Slow, Detailed Work: Understanding Your Weaknesses
When I first began taking Pilates mat classes, I was going for the sole purpose of feeling good about myself. I liked stepping out of the studio, feeling lighter on my feet, and making myself taller with each step. When I came to Kinected and started my Mat certification training, I had no idea how detailed the movement of Pilates could be. As a detailed and structured person by nature, I appreciate so much the focus on organization and foundation through detailed attention and work that instructors and teacher-trainers at the Kane School provide.
I think an effective way to reinforce what I’ve learned about each muscle group is to do weekly exercises to strengthen and stretch each. I’ll share those exercises here, getting down to the nitty-gritty of each muscular function and how my exercises impact each. Hopefully not only will I discover a new way to look at anatomy and musculature, but you also will benefit from this!
Last Thursday at Kinected, I had my first private 1-on-1 session. I explained to my instructor that I was a Pilates Mat teacher-in-training and wanted to use that time to focus on my weaknesses and how I could work on strengthening my weaker muscles. I was given a very comprehensive assessment, beginning with fundamental warm-up exercises on the cadillac and then moving onto the reformer and chair for work on my lower extremities. We even got in a very detailed foot exercise with the Pilates massage ball in between—something I was very glad to have tried! We discovered a tendency in my feet and ankles to be a tad externally rotated (i.e. supinated), which in turn kept my VMO and lateral hamstrings tight. Using the Pilates massage ball actually helped to improve the alignment of my feet and loosened the external rotators of my tibia during foot and leg work on the chair.
Here's a wonderful diagram of the anatomy of the lower extremities:
On the reformer, we assessed the serratus anterior and latissimus dorsi in a quadruped plank position, with hands on the foot bar and feet flexed against the shoulder blocks. The movement was simple, but form proved to not be so easy to maintain throughout. As expected, my serratus anterior was the culprit in my difficulty in keeping good form. There was also a little tightness in my lats, which my instructor helped alleviate with a nice arm-overhead stretch in the ladder barrel afterwards.
To say the least, I was grateful to have spent an hour doing slow, detailed work to figure out what parts of my body were needing more organization and attention. Admittedly, I did not feel out of breath after my session, nor did I have the same "feel good" sensation I usually do after class, but I did feel lighter and more balanced in my form. Slow, detailed work might be more boring and we might not get the same rush of endorphins as we would from a more fast-paced session, but we must not let the tedium discourage us from going through that kind of work. It's only with slow, detailed work that we can build a solid foundation in our bodies and create the proper context in which to do our exercises and advance through them. Depending on what we want to achieve for ourselves, we can go through exercises quickly, "feel good" at the end, and hope that our forms could be fixed through more practice, or we can try to understand our own bodies and figure out how to organize them in the moment; to begin with the right form and move through future exercises with more ease.
