A blog about Pilates and fitness

Pilates is not like other exercise. It isn't just to make people fitter. Instead; Pilates consciously effects change throughout the body to allow us to move with grace and ease.  I spent Sunday participating in a teachers' workshop at the Pilates Pod in Hitchin. The tutor, Michelle, is trained in classical Pilates, which means that her teaching draws more from the original style and method of Joseph Pilates than a contemporary teacher such as myself. A key focus of the day was how the mat, reformer and other apparatus work together to help create change in the bodies of our students. At the Pilates Pod. Photo credit: Michelle Smith. Most - if not all - of us have movement patterns that hinder us from optimal efficiency. Pilates can help us to identify and correct those patterns, through improved strength, flexibility, alignment and coordination. Often, we focus on strength and flexibility by going to ever bigger and more challenging movements. However, if these are performed dy...

Let me tell you about an  experiment run by Stanford University . A group of students were each given 25 cards. Each card had printed on it a pair of suicide notes, one real and one fake. The students were asked to read each card and decide which one is the real one. A pretty macabre choice of topics, but it's what they went with. They were told that on average, people could correctly identify 16 out of the 25 cases on the cards. As they gave each answer, the researcher either said, 'correct' or 'incorrect'. Regardless of their real performance, at the end of the test they were told that they had correctly identified either 24 (success), 17 (average), or 10 (failure) notes.  A few minutes later, the researchers confessed to the students that the experiment was actually about how people react to success or failure, apologised for the deception, and explained that their score was assigned randomly, and did not reflect the actual performance in the task. This is wh...

This week, an influential Pilates teacher trainer shared a video on her social media about how she had how she woke up in pain from her osteoarthritis that morning, but after Pilates was pain-free for the rest of the day. She eulogised (quite rightly) that motion is lotion and movement is medicine.  However, she also said something that bothered me. When she was a teenager she was a competitive sprinter, and as an adult she taught aerobics for many years. This, she said, had led her to develop terrible osteoarthritis in her hips, knees and hands. She blames herself for her arthritis. Arthritis* is the word used to describe joint pain and stiffness. Osteoarthritis is the most common form, and it can happen when the protective cartilage on the ends of your bones breaks down.  Osteoarthritis is often colloquially known as, "wear and tear" arthritis, to distinguish it from other types; and it is tempting to believe that you can wear your joints out by subjecting them to impac...

  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 activit...

When describing Pilates, sooner or later people will usually use the phrase "slow and controlled" but is this really an apt way to talk about Pilates, and is it what we should be aspiring to? I teach two types of classes - Pilates and STRONG Nation. If you do both of these, you'll develop both speed and control in abundance. However, it isn't true to say that speed and control are mutually exclusive. When learning a new skill it is better to start slowly as there is a trade-off between speed and accuracy. However, as we become more accomplished and instinctive, we can start to add speed without compromising control. A slalom skier would be an excellent example of someone with both incredible control and speed! But a beginner skier needs to proceed relatively slowly until they have developed the skill to move and turn on the snow. A small amount of speed gives the skier a little help with balance, and allows them to progress from the nursery slopes onto the piste. But ...

With the new term starting, some of you may find that you get stiff, sore muscles a day or two after your new workout. Perhaps you'll find yourself walking downstairs, tentatively supporting each step with the banister rail: “Ouch! Ouch! Ouch!" This is the classic symptom of delayed onset muscle soreness, or DOMS as we call it in the trade. This article explains what DOMS is and whether it's friend or foe. Some people are motivated by DOMS - “Whoop whoop! What a workout yesterday! I can hardly move!!”; whereas it puts other people off - "Boo! What a workout yesterday! I can hardly move!!" But what does DOMS tell you about your workout? Contrary to popular belief, it isn't caused by a buildup of lactic acid that can be flushed away by water or massage, nor is it the result of failing to warm-up before or stretch after exercise. Instead, it is thought to be the result of inflammation caused by tiny tears (microtrauma) in the muscle tissue. DOMS is a sign that y...

  If you are one of those people can always turn your hand to new sports and physical activities, scroll past this article. It's not for you. This weekend I went stand-up paddleboarding on the river Cam for the first time. I pushed that board along quite respectably and I didn't fall in. If you only recently met me you'd say, "Well of course!" But I haven't always been like this. I'm not a natural at physical activity, I'm a bit of a coward, and I'm not a fan of cold water! Perhaps unexpectedly, my lack of innate skill is the main reason that I got into teaching fitness. My experience became a passionate belief that we all have the ability to improve the components of fitness that make it easy for us to try out new things and seem like a natural. I'm in the business of changing lives through better movement. What abilities have I gained from Pilates and STRONG Nation that made paddleboarding easy? Confidence. We do things that scare us. Maybe n...