Body Basics Newsletter

Pilates & Posture

Well Hello!! June is here and with it comes the summer and that means we are going to show off more of that body and how do you feel about that?

Let's look at one way you can seemingly lose inches from that body by correcting something in minutes.

Posture: Posture is how you place your body in space and the relationship of one bit to the next as you do that. It's a body in balance is what good posture is. Whoa, I hear you say. Lose inches with posture? Yes, I am telling you. I worked on one lady for one hour the other night on basics of Pilates and we realigned her posture as part of that. She could not believe it, she had lost inches in minutes just by the way she stood.

So what is good posture? Well it is definitely a body in balance. But let's start with the more or less central point from which posture occurs. The pelvis. You have heard me talk before of neutral pelvis and this is the key to good posture.

Neutral means the most balanced position.

With your pelvis stuck out behind you like Donald Duck you won't look straight and tall and you will get muscle and joint imbalance and back compression as a result. Boy do those abs stick out!!!..

If you walk with your pelvis tucked underneath you like Pink Panther, again muscle and joint imbalance above and below, a really stuck and over elongated lower spine, not straight and tall and resultant back problems and abdominals that are out to lunch.

So neutral pelvis is somewhere between the two. That balanced position of the pelvis on the legs.

Try it by standing sideways in a mirror and rocking the pelvis back and forwards as far as you can in each direction and then getting smaller and smaller until you reach that neutral place in between.

That is the place to move into and out of when you move. So once you have neutral pelvis, you need to get the body above straight on top of it. This will be the subject of next months newsletter, so stay tuned.

Success

I do Pilates a lot but I have noticed that sometimes my back gets a little sore and tight. Usually I look at how much I have done Pilates recently and 80% of the time I have not done it as much as I usually do. The other 20% is some situation which has caused the back stress like sitting in an airplane seat for some hours, or some kind of heavy strain of lifting. What releases it and gets it going again? The correct Pilates exercise. As I get older and the body is not so resilient Pilates is the thing that keeps ii the way it should be.

News Flash

The Pilates Method Alliance has instigated a national exam for instructors to keep standards high and codes of ethics in. I am pleased to announce I passed this 3 hour exam this week and am now a nationally certified Pilates instructor. I felt I learned a lot from the study and became much more professional.

Yours, Louise Forscher

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