How to Do Pilates Scissors Exercise - part of the women's fitness video series by GeoBeats. Hello, we're Katherine and Kimberly Corp. We own Pilates on Fifth in New York City, and we would like to show you the Pilates exercise Scissors in the Air. Now this is an advanced exercise so beware! Kimberly is going to lay on her back. This is a great exercise for strengthening your abdominal muscles. It's all about strength, all about control, and, yes, and you'll also strengthen your glutes as well, your little butt will get a lift. Hopefully! 2 inches more, I'm kidding. So she's going to create a nice strong supported position. That means she's going move her hip bones closer to her ribs, really flatten the abs, moving the lower spine towards the mat. Lifting one leg into a table top position, and then exhale lifting the other leg to a table top position. We call this table top because this is just like a top of a table, you can just hang out here. Anyway, she's going to stretch her legs nice and long. On an inhale, using her abdominal muscles she's going to send her legs overhead, not using momentum of course, and then on the exhale, as she reaches her legs to the ceiling, she's going to bend her elbows and then just support the weight of her hips with her hands, reaching her toes as much to the ceiling as possible, and you want to make sure that you're not on the neck. Ok, I don't want to talk too much here because it's hard to hold this position. From here she's going to scissor the legs, so she will exhale-exhale inhale switch, exhale-exhale switch, keep going. The image is that the sit bones remain pointing to the ceiling the whole time. What this exercise is not, we're going to give you a break, is about hamstring flexibility. This actually is really easy. If you have the hamstring flexibility available to you, this is very easy. What we're trying to do is create equadistance from an imaginary center line. The legs are opening there. And its this leg reaching long that creates the work for the glutes and for the abdominal muscles. And just one more, exhale-exhale inhale, both toes point to the ceiling. Take the arms back down to the mat, and then slowly with control eventhough you're almost finished rolling down, and Kimberly even did it with a smile on her face. And that was Scissors in the Air.
