Finding Stability Against Movement

Ugh what a boring title, amiright?! So let’s dig into the nitty gritty! The exercises in this video do not look impressive, however, when executed correctly, the intensity of connecting the front to the back body is an extraordinary sensation.

Without connection and support, our body will flail and get ‘bossed around’ by resistance and moving extremities. In the Back & Core video, the arms move against resistance to challenge the core to stabilize in alignment.

What do I mean by this? From the crown of the head (the back part of your skull, not your forehead) to the tip of your tail bone (spot just above the butt crack) you are one long line. You want to imagine there is a string attached to your sternum (your chest) pulling upward. The abdominals will pull away from the top of your thighs, elongating the spine.

Now that we have our alignment established, let’s see if we can keep it! In the first exercise of this series, we pull up on the bar. The tendency here is to tense the neck, lift the shoulders and hurl the torso backwards, but we need to keep our alignment.

So how do we do that? Before you pull up on the bar, turn on your lats (arm pits) by attempting to rip the bar in two. Keep that spot (the lats) engaged and as you pull upwards on the bar, the feeling of engagement should intensify. It’s like finding resistance within your own body: the arms want to lift upward, while the lats resist this lift.

The second exercise works your deltoids (shoulder). The second exercise calls on your lats to remain engaged as to keep space between the top of the shoulders and the ears so that you can find rotation in the upper deltoid. Your abdominals also have to lift inward to brace the torso and maintain alignment.

Why not make the third exercise harder by adding gravity into the mix? Leaning the body back gives the abs no choice but to connect, because if they don’t, you’re going to fall. So with the abs engaged, the back muscles can be targeted to work. As you press the bar up, you want to feel the bottom tip of the shoulder blades pull down the back. It will feel like a squeeze across the mid-back, just below the tip of the shoulder blade.

And for the grand finale’! After connecting the abdominals to support the spine, flipping the position to your knees then calls upon the back muscles to stabilize so the abdominals can work dynamically. Since the back muscles are no longer working against resistance, we have to find and connect the back muscles on our own. The exercises that came before prepared you for this moment, as they all targeted the spot that is now being called upon for support.

The tendency here is to slouch the shoulders forward and up into the ears, sinking the chest toward the floor. When executed correctly, the front and back of the core work in tandem; one side stabilizes while the other moves.

Still not making sense? Come to class or book a sesh and I’ll show you what I’m talkin’ about!

The Core Is More Than a Six-Pack

What if I told you that you must first find and be able to access your lats before you can strengthen your abs? ‘Whaaatttt?!’ You might ask ‘but why would I work my back muscles if I want to strengthen my front?’ Good question. Let me explain.

Have you ever felt neck tension and shoulder pain during ab work? Does that tension pull your focus from the targeted area? Yea, we’ve all struggled with this because most of us work under the assumption that accompanied pain is a part of the process but it’s not.

The reason your neck is tensing is because the lats are not engaging, as their major role is to pull the shoulders down and keep them in place. If we’ve accepted the tension, however, it can be challenging to access the lats and know if they’re activating.

Years worth of pulling the shoulders into the ears means that we have to retrain the body to work from the lats instead of the traps and the way we do this is by executing exercises that help us to feel that spot engage. The video attached showcases a series of exercises you can do to help turn the lats on and actually feel them engage.

The equipment utilized in the video offers soft spring resistance (adjustable to your needs) that the lats have to work against. In working against resistance, the sensation of engagement is then felt in the targeted area;the lats!

The utilization of the equipment is to ingrain that sensation into your muscle memory, so that you are able to intentionally find it on your own. Finding it on your own is applicable to other forms of activity ranging from placing your luggage in the overhead compartment to rock climbing. This is just one of the many ways that practicing Pilates brings awareness to your entire body, engaging the right muscles at the right time and keeping you injury free.

How Pilates is like an Onion

People will often ask me to explain what Pilates is and the hard truth is I have yet to come up with a perfectly worded explanation, but what I can tell you is as you practice, you will constantly peel back another layer of understanding how your body moves. Beyond core focus are other layers of precision, isolation and conscious, intentional muscle engagement. What does all this even mean? Luckily the internet exists and I can share video footage to explain my point;

For the sake of this blog post, we will be referring to the videos attached to this post. The first video is a compilation of classic Pilates Mat exercises. Depending on the exercise, the core is challenged to control the spine through articulation or stabilization. This sort of control can be particularly difficult because you have to mentally tune into the muscle and then physically turn it on. How do you know if you’re turning it on or not? You feel it.

Which brings me to the second video, where the same exercises are executed on the reformer. The reformer adds resistance to the exercises. This is helpful because the resistance allows you to feel your muscles engage and takes some of the mental work out of the workout. Tactile reinforcement offers you the chance to commit the sensation of engagement to memory, so that when you attempt a move without outside resistance, you can find it from within.

All this brings me to my onion point; when you first start your Pilates practice, it should always be done on the reformer because the reformer teaches you how to move. Only after making sense of your body on the reformer should you take the work onto the mat and determine whether or not you can access those muscles without the use of equipment. In your practice, you should constantly bounce back and forth from mat to reformer as doing so will peel back new sensations and findings.