Writer : Lucia Farina
Pilates has always been known for its benefits to posture. People often ask, if it's good for posture and alignment and my response is, I guess like a lot of exercise methods, yes, it is but Pilates does offer more benefits than say, your average fitness class or gym program.
I think when it comes down to it, Pilates is good for posture if the person teaching you knows how to apply the exercise and suitable cues for your postural in-balance, or area of need. The instructor's ability to see your body and understand its needs is essential if the aim of you practicing Pilates is for improved posture.
If you wanted to practice Pilates but without any specific goal, would we see a difference on posture regardless? In short I'd say yes.
If we look at what really affects our posture, for some of us it's anatomical structures that cause an imbalance and for others (most) it's actually more habitual. How we sit, whether it’s for work or how we slouch on the couch, how we stand, really all kinds of habits we are in during our day to day lives. Which accumulates to week to week, month to month, year to year.
If we sit in the same position for long periods day after day, for example, that would naturally result in some adaptive lengthening and shortening of muscles, which can then lead to postural pains.
Pilates is a well balanced practice that uses a lot of crucial postural muscles in the exercises. Postural muscles, are the deep muscles in your abdomen, pelvis and back. They are a support for your skeleton and stabilise our spine and pelvis. Many of the Pilates exercises will active these muscles working through control, allowing space to focus on alignment.
Due to our daily habits, which for most of us tends to pull our upper backs forward, to create balance there we need to do a bit of thoracic extension and regularly too. Pilates incorporates extension regardless of your personal goal. So this is why I says that Pilates offers more benefit than a standard gym program. The fact Pilates programs mobilise the spine in all directions and work on strengthening all these movements, means that during your workout, you're ticking off those good postural exercises too.
When it comes to extension, we can lift our chest up in the movement, but it doesn't mean we are getting much movement in our thoracic region. A Pilates coach would generally be pretty motivated to help you find that connection and will give you personal guidance to help you feel the exercise in that area. The action of extension on the upper back is pretty hard to achieve for most of us, due to the fact that for most of our day and in fact, just the way the spine naturally sits, we are slightly flexed forward. So to counter that or create balance would actually mean doing a HEAP of extension exercises, or bringing a lot of focus on the details in the exercises to always be working length in our upper backs.
With is being so important to create balance along the spine and extension in the upper back being mostly what is needed, we've put a workshop together that focuses on how to execute the extension exercises in a way that gives YOU results. For more information on this and to book in, click HERE.
We look forward to seeing you on the mat soon!
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