A blog about Pilates and fitness

  Is bending to lift bad for your back? There’s long been debate over whether bending and lifting cause disc herniations. Some believe these movements are risky, while others say our spines are built to handle them. So, who’s right? The Case for Caution Research shows  repeated  bending and lifting can contribute to disc herniations. When you bend forward, the pressure in your spinal discs shifts backward. Add lifting, and the load increases further. Over time, this can cause the soft centre of a disc to press through its tougher outer layers, leading to a herniation. This has led to advice like “keep your back neutral” or “lift with your legs” to reduce strain. The Other Side of the Story Critics argue that avoiding bending and lifting isn’t a perfect solution. Straight-backed lifting increases muscle fatigue and shifts force elsewhere, creating other risks. Plus, some spinal flexion is inevitable, even with ideal technique, and they complain that laboratory based experi...

The Best Pilates Studio in Cambridge Ease Pilates has been awarded the Best Pilates Studio in Cambridge for 2024 by Quality Business Awards! Thank you to our fantastic team for delivering the best Pilates classes and customer service, and to our wonderful clients who make it a joy to work for Ease Pilates!

Pilates isn't your average workout— it's an intricate skill that develops complete control of both body and mind, where each exercise is a gift with many layers to be unwrapped: Precise alignment - from the start position and through the whole movement path. A particular rhythm and a particular tempo. Optimal breathing pattern. Stretch - optimal range of movement without overstretching. Strength - to work against gravity and/or spring tension. Control - of balance and momentum. The mind - to work with precision and focus. Endurance - to move continually from one exercise to the next. Satisfaction - your reward for persevering with a challenging task. With all of these components in place you will find that, to quote Joseph Pilates himself: "Physical fitness is the first requisite of happiness. Our interpretation of physical fitness is the attainment and maintenance of a uniformly developed body with a sound mind fully capable of naturally, easily, and satis...

Welcome to 2024! Since the new year, I've been hearing a lot about 2024 plans, both from new starters and established regulars who want to up their game. It's normal in January to start thinking about goals and resolutions. According to   Forbes , around 40% of New Year's Resolutions are about exercising more, so, as you can imagine, I hear a lot of them. However, the same article reported that 21% of people give up their resolution in under a month, with a further 34% lasting only three months. I don't actively market to the New Year's Resolution crowd because I believe that long-term behaviour change is the key to improving your quality of life, and that repeated failure may have a negative effect on self-esteem. However, the New Year is as good a time as any to make positive changes to your lifestyle, so if you've made resolutions, here are my tips for developing new habits that will change your life for the better! You are good enough.  Nearly all of my begi...

I often get asked which is best - mat or reformer? The truth is that both are excellent ways to exercise and both will help you to achieve a stronger, more flexible body.  The reformer is a fantastic teaching tool that gives support and feedback to improve your technique, so that you can achieve things you never thought possible. The resistance training element means that it also offers more opportunity for strengthening the arms and legs. The 100 exercise performed on the mat and on the reformer The mat is where you can put what you have learned on the reformer into practice. Because you don't have the support of the springs, some exercises will work your core harder (so much harder, in fact, that we usually have to modify the work to make it accessible!). It's also an affordable option that will teach you the skills to establish an independent practice that you can take anywhere with you.  The ideal recipe for Pilates success is to take one mat and one reformer class every w...

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...