Breathing:
Joseph Pilates once said that if you don't get anything right get the breathing right. We often forget to breath. When we are faced with a crisis and have to react quickly we forget to breath. Out breathing becomes very shallow. We forget to give the body what it really needs, a good healthy dose of air and hopefully fresh air. In Pilates we direct the breathing towards the bottom and back of the ribs. It is a lateral kind of breathing. Lets try that, simply place your hands on the bottom ribs with your fingers pointing toward each other and the fingers should almost be touching. Now breath deeply and try to move the air into your hands and by doing so your hands should separate away from each other. Breath through your nose and into the side and back of the ribs and exhale out through the mouth exhaling fully this time closing the ribs. Try this several times and add the following. Visualize that you have extended wings (angel wings) attached to you back bottom ribs. Now breathe the air into those angel wings. I encourage you to practice this and all that is in this chapter as simply practice makes perfect. Good correct breathing can do many things. It feeds the body, it cleans the lungs, it is a great form of stress relief and it can only help you when exercising both in Pilates and in an endurance sport. In Pilates everything begins and ends with the breath. It is a smooth and flowing breath. Think of riding the movement with the breath.
A Strong Mind Body Connection:
The best way to understand this is by way of example. Picture yourself in one of those fancy gyms with heaps of fancy bits of equipment. You have just joined with the intention to look like Arnold and Sly as soon as possible. Holding dumbbells in your hands and standing in front of the mirrors doing bicep curls. The gym is an exciting place filled with some good looking people, your mind begins to wonder. Now stop right there and actually think of the bicep. As you slowly release the dumbbell to the floor focus on allowing the bicep to stretch. Now as you start to bring the dumbbell towards you focus on contracting that bicep more and more. This is a slower and more focus movement. Notice how you don't even have to have weight in your hand to get the bicep to work. By placing the focus on the relevant muscle you would have gained the maximum results out of the exercise. It is exactly the same with Pilates. By becoming highly focused you are going to gain far more than by just pumping iron. In Pilates we place the body in the correct position and coupled with an intense focus by the participant you will achieve extraordinary results.
Body awareness:
With that in mind lets focus in on the body. This is the way that I would begin each Pilates class and it is a way of preparing the body for the work to follow, finding your center and core connections and also preparing the mind byway of focusing on the body (creating that strong mind body connection) Throughout the following routine you need to keep your gaze forward and parallel with the floor, not looking at anything in particular but rather becoming introvert and directing your attention inwards Lets start with the feet, our connection with the earth. Feel all ten toes spreading across the floor. Make sure that the feet are parallel with each other pointing toward the front and hip distance apart. Now lift your heals gently to ensure that the weight is forward over the balls of the feet. Imagine that you are standing on the earth, visualize the globe underneath you and being pushed away. To do this the leg muscle need to be activated. Pull the knee caps up towards your center by activating the thigh muscles, gentle squeeze the legs together by activating the inner thigh muscles, and feel the hamstrings and the gluteal's firmly held. Now focus on the gap between the hip bones and the bottom ribs making this gap wider and wider and imagine a corset wrapping around your waist getting narrower and narrower. Feel little bubbles between each vertebrae and the gap between each one getting wider and this makes you feel lighter and lighter. Move your attention towards your shoulders and widen the gap between shoulders and earlobes, gently feeling your armpits moving towards your waist. Visualize a giraffe with its long neck. Finally feel the crown of your head reaching up towards the ceiling. Lets now imagine putting on a very tight pair of jeans and you slowly do the zip up. The jeans are too small so you need to suck in the flesh from the pubic bone up to your belly button. Start with the very lowest part of the zip by sinking the navel to the spine, remember tight jeans and slowly zip toward your belly button. Lets not forget to breath. Inhale through the nose and as we exhale out through the mouth we are once again zipping up that very tight pair of jeans, and pushing the air out from the navel to spine connection. On every inhale try to grow a few inches taking special care keep that giraffe like neck and not to displace the shoulders. This attempt to grow taller has an added benefits, apart from actually making you feel better about your self it also activates a deep core muscle in the back. This muscle is called the Multifidus. It is an involuntary muscle which we cant ordinarily activate. Meaning that it is like the heart muscle which continues to beat by signals from the brain. However we can get the heart to work harder by taking a jog and similarly we can get the Multifidus to activate by lengthening and growing taller. Now that we are more body aware lets do one of our first exercises.
The Role Down.
Inhale to prepare and to lengthen not forgetting the wide lateral breathing that we learned earlier.
Exhale to node your chin looking towards your feet and to continue to move your head down towards your feet. Each vertebra will unstack one after the other as you allow the weight of your head to take you down toward the floor. You can soften the knees a little if required. You will only be going down as far as the shoulders are in line with your hips. Throughout this exercise keep the belly button glued onto the spine to protect the lumber spine. Inhale to hold taking a deep breath into the back of the ribs. Exhale and activate the leg muscles, deepen the abdominal connection (navel to spine) and bring you body back up to standing by only using your abdominal. There should be a lot of work into the abdominal's right now but also keep the legs activated. Stack each vertebra one on top of the other as you come back up with the head being the last to come back up and sit on top of the neck. Repeat 3 times. There are many things to think about in this exercise and I hope that you now understand why the mind body connection is so important.
