Four little things

Given that I’m thinking about the small stuff that adds up to big stuff this week, I’ll offer a list of the little shifts that Pilates creates:

1.     Posture.  Most of us slouch.  Pilates helps us get our hips back under us, our shoulders back and down, and our heads in line with the rest of our spine.

2.     Height.  When we work to articulate our spines in Pilates, we create more space there.  We look and feel taller and longer.

3.     Grace.  As we improve our sense of where our bodies are in space by moving mindfully, we are less likely to crash into unexpected furniture, door frames, or humans.

4.     Calm.  That same mindful movement, coupled with focus on breathing, helps us chill out a bit.

Let me know if you want to try it out!

Balance it out

Another thing I like to work on with my clients that they generally don’t do when I’m not watching is balance.  Most of us don’t love working on it because—news flash—it’s hard.  I admit that we are unlikely to have to teeter our way along a tightrope or commute by unicycle or leap from peak to peak like mountain goats in our daily lives (although some of us may have more interesting lives than others…).  We all do have to negotiate curbs, potholes, uneven surfaces, stairs, and the occasional unexpected pet, toddler, or unidentified lurking object on the floor.  All of those obstacles require us to react with balancing skills.

It may not be fun to find out that our right ankle is significantly wobblier than our left, or that our abs could use a little work, or that one glute doesn’t like to work much.  The thing is, we get better as we practice.  I have clients do single leg squats, or play one-legged catch with me (that way, I get to practice, too!).

At home, I suggest standing on one foot while brushing teeth.  Seeing how long we can balance on one foot (or, if we’re feeling particularly advanced, on the ball of one foot) can help the time pass in the grocery line (and if we have to step out of our balance, we can amuse the other people in line).

All the work we do to improve our core strength and to keep ourselves in good postural alignment helps, too, but nothing substitutes for actual practice.

One note:  when we get too frustrated, we should stop.  We can’t balance without taking ourselves lightly.

Stretch Goals

When I am there with my weight training clients, they stretch.  In fact, I offer assisted stretching.  At the very least, I’m standing there reminding them to do it, watching the few form issues that stretching presents, and encouraging them to stick it out for a few more breaths.  I remind them that doing it more often makes it easier.  I suggest that just because it makes them feel good, it doesn’t mean that it isn’t good for them or important.

And almost none of them stretch any other time.

Stretching doesn’t burn calories or produce the high that cardio does.  We don’t get the same kind of sense of achievement we get from lifting a record weight (although for the chronically stiff, that first toe-touch is pretty special).  It just hurts in that good, first-thing-in-the-morning way.  And then we feel better.

So we skip it.  We hurry off to the shower and work and kids and traffic and oh-no-I-forgot-I-have-to-go-to-the-dentist and then suddenly our shoulders are up under our ears and we can hardly turn our heads much less bend down to pick up our shoes.

Five minutes.  We can steal that five minutes somewhere in the day, whether it is a calf stretch while we do the dishes, a quad stretch while we’re on the phone, a surreptitious piriformis/glute stretch (the one where we, sitting down, cross one ankle over the other knee and press the bent knee down) during a meeting, or maybe a triceps stretch while we wait for the microwave to ding.

If we can, longer is better.  A whole yoga or stretching or Pilates session is super double awesome, but even a little can make a big difference in how we move.