The Body Works Pilates Studio

Teaching Tip Tuesday

This simple sequence of exercises for strengthening the feet has proven time and again over the past 20 years to be tremendously effective.

Toe taps - 50 reps
Heel taps - 50 reps
Toes swishing inwards against the floor - 50 reps
Toes swishing outwards against the floor - 50 reps
Heels swishing inwards against the floor - 50 reps
Heels swishing outwards against the floor - 50 reps
Inchworm - 4 sets of 5 x forward & back

Terrific for developing strength of all the intrinsic muscles through the feet. Pair this with the foot mobility work from our Good Gait class, based on the Anatomy in Motion work by Gary Ward, and you will have the most supple and strong feet.

Tuesday Teaching Tip

Do you have a tight diaphragm?

Can you even imagine that a diaphragm could be tight? Well, it is a muscle. And just like any other muscle, it can get overly tight, restricting your ability to breathe.

The diaphragm is shaped like a big umbrella. Everyone has had the experience when trying to close your umbrella, it gets stuck part way down, not allowing you to close it completely. This is exactly what can happen with a tight diaphragm. A tight diaphragm prevents you from exhaling smoothly and fully. A tight diaphragm will inhibit your abdominals from firing properly (remember that the diaphragm is your primary inspiration muscle and the abs are expiratory muscles).

Here is my simple sequence to release a tight diaphragm and rebalance the abs to the diaphragm:

1. Coughing is a strong ab-driven action. It is one of our primary reflexes that will always override any undo diaphragm tension. Start laying in a comfortable position. Bend to the right by bringing your right shoulder down to your hip. Press the right arm against you hip. Turn your head to the right. Cough strongly two times. You are pulling down strongly the right side of the diaphragm - this is your release for the right side of the diaphragm.
2. Straighten out your torso. Bring your left thigh and and right hand together. Strongly exhale as you press the knee and hand together. On the inhale, release the knee pressure. You will feel the right side obliques that attach along the right side ribs engage strongly. Repeat this diagonal knee pressure 4 times. This is strengthening the abs to support the longer right side of the diaphragm.

If you take a breath in now, you should feel way more expansion and freedom through the right side. Repeat this sequence on the left side.

It is surprising how many people I see coming into the studio who have a limited breathing capacity. Many of my clients have this sequence as the starting exercise for their programs.

Tuesday Teaching Tip

Been sitting at the computer for far too long? The Prone Cervical Nods is a great exercise to help undo that desk-bound posture that most office workers tend to carry. Specifically, I am referring to the head-forward, rounded upper back posture that I see many of my 5:30 pm clientele have walking into the studio. Typically, this involves short, tight neck extensors paired with long, weak neck flexors along with weak upper back extensors.

Lay on your front, arms by your side, palms down.
Engage the abs, drawing them up to meet the spine.
Reach the arms down towards your feet to engage the lats and lower trapezius muscles as you lift your sternum off the floor. This will use the back extensors through the thoracic spine (along the sides of the rib cage).
Hovering the sternum only an inch or two off the floor (between 2.54 and 5.08 cm for you metric-centric people), nod your head. With the nod, you are lengthening the back of the neck, creating more space between the base of the skull and the collar of your shirt at the back. The head remains the same distance off the floor (inches or centimetres, your choice).
Hold this position for 10 reps do the small head rotations for the first set.
Repeat the whole exercise with 10 reps of small head tilts side to side.

Pair this exercise with the seated hip flexor stretch (check back to my earlier post), and you can undo hours of sitting-induced stiffness.

Tuesday Teaching Tip
I recently had an interesting conversation with a client about this exercise, the Spine Stretch. She really wanted to feel where the effort was; she was searching for ‘the burn’. It took a little while to talk her down from that perspective. You can see in the video I do several reps, two in relatively good classical form, two in the thrusting dive forward that the client was trying to do, and then two more good reps. Her focus was on how forcefully she could dive forward, thinking that this was the big effort for the exercise. She was missing out on two fundamental points implicit in all Pilates exercises: whole body movement and spinal mobility.
We start bringing the the arms forward, moving through the shoulders and shoulder blades with ease, not closing down with tension.
We then flex forward through the spine, articulating through each vertebral joint down the spine to open space through the posterior space of these joints, through into hip flexion. The arms are actively reaching forward, increasing the shoulder flexion and pulling the shoulder blades further apart to release the posterior shoulder girdle muscles.
We stack the vertebrae back to vertical, activating all of the deep to superficial back extensors sequentially up the spine, lifting the vertebrae up off each other to our ideal spinal alignment. Pressing down through the sitz bones and thighs further integrates the whole posterior kinetic chain. The passive arm release back to a neutral shoulder position teaches the brain that while one part of the body may be actively working, another part can be releasing.
When done well, the Spine Stretch opens each and every vertebral joint through the posterior side, as well as then returning back to perfect posture, tractioning the vertebrae apart as we reach this alignment. Effectively this works the spine from both front and back, developing the strength to support the mobility through each vertebral joint. We learn how to move through the shoulder girdle with ease rather than binding down in tension. And we work through active hip flexion and extension.
A full body experience with a supple spine = Pilates.

