SL/PE2

Been working on these. Keep working on these, but I'm not sure how to fix what I'm doing wrong (which I assume I am doing something wrong). I feel as though my hips pike on the descent, however, if I relax the hips, I don't feel any tension in the obliques. So I squeeze the glutes and attempt to maintain a solid body line in order to engage the obliques, but then some piking occurs. I don't have trouble with the endurance and I can reach the floor without "bending" the elbow, but, still I don't feel confident these are mastered. If they are not, then any suggestions are quite welcome. I'm in week 2 of block 3 on these, but I wanted to film them with the holidays coming up and the likelihood of consistent workouts being uncertain.

 

In this video, I used the form that I have been and thought was good, upon reviewing the video, I changed my form in the second video:

 

In this second video, I switched my feet placement under the presumption that I might help reduce the amount of piking in my hips, but am unsure as to whether that's the case:

 

In this video I tried to relax my tension of the glutes and of the legs so as hopefully reduce the amount of piking that that might induce. I also tried to roll more with the torso

In my experience with this element, a lot of it is down to body awareness. 

 

Think of this as a straight body element, not arched, not hollow. There is a tendency in the beginning to want to hold the hips too high so there is a bit of side arch, this will inevitably lead to piking. To have a straight side, it may feel as if you hips are sagging at first.

 

So, as you begin the descent, once you feel you've reached the limit of torso rotation, you need to let your hips rotate with you.  And your obliques will be forced to engage more to prevent the piking. This is why we actually want the hips to rotate somewhat in this element. If you don't allow the hips to rotate, you will wind up doing a crunch, deep hollow and piked hips, to get the elbow down.

 

The key thing to be aware of is the height of your hips relative to the rest of your body, the hips need to stay in line and not lift above or fall behind the line. 

Ahhh that makes perfect sense and explains it thus that I can work on it. You were right then before, it shouldn't be a big fix for me. I'll post form checks Friday and next week. Cheers