Pilates: Movement that gives you "All The Feels"

Stand with both feet hip bone distance apart, now shift your weight into your left foot to take a giant step forward with your right foot. Hold this position, then flex your right knee to a 90 degree angle so it’s perpendicular to your right heel. Keep 80% of your weight into your front foot as you extend your left leg out, curl the toes under and drive the balls of the toes into the ground. Lift the left heel and start to pull it in towards your front foot without bending your left knee. Keep pressing into both feet and shift 70% of your weight into your right foot and leave the remaining 30% into your left foot.  Now hinge forward from your hips. Press firmly into your right big toe and “feel” your right glutes engage to stabilize you.

This is typically what you’ll hear, whether you’re in a mat Pilates class, a Springboard Pilates class and/or a reformer Pilates class. Attention to detail, specific cues to isolate specific muscle fibres when doing a set of exercises. Focused areas where we will tell you what you should feel and where you should feel it. This attention to detail delivers information through proprioception and motor control.

There are 2 types of proprioception, the first being where we have to adapt to unexpected perturbations and/or the environment and the second category of proprioceptive information is in the planning of motor commands that are internally generated.   Before and during a motor command, the motor control system must consider the movements of the joints involved with the given command to move and account for the interactions within the musculoskeletal system. Proprioception provides much of the information required to solve all these movement scenarios and it is through the  command that the brain communicates to the body the movement it wishes for it to take. 

Mind-body exercise? We think so. It’s conscious movement, it’s awareness of how we move and Pilates is about moving the right way to perceive the right things. That’s why we call it movement that gives you “all the feels”. Get to know your body, get to know your strengths, re-learn to move in a more efficient manner to reduce pain and promote optimal well-being.

Come to our open house on Saturday November 10th from 2-4pm.  We welcome you to drop in for a visit, try out the equipment, meet our instructors and find out if Pilates is exactly what you’ve been missing.

Don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel for weekly clips and exercises you can do at home.