Belly Dancing: Chest Isolations - Women's Fitness

Belly Dancing: Chest Isolations - part of the women's fitness video series by GeoBeats. Today we are going to learn how to do some chest isolations. This is big with Middle Eastern Dance. You want to be able to move one part of the body and keep everything else still. So the tricky part about moving the chest is that the hips will want to come with you. So standing in that strong belly dance posture where the lower belly is very contracted is going to help to stabilize the pelvis so everything above the belly button is free to move. You might want to try some of these seated but for now, if we are standing, again holding that contraction, I am going to imagine a string at the sternum pulling the rib cage forward and then dropping it back behind me. So I am actually keeping the shoulders right where they are and moving the rib cage in front of them, and behind them, in front of them and behind them. Now I also want to be able to do a rib cage slide. So again I am actually going to move the rib cage over to the right. Keeping the shoulders parallel. So what I am not doing is a tilt, keeping the shoulders right where they are. Rib cage slide. Exactly, good. Sliding the rib cage side to side, keeping the shoulders nice and parallel. Movement is nice and smooth. Excellent. So we did a lift and a drop, and a slide to the side. Let us try that again. Lift, drop. Sliding to the side. Now if I combine those movements I can do a diamond shape. Forward, side, back and side. Forward, side, back and side. Smoothing out the corners of that movement I can begin to draw a circle. Please be mindful of where the pelvis is in space, it is really easy to lose control. So keeping that contraction, lifting up in the rib cage. I like to imagine that there is a large ball and I am just drawing my rib cage all along sides of the ball. And let us try it in the other direction. You might find that one side is easier than another that is perfectly natural and I always suggest that you stay in that side a little bit longer until they both come nice and even. Excellent. So we have got a lift, a drop and a slide and a circle. Another thing you might want to try is to put your hands on a chair just to stabilize and you might find it a little easier to get the isolation that way. And those are your chest isolations.