 minute gratitude exercise:

🗣️ Script to use: 

• Put your hands over your heart 🫀 Close your eyes if you feel safe doing so. (For pregnant clients, ideally have them sit down if they are going to close their eyes, because balance tends to be challenging. Then, have them put one hand over their heart, and one hand on their belly.)
• Let's take 3 lateral thoracic breathing cycles, exhaling l o n g e r than the inhale. 
• As you breathe, pay attention to the beating under your hands. Feel the miracle 🌟 that is keeping you alive! (For pregnant women, feel the miracle that is keeping you, and keeping baby alive.)

Continue to talk clients through the breathing cycles. Add YOUR OWN cues to the exercise, whatever your unique way of teaching calls for! 

3 Ideas for when to give this exercise:

1. A few times throughout the class - once in the beginning and once at the end, during the cool-down phase.

2. After a series of exercises that gets the heart pumping.

3. As homework for clients when they start to feel overwhelmed or anxious. 

Research confirms that even brief intervals of silence and deep breathing provide significant physiological and psychological benefits for pregnant and postpartum women. 

Click Here for the Research on benefits of micro breathing practices for pregnant and postpartum women .(This link will take you to my Google search, and outlines the relevant research.)

Let me know how the practice goes! 

To Your Perinatal Teaching Success,

Alison Marsh - Founder of Pregnancy Pilates IMPACT

P.S. Do you have Instagram? Take a video of you teaching this exercise. Then follow, and tag me @pregnancy.pilates.impact I'll share your video in my stories!