Muscle through or move with ease?

 

There are many benefits to exercise, including strength, coordination, flexibility, focus, power, endurance, pain threshold, cardiovascular health, and body composition (eg ratio of muscle to fat). While most exercise regimes will help with all of these to a certain extent, each method has its own focus. For example, if your primary goal is to build muscle (hypertrophy), then the best method is weight training. When it comes to growing in size, your muscles don't mind how well you lift weights - they care that you make them lift a heavy enough weight enough times to tire them out. Weight training will also help with other fitness benefits, but it is the king of hypertrophy. Pilates, however, is the king of control. The other fitness elements all improve when you practise Pilates, but the main goal is to move your body effectively and efficiently. These skills transfer over to make you more effective and efficient at weightlifting, running, gymnastics or any other movement activity that you might choose to do. With Pilates, you can change movement habits that aren't necessarily working for you. Perhaps you move in a certain way because of an old injury long since repaired, carrying a baby on your hip/ bag on your shoulder, or an unnatural position you need to adopt for work. Pilates will teach you new and better ways to move. Pilates is the King of Control Joseph Pilates defined Contrology (as he named his method) as 'the complete coordination of body, mind, and spirit'. As such, he didn't care for 'hours of sloppy calisthenics or forced contortion'. Instead, his work is about carefully selected movements, performed well, that will sustain a healthy and well-balanced body.  It is a fundamental principle of exercise that we need to make changes to our bodies we need to progress the work we do. However, if we progress before we are ready, we can 'muscle through' and use our existing (perhaps unsatisfactory) movement patterns and momentum to create something that loosely resembles the intended movement. It is unlikely that you will be injured if you can't execute an exercise that is too hard for you perfectly, but your body will miss out on the opportunity to learn its most efficient pattern. Instead, you would strengthen your body in a way that reinforces the faulty movement.  The video below shows me performing the pulling ropes exercise with an appropriate spring, followed by a spring that I deliberately chose to be too heavy for me! Can you see how although I can 'sort of-kind of' do the exercise, I'm having to bend the elbows and wrists, use momentum and raise the shoulders in order to get there with the heavy spring? These are all indications that the load is too much for me to be able to recruit the correct muscles, so I'm compensating by drawing on any muscles I can to move the arms. I promise you that I was trying my best to move correctly, but I had made it too hard for myself! This was only for the purposes of demonstration - I don't normally work like this.

By starting with an appropriate spring and with practice and a gradual increase in load, I will be able to perform the exercise with the heavier spring with the same quality of movement as the lighter spring. However, if I jump straight to the heavy spring I will get stronger, but that strength will not be accompanied by good movement quality. With Pilates you will get stronger - much stronger - and you will develop your musculature, but don't confuse it with strength training alone! With Pilates you will get stronger ... but don't confuse it with strength training alone That's not to say that Pilates is easy - it very seldom is. Changing the habits of a lifetime is hard, and you can expect to work and grunt and feel the burn! The skill is in finding just the right level of difficulty for you. So take it steady, listen to your body (and your teacher!) to choose the right level, and if you are on the reformer, the right spring tension, for you to be able to execute it to the best of your ability.