Smile and notice how the muscles of your face activate.  

Now place your hands on your lower abs and smile your lower abs.  

Feel the abs contract wide against your pelvis.  

Feel how you created your own internal spanx.

Pilates is more than abdominal workout.  It is about connection of the entire body.  When the lower and/or upper body works in harmony with your torso, you create better alignment, strength, balance of tone and mobility with your entire body.

Newcomers to Pilates sometimes get stuck on the idea that a hard muscle is a functional muscle.  A lot of people are hardening their muscles that is destroying correct movement of the body.

As you advance in your practice, Pilates repertory has more sequencing of movement and level changes.  This teaches you to have dynamic stabilization of your body.

How Yoga Can Wreck your Body in New York Times

There is a wonderful article this week in the New York Times about yoga.  There is also a bigger issue to address.

 A lot of students think pushing hard to almost an injury is a hard workout.

Many new students trying Pilates for the first time complain about being not hard enough.  The majority lack awareness and deep internal connections of how to stabilize.  If you are doing legs in straps or leg springs with no center control,  you can be pushing from your back.  Rudoph Laban had a wonderful concept of Stability/Mobility.  To mobilize a part of your body, you need to stabilize somewhere to facilitate any simple movement.

When you are weak and you increase the load, a lot of times you will initiate your poor habits to do the exercise.  When I do leg springs with a quiet spine, it targets the legs.  I have had many clients complain that their back hurts in legs springs.  One has to look at their form and retrain how they perform the movements.

The majority of new clients coming in, have no clear idea of how to stabilize the torso.  When you find it,  it has a lot of lightness.  They are very much into the more superficial mucles of the torso and body.

More does not equal more.  Awareness, concentration and precision in form is key to any fitness routine.  This is the “MORE”

The plank pose is one of the best exercises for core.  Why?  It is a full body action that requires coordination of the limbs with the torso.  When your form is good, you maximize your use of the core.  It also requires the body knowledge of how to use your legs to be in hip extension, your torso in neutral and great hand-scapula connection.  If any of these patterns are off, it could create shoulder/hand and/or back problems.

How Planking Became the Internet’s Latest Bored Game

Facebook’s Plank Craze

Through my studies with Eric Franklin, Irene Dowd and Amy Matthews,  I have come up with a podcast of simple ways to exercise your feet.

By changing your foot fitness will change how you stand and how you use your core.  In my DancingMindBody class on Friday mornings, I start with rolling the feet on the Franklin Balls and some kind of foot exercise.  It is amazing to observe how the tone of the abdominals improves after this foot warmup.  We haven’t even done an abdominal exercise!

From Google's Body Browser

Work IN vs. Workout

There were so many gems from the workshop with Marie-Jose Blom.

To get to the deep stabilizers, you need to concentrate on working slower to turn on the correct muscles.  Our large global muscles are like rock and roll.  Lots of power and pizzazzz.

The “Work IN” invites the deep stabilizers to facilitate movement without compression.  Many injuries are happening when overtraining prevents the body from moving well.

Try walking with bracing your torso in a crunch.  How does it affect your legs?

Now imagine a gentle corset like the new Spanx.  You should walk and dance with freedom.

From Google's Body Browser

Marie-Jose brought in newer info about the abdominals.  It really made me rethink how I was cueing and thinking of them.

Muscles have different qualities of tone; fast and slow twitch.  Another way to think about them as global and local.  Marie-Jose’s image for these kinds of muscles is of a light switch.  Your superficial muscles are like the light switch that you turn on and off.  The local muscles are your deep stabilizers that are like dimmers.

We need to turn the dimmers on slowly before adding the big lights switching on or off.

The transverse abdominus  is a corset especially the old fashion where you tie in back.  The fibers do not have the same contration as other muscles.  Widening the transverse to the back will flatten the front and give support for the spine.

• Widen the transverse
• In towards the spine
• Up with the pelvic floor

This is the wiup (whup).  This is a quick nickname that I came up with.  It has been amazing to bring this imagery into my session with students.   It made such a positive change!!

A few well-designed movements….

A few well-designed movements, properly performed in a balanced sequence, are worth hours of doing sloppy calisthenics or forced contortion.   Joseph Pilates

This is such a great quote by Joseph Pilates.  It is so hard even now to get some clients to understand the importance of quality of a workout over the “burn”

What is Core?

This weekend we ran BodyMind fitness: Core.

I shared the teaching with Dr. Martha Eddy, Doris Pasteleur Hall and Kim fielding.

Core is more than your abdominals. It is the torso that houses important organs for breath, circulation and digestion. Giving 3D support is not only important for backcare; it gives the organs room to function. If a person’s posture is chronically slumped, can you see how it will affect breath and the movements of the diaphragm and lungs. With diminished breathe, comes poor circulation without the right amount of oxygen getting to the blood and heart. A domino effect!

A lot of fitness’ core training is bracing down on the torso. Great core support should uplift you. Getting to the deeper
muscles of the core takes great awareness and sometimes backing away from more superficial muscles such as the rectus.

Training of the Pelvic floor, transverse abdominus and the multifidus have a different quality of tone than many muscles. It is the coordination of these in dynamic movement that it becomes complex. Take the plank pose, a full body action.  Bonnie Baindridge Cohen has a great image about deeper muscles.  They current into the joints for stability where our larger muscles groups current out.  When you see poor torso stability,  you see the larger muscles groups compressing the torso down.

Sitting Up for Core Control-Article in PT project

Mom was always telling me to sit up straight at the dinner table and as a kid I never understood why it was so important. Now I teach my clients the benefits of sitting and standing tall to keep their pelvic floor and core muscles continuously active in their endurance mode. This inner cylinder of muscle switches on when we become upright each morning and responds with higher bursts of activity depending on the task involved.

Try this quick activity with your clients to reinforce why posture correction is an essential daily habit to maintain core muscle endurance. Sit on the edge of your chair and become aware of what happens with your pelvic floor muscles with changes of position. Go into a full slump then grow tall through the crown of your head. Try this action again and become aware of how the pelvic floor relaxes with slumping and then firms when you sit tall without any effort to actively contract these muscles.

Years ago I was involved in a study demonstrating this effect.  Pelvic floor muscle activity was recorded via a vaginal electrode and when subjects were fully slumped minimal electrical activity was recorded from the pelvic floor. When asked to sit ‘tall’ they fired off high levels of electrical activity.