Neutral Pelvis:
Pilates is very Posture orientated. It is about correcting bad posture through a re balancing of muscle. It places the center of gravity back onto the center of each joint. Bad posture places the center of gravity away from the center of the joint and results in time with a grating away of the joint and the result is painful joints. Pilates is therefore excellent for longevity. So lets look at posture then. If we are to look at our selves and others around us we will see a variety of postures. Some people walk around with there pelvises pointing down towards the ground. Imagine that your hips have head lights attached to them much like a car. Now instead of these head lights pointing directly in front of you and parallel with the floor they are flashing on the floor. The pelvis is now tilting towards the floor and this means that your lumbar spine is in a constant flexion. It is over arched and placing undue stress on the muscles and vertebrae and is going to effect the entire body alignment. To go to the other extreme some of us have the head lights facing the ceiling. The back is now flat and there are no shock absorbers in place. As one walks or runs in this standing position there is shock going up through the vertebrae up into the back of the head. We want our headlamp's to be parallel with the floor. Now place the heals of your hand on top of the bony bones of the hips and the fingers of both hands just above the pubic bone. You now have a triangle shape, that is hip bone right hand is corner A, hip bone left hand is corner B and fingers of both hands in corner C. This triangle should be at a 90 degree angle to the floor when standing. Play around with this for a moment tilting the triangle upward and down towards the floor and then finding that middle ground. That middle ground is what we call neutral pelvis. Now we can move to the mat where we will be lying on the back with knees bent and knees and feet in line with the hips. Once again place your hands on hips as you did standing and tilt your pubic bone towards and away and once again find the middle of the two which is the neutral pelvis and which should now be parallel with the floor. Some people might find this position uncomfortable, and the reason for this is that they have adopted and incorrect posture which they find comfortable and so this correct position feels alien. It is important to work in this neutral pelvic position to correct bad posture. It has been proven that it takes between 3 to 5 thousand, yes thousand, repetitions for the body to recognize a correction or to develop a new habit. So repetition is so very important and once again I encourage you to practice this neutral pelvic position when sitting and standing so that the body and brain can recognize it as correct.
The Transverses Abdominis: Lets adjust the hand position a little, lift the heals of your hands of the hips and just dig your fingers into what is best described as the bikini line or for the guys perhaps the speedo line. Now take a deep breath and cough to big cough twice. Repeat. Hopefully you felt your fingers bounce up as you coughed. This is the function of the deepest core abdominal muscle called the transverses abdominis or TA for short. As Pilates is very core muscle orientated we will be getting to know the TA very well. The TA function is to acted as a girdle stopping the insides from falling out. Now it is important to be able to isolate this muscle. That is to use this muscle on its own with out recruiting the other abdominals at the same time. release your finger away and lets try this exercise:
Inhale to prepare not forgetting to take that wide lateral breath and also lengthening out through the crown of your head and your tail bone.
Exhale to blow the air out through your mouth but trying to do this by sinking the TA muscle down and flat. Think of shrinking the flesh from your pubic bone up to your belly button down and flat across your navel like a belt. The zipping up of a tight pair of jeans also may help you. Being careful not to activate other abdominal's to help you but only the TA muscle or the cough muscle that you felt earlier.
Inhale to hold this connection.
Exhale to repeat attempting to go deeper.
The Pelvic Floor:
You may well be asking yourself, what on earth has the pelvic floor or PF got to do with anything? Well remember that Pilates deals with core muscles and lets face it the PF floor is a core muscle. Having a strong PF is especially good for women as women tend to suffer from incontinence in later life. The Pilates reason for using the PF would be to help activate the core abdominal muscles. By activating the PF you will be able to develop a stronger connection with your Transverses Abdominis. What is the Pelvic Floor? Imagine sitting on a hammock that is made for a Barbie doll. As you sit onto it and put weight onto the hammock you would be pressing onto your Pelvic Floor. It is the Girdle that stops all from falling out between the legs. So how do we then activate this Pelvic Floor? Imagine that you have a very full bladder. You need to wee, urgently. The PF would be working to hold back until a convenient opportunity. It is the same with perhaps passing wind. For men it would be the feeling of pulling up the scrotum. Spend a moment or two just activating this muscle. This can be done sitting, standing or lying down. Activate the muscle and release, contract and release…. Lets take it a step further and after activating the PF try to recruit the Transverses Abdominis TA. Now try the following exercise:
Inhale to prepare.
Exhale to activate the PF and to blow the air out through the mouth but from initiating the TA (zip the jeans).
Inhale to hold.
Exhale to repeat but once again going deeper.
In conclusion:
Do not fear if you cant feel the connections immediately. It can take time and so you will need to build upon what ever connections you can feel. Keep focusing on what you are trying to do as you go through the above mentioned exercises to assist you on your journey. After a while you will feel both TA and PF connection working on their own and then together. Further more add the lengthening of the body to activate the Multifidus which we looked at earlier. I often refer to the three core connections as the Pilates nappy. A nappy has a front part (TA) a back part (Multifidus) and the part that goes in-between the legs (PF). Work all three together and you are well on your way to a better body for life and to strengthening the power house which is the very core of the Pilates method. These connections should be held gently and continuously. It will not restrict your breathing as that is done laterally and will only help support your back and improve your posture. I want to stress though that it should be a gently hold and not a bracing heave. You want to be able to hold this for a long time so gently activate and hold. This then concludes chapter one and this is only the very beginning of the Pilates experience. However with out it you will not be able to benefit from your training as you should. Like most things it must begin in the mind and then permeate into the body. The next step would be to take this knowledge into the actual Pilates exercises.
Finally I have only two words to conclude:
Try It.