And about the exhale…

After yesterday’s post about inhaling through the nose, I have had several questions about the Pilates exhale. When doing any Pilates exercise, we are generally working for the strongest and fullest exhale we can muster. A strong exhale is driven by the abs pulling the ribs down to squeeze the air out of the lungs. A strong exhale will recruit more abdominal fibres than any other core exercise. Test this out: put your hands on your abs and cough. What do you feel happen under your fingertips? You should feel those abs tense up and draw inwards, tightening up like a corset around your waistline. If you can feel that, you have four layers of abs totally coordinated.

And we exhale through the mouth making a shaped aperture. Test this out, as well. Try forcefully exhaling with a wide open mouth and then with deliberately shaped mouth. How well do you engage the abs with the wide open mouth? Probably not very well. A little shaping of the lips changes the ab coordination.

The simplest exercise to organize this breath out is to play with a pinwheel. Blow on the pinwheel, making it spin well, sustaining the spin until you have totally squeezed all of the air out of your lungs. A complete, strong, full exhale through the mouth is a Pilates exhalation.

I am not suggesting that have to walk around breathing like this all day long. We use this breathing technique when we do the Pilates exercises to optimize the core recruitment for these movements. You are compounding the strengthening intended in the exercises. You are also simply strengthening your respiratory muscles for when you need a greater respiratory output, like when you are climbing up that hill on your bicycle ride or being chased by that bear on your camping trip. And you have to admit - skipping down the street while blowing on your pinwheel, what could be more fun?

Tuesday Teaching Tips

We are back talking about breathing technique today. With every breath in Pilates, we inhale through the nose and exhale through the mouth. Nasal breathing, in general is the most efficient means of breathing for a whole litany of reasons. Why we want to inhale through the nose in Pilates is because this promotes the most effective recruitment of the diaphragm. In other words, we are neurologically hardwired to use our diaphragm most effectively when we inhale through our nose.

Yet, a lot of people still get this wrong by sniffing through the nose. As you can see for the first two breaths in the video, when I sniff, my nostrils actually close down on themselves. The breath becomes much more of a upper rib cage breath. And you can see how much my neck muscles are recruited. This does not use the diaphragm, only the intercostals and superficial inspiratory muscles.

A simple cue to ensure you are inhaling well is to deliberately draw the breath in through the nose into the back of the throat. The nostrils should automatically expand, creating a bigger diameter passageway through the nose. And you should feel the diaphragm expand more thoroughly around the whole circumference of the lower rib cage, as demonstrated in the second two breaths on the video. This is a true diaphragmatic breath, a perfect 360 degree breath. Taking the inhale cuing further, I ask my clients to inhale through the nose, drawing the breath into the back of the throat and down into the bottom of the lungs to the 12th ribs. And to be able to do this through every rep of every single Pilates exercise requires a whole lot of concentration and control, exactly what Joseph Pilates asked for when he designed all of this work.

Tuesday Teaching Tip

For today’s tip, I want to address a critical safety tip for all Pilates practitioners - the importance of a good quality mat. There are several mat exercises that put weight onto a flexing or fully flexed spine: Roll Over, Rolling Like a Ball, Open Leg Rocking, Jackknife, Seal and more. In these spinal flexion exercises, the weight of the body is loaded through the spine more directly through the spinous processes of the vertebrae, the knobby points that you can touch on your back. Simply put, these exercises expose these bony projection more when you flex the spine. And you need decent cushioning to protect these bony points of the vertebrae.

Get yourself a reasonably cushioned mat to do your matwork on. A yoga mat is NOT sufficient. There are several Pilates-specific mats on the market that you can purchase. These are usually about 1 cm or more thick. What I use here at the studio is a camping mat made by Thermarest, called Ridgerest. These are inexpensive and last for decades (I kid you not, I only replaced my original stock five years ago and I have been in business for 25 years).

Again, this is a critical point for safety. Doing these exercises on a poorly cushion mat, you can bruise or even fracture a spinous process. I have done this before practicing my mat exercises on a s**g carpet with what I thought was a thick underlay. It took two months for the bone bruise to heal. And, if you have any degree of osteopenia or osteoporosis, these particular exercises are completely contraindicated. Let’s play safe when we move.

