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Get More From Your Pilates Practice
How do you deepen you Pilates practice to get more out of it? What steps, methods or principles will help make the most of each exercise?
You’ve been taking Pilates and going through the motions, but you feel like you aren’t sure how you can get more out of it. There are advanced exercises, but you can’t do those because of limitations within your own body. So how do you progress without doing advanced work? These are three things you can do to deepen your practice:
Find a studio that requires a few private sessions
Find a good studio that makes sure people know what they are doing before they start taking group classes. Good studios have good gate keepers. Good gate keepers take time with each client BEFORE they enter a group setting. They take time to correct mistakes and observe body movement. This step is crucial to being able to go deeper in your Pilates practice in a group setting. It is an investment in yourself that will provide you with the tools to understand how to go deeper when you don’t have the one on one attention. This will make the class setting that much better because everyone is focused on the same thing: going deeper. Pilates is different in that it focuses on the smaller intrinsic muscles that help us exist. By understanding this alone, you are starting the journey of going deeper. It’s a slow and steady pace, but the reward is worth the patience to practice.
Focus on the basic principles within each exercise
Each exercise with a STOTT PILATES certified instructor is cued and guided by 6 basic principles. Focus on these principles within each exercise, and your body will start to respond in kind. STOTT PILATES and the Merrithew corporation sets these principles as the foundation for each STOTT PILATES certified instructor’s training. You can find short videos that go over each principle in detail here at Merrithew.
- Breathing
- Pelvic Placement
- Rib Cage Placement
- Scapular movement and stabilization
- Head placement
- Lower kinetic chain: hip knee ankle placement
Go Slower!
The Pilates repertoire is usually 5-10 reps ONLY. Use perfect posture for each rep. That might mean you only get through 4 reps and THAT’S OKAY! Once you start to focus on and integrate the Pilates principles outlined above, as you execute each exercise, you will feel the difference when you slow down. The value of moving from your center will become evident. And the small muscles that need all that attention will reward you by feeling stronger when you stand, sit, and move.