Just like a building, our bodies need a solid bedrock of support.  In today's episode I share about what this should include .

Listen Here:

Spotify | Apple | Google Play | Amazon Music

Show Notes:

Importance of fundamental skills in Pilates

• Much like learning a new sport, mastering the basics is crucial

• Skipping these skills may lead to an unstable foundation and potential pain

1. Cari's personal experience

   • Young teacher who initially overlooked the importance of fundamental skills

   • Two car accidents led her to focus on these skills for healing and teaching

2. Practicing and progressing gradually

   • Concentration, focus, connection, awareness, and breathing are key elements

   • Teaching these skills in stages for better understanding and implementation

3. Proper equipment and modifications

   • Use a thick mat (at least half an inch) for support, avoid yoga mats and beds

   • Modify positions as needed, including chair or water-based exercises

4. Fundamental skills to build a foundation

   • Awareness: Focus on the bones and their relation to alignment and posture

   • Breathing: Essential for overall health and proper Pilates practice

   • Stabilization: Making the body more physically stable

   • Spinal articulation, spinal twisting, and upper spinal flexion: All movements of the spine

Key Takeaways:

• Don't overlook the fundamental skills in Pilates; they are crucial for building a strong foundation for your body.

• Utilize proper equipment and modifications to ensure safety and effectiveness in your Pilates practice.

• Focus on awareness, breathing, and stabilization, as well as movements of the spine, to enhance your Pilates experience and overall physical health.

Transcript:

Hello everyone and welcome back to Better Than a Pill. I'm Cari Vann and I'm so grateful and excited to be here again to share with you today. In today's episode, we are going to be talking about building your foundation in the form of a therapeutic Pilates regimen.

Now, learning Pilates is much like learning a new sport. It is composed of certain fundamental skill sets that are necessary to achieve and get ingrained into your mind and body before moving on to the next level. And this takes both repetition and practice.

And just like most new skills, this is the case, right? Just like learning basketball or even playing the piano or dancing or whatever the sport may be. Now, unfortunately, most of the time these fundamental skills are often overlooked or they're not even taught.

But yet it is these fundamental skills that are going to be key to pain free movement in building a strong foundation for your body to stand on.

So, I mean, I've had clients that have come to me after doing Pilates for 15 plus years and they never learned these skills and they've got to come back and they've got to learn them. So it just makes sense to start here.

Now, using myself as an example, I remember when I first started teaching many moons ago, as a young teacher, I didn't realize the importance of these skills. And when I was teaching, I was cheating in my own body. I wanted to jump into the big movements and it just didn't serve me.

In fact, it took for me to slow down. It took me two car wrecks and that was actually a blessing. And it provided an opportunity for me to focus on the fundamental skills. And I found it so powerful and key to helping my own body and healing it. I remember being so excited by this that I began teaching workshops on the subject matter.

So that being said, the fundamental skills are skills that need to be practiced and progressed gradually doing them. And it is through concentration, focus, connection, awareness, and breathing that you begin to gain fragile control of your body. I have also found it best to teach these skills in stages and have designed protocols around this.

Now, to start off, when you're doing the fundamental skills, just like with stretching, it is optimal to lie flat on a thick mat or table. Again, you can always modify. I just want you to know that if lying on your back is not something that you can do, but you don't want to use a yoga mat, you want a thicker mat, at least a half inch thick or more.

And this is primarily because it provides more support for your back. Also, you do not want to lie on a bed when doing these because it's just not firm enough.

So, like I said earlier, flying on your back is it a position that doesn't work for you. We can bring it to a chair or even the water. And I've designed numerous protocols to help meet people where they are and still achieve results.

Okay, so let's get into this. What fundamental skills are part of building our foundation? Well, let's just start with awareness. Awareness of feeling the bones of our body as they relate to alignment and posture. So we actually take away the muscles and we connect with the bones of our body.

Okay. Then we have our breathing, which is all encompassing. And Joseph Pilates himself has many quotes just on breathing. He said, if you do nothing else correctly, learn to breathe.

Lazy breathing can contribute to poor health. And it's the first act of life and our last, and our life depends on it. So breathing is essential. I've seen teachers even teach not using the breathing, and that's a huge red flag. We need the breath, so we have the breath.

And then stabilization is also key. And that is just, simply put, making our bodies more physically stable, which is a huge part of a firm foundation for your body to stand on.

Other fundamental skills include spinal articulation, the concept of one vertebrae at a time, spinal twisting, which can be done in different ways, and then upper spinal flexion. And these are all movements of the spine.

So there is really so much involved in each fundamental skill set that I will be breaking them down further in future episodes. So just to recap from today, we talked about the importance of starting with the fundamental skills to build a foundation for your body.

You don't want to skip them. It's optimal to start here. That's going to arm you to succeed. And this includes many things, but it includes awareness of our bones. It includes alignment, posture.

Again, you want to be on at least a half inch thick mat or thicker, not a yoga mat. You don't want to be lying on the bed. Optimally, you can adapt to different positions, including even the water.

Again, the breath is integral. It's just a huge skill set in and of itself. And then we have stabilization, making our body more physically stable, as well as spinal articulation, spinal twisting, and upper spinal flexion, which again are all movements of the spine.

So I hope you have enjoyed this episode and found it helpful. Remember, we do episodes weekly on Wednesday.