Tuesday Teaching Tip

The Spine Twist is the purest spinal rotation exercise in the classical repertoire. When the spine is a straight or neutral alignment, the spacing between the vertebrae is in the best orientation for maximum rotation. Spinal rotation is a complex coordination of muscular action, from the main drivers of rotation, the internal and external oblique abdominal muscles, to the rotatores muscles which link from one vertebra to the next below deep along the posterior surface of the vertebrae.

So, to optimize your spinal rotation, firstly sit up straight. If this means rolling up your mat or sitting on a yoga block to counter a slouched spine because of tight hamstrings, go for it.

The second point is to ensure the main rotators are indeed driving the spinal rotation. If you are turning to the right, you should be feeling for the left external obliques and right internal obliques pulling the left corner of the ribs towards the right hip. Often I see clients inadvertently throwing their arms around for momentum. To correct this, when turning to the right, touch your right hand fingers to your sternum. This will negate any possibility of throwing the arm around in the turn. The trailing arm is held out directly to the side. Take the arms out of the equation and you will better access your primary rotators of the spine.

From walking, opening the door, to swinging a golf club, even down to the hydration of the vertebral disks, rotation is a critically important movement for our daily functioning. The Spine Twist is a brilliantly simple classical Pilates exercise that helps facilitate this spinal motion.

Best case scenario:
Here is what a good extension in the Swan should be, unlike the old-man swan I demonstrated previously...

Tuesday Teaching Tips

Swan - a full body effort to open the front of the spine.

The Swan, and even more so the Swan Dive, had long been my nemesis. I got into Pilates to rehab from two fractured vertebrae. So, back extension has never been a favourite direction. For the first several years into my Pilates journey, any back extension movements would only lead to over-firing my lumbar extensors, compressing my low back.

One of the movement principles Joseph Pilates espoused was whole body movement, everything works to support the movement. It was when I figured out how to do this that I was able to do the Swan without pain. Now, I can literally traction my whole spine in extension with this exercise. I still don’t have a very big range of hyper-extension, but do I need that in my mid-50’s now? No, I need a long, supple spine that can move in any direction freely and without pain.

The components for a good swan are:
Back extensors - working the multiple levels of extensors to articulate through each joint
Hip extensors - gluts and hamstrings leverage the pelvis off the floor and are continuous with the back extensors through the posterior kinetic chain and cues lengthening of the hip flexors.
Shoulder girdle - strongly sliding the shoulder blades down the thorax engage the lats and lower trapezius, adding more lift of the weight of the torso and countering the extensors to open more space between the vertebrae
Abs - use the entire length of the abs to support the front of the spine/torso with the eccentric contraction of the abs
Arms - the hands are fixed into the floor to anchor the shoulder girdle. Actively pull yourself up and down with the arm effort
Eyes - track up along the floor and back down to refine the smooth articulation from the top of the spine down and back.

Tuesday Teaching Tip

Stretching the deep external rotators.

Did you know that there are six muscles deep across the back of the hip joint that are dedicated to rotating your femur (thigh bone) outwards in external rotation (what every ballet dancer works for in turnout). These small but powerful muscles also form a hammock for your pelvis to rest on and thus provide a role in organizing pelvis alignment over your legs.

If they are too tight, they will force the ball of the femur upwards and forwards in the hip socket. This stretch for these muscles is an adaptation from a myo-fascial stretch by the French osteopath, Guy Voyer.

For the side that we are stretching, we are bracing the leg in internal rotation against the floor; the other leg is held in external rotation. Sit with the pelvis as square as possible. You can sit up on a mat, yoga block or pillow to get the sitz bones as level as possible. Rotate the spine towards the internally rotated leg, using your core and your arms. Rotate until you hit the end point of your twist. Go a little further and you will feel how you start to leverage your pelvis back away from the femur (think of pulling your back pocket towards the wall behind you). And reach out through the leg, pulling your knee forward. The goal is to open more space across the back of the hip joint. Hang out for 4 - 6 breaths, increasing the turn every exhale.

Once you have completed the stretch, lay down on you back and do 10 small leg swings. Allow the femur to fall back in the hip socket as the leg comes up to vertical.

Some people experience knee pain along the inside line of the knee from this stretch. Do the stretch judiciously, not taking any structure, knee or hip, into the range causing pain. You may have to work on this repeatedly to gently coax length out of all the tissues around the hip joint. Listen to your body as you do this or any stretch.

Practicing this regularly will free up the hip joint and allow for more swing in your stride.