If you’ve been considering Pilates classes, you probably already know that this type of exercise is more popular than ever. There’s a good reason for that—everyone from celebrities and athletes to stay-at-home parents have recognized that Pilates provides more than just a workout.
It also bolsters the body’s own ability to take care of itself by staying stable, strong, and flexible. You do not need to be a flexible or acrobatic person to start enjoying Pilates classes. In fact, Pilates is a great foundation for gaining flexibility and also strength, balance, and mobility.
Here are some of the ways that Pilates improves your body alignment and stability enabling you to approach your favorite activities with confidence and energy.
Stabilizing the Spine
If the body is a tree, the spine is its trunk—and no tree can stand tall and strong without an equally strong trunk to hold it up. Pilates exercises articulate the spine, moving it and stretching it in all directions across all of its segments.
This ensures it remains flexible and strong while training the muscles around it to help keep it stable. The processes of moving the spine in these various ways are called flexion, extension, and rotation.
There are different Pilates exercises that move the spine in these directions, to help the entire spinal column become strong and well aligned.
Strengthening the Core
Many people do not realize that the back muscles are not the only ones holding the spine in place and keep you stable. The core muscles are a group of muscles within your midsection that stabilize your spine and pelvis.
By strengthening the core through Pilates exercises, all of the muscles in this area deep within the abdominals and back, get exercise to keep them strong and exert pressure where they are supposed to.
This pulls your hips into the right position, alleviating back pain and keeping you more stabilized in your daily activities. Without a strong core, other muscles will attempt to compensate, which can lead to bad posture, pain, and tightness.
Boosting Bodily Awareness
Pilates is a type of exercise that focuses on proprioception—the understanding of how your body is positioned in space. You’ll be asked to hold positions at certain angles, and after a while, you won’t need to look. This builds bodily awareness, which is valuable in other contexts, too.
For instance, understanding how your body is oriented helps you recover faster if you trip. It keeps you more stable, and it can even help you notice if your posture is slipping throughout the day. You cannot start to fix a problem if you haven’t noticed that it exists!
Increasing Flexibility
We talked before about how Pilates can make your spine more flexible—but this benefit doesn’t stop at just your spine! Pilates builds full-body flexibility, and you will find that from your hamstrings to your hips, and everything above and below, you are more tolerant of stretching after taking a few Pilates classes.
Increasing flexibility is not just useful to help you bend and move, though. A more flexible body recovers from injuries faster and stays in the right alignment, rather than being pulled by tight ligaments into a less than ideal position.
This can spare you from lower back pain, neck pain, and injuries that result from hyperflexion, or extending a part of your body too far outside its flexible range.
Equalizing the Gait
A person’s gait refers to the manner in which they walk. For some people, their gait can be the cause of pain because they may walk unevenly, placing greater strain on one side of their body.
In fact, multiple studies have shown that people with low back pain have a different gait than those with no back pain. Supporting an even and stable gait is a good way to keep the body in good health.
Pilates focuses on muscle groups evenly without favoring one side of the body. This can help weak muscles develop enough strength to properly stabilize the body and bring it back into proper alignment. While this often occurs around the spine and hip area, it can happen anywhere!
Explore Pilates Classes at RTR Pilates
Pilates is a great exercise, and our instructors will teach you how to become proficient on a reformer even if you are a beginner and have never seen one before.
Your body will thank you, because it will not take long to start feeling the results of actively engaging your entire body! The instructors at RTR Pilates are always eager to welcome new participants, whether you have Pilates experience or no exercise experience at all.
Contact RTR Pilates to sign up for your first beginner class and develop the bodily alignment and stability that will keep you active for years to come!
