Pilates Students' Manual
Pilates Students' Manual
What Makes Mat Pilates So Difficult?
In this episode, I share my first experience with mat Pilates and explain what makes mat Pilates exercises so challenging. I discuss the physical and mental blocks that can make mat Pilates difficult, as well as how load (usually body weight and gravity in mat Pilates) can raise the starting point of challenge in a mat class. Tune in!
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[00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to Pilates Students' Manual, a podcast helping you get the most out of your Pilates classes. I'm Olivia, and I'll be your host. Join the conversation and share your thoughts on Instagram at @pilatesstudentsmanual. You can support the podcast by visiting buymeacoffee. com/OliviaPodcasts.
[00:00:29] Let's learn something new.
[00:00:46] Hello. Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. It's March. So the Pilates community online is celebrating March Matness, which is the Pilates version of the [00:01:00] college basketball tournament in the United States that is known as March Madness. Um, but for Pilates people, we celebrate all of the Pilates mat repertoire all month long. So I thought it seemed really fitting in this episode, debuting in March to talk about some mat adventures today as well.
[00:01:20] But before we dive into today's episode, because, honestly, like, what does make Mat Pilates so challenging, I do want to share some exciting updates. I have been on a hiatus, which I do in the winter sometimes, because it's dark and gloomy, um, but I have been working so hard behind the scenes these past couple months, and I can share That my very first book will be coming out super soon.
[00:01:46] The title is Pilates Teachers' Manual: The Book, and it is based on the past five years of podcasting over on Pilates Teachers' Manual, but as you know, listening to Pilates Students' Manual, there is a ton of [00:02:00] crossover. So it is a written version of topics that have been covered in the podcast and some other additional topics. It's kind of a companion guide to your Pilates teacher training and beyond. So regardless of where you are in your Pilates teaching journey, there is something for you in this book. And if you've been listening to the podcast for a while, you know that I've been talking about this for like two years.
[00:02:26] But over the past few months, I've really hunkered down. And it's very nearly here, like we're formatting so that I can save it as an EPUB file and make it available. Um, so all that good stuff is happening right now. Plus, there's some additional surprises if you check out over on Pilates Teachers' Manual Instagram. There is some other exciting announcements.
[00:02:49] If you want to be the first person to get the lowdown on all the cool stuff that I'm doing. Visit that, Buy Me A Coffee page because supporters on Buy Me A Coffee, get first dibs [00:03:00] and first announcements on everything I create. So if you want the low down, definitely become a supporter and get first dibs and early access to all the content I make. There'll be some giveaways and you get to hang out with me at a coffee chat. So it's a good time. Check that out.
[00:03:18] Um, but that is just some exciting news that's happening in the background, but let's talk about mat Pilates. What makes mat Pilates so hard? Story time. I would like to share with you one of my very first Pilates experiences in a Pilates mat class that I vividly remember.
[00:03:40] It was at a small boutique studio in Hyde Park here in Chicago. And I knew the instructor because I was also working at the studio as a yoga teacher and she had taken my yoga class sometimes. And I considered myself, like, a strong, capable 20 something human. You know, I could do headstands, and I was doing all this fancy [00:04:00] yoga stuff. And I don't think that I thought that, like, mat pilates would be easy necessarily, but I really thought that I would be able to do it. Um, plus, this was like a mat therapy class, so that was the title of the class. And I was probably the youngest person in that class by like a solid 30 years. So classic young person hubris because that was the hardest class that I have taken in my life.
[00:04:27] I was on my mat, I was, you know, listening to the instructor, they were cuing these things, and, you know what my actual downfall was? It was a clam. Literal clams. Like, lie on your side, knees bent at 90 degrees, stack your hips, stack your shoulders, feet stay together, lift the top knee towards the ceiling, keep your hips still, rotate, external rotation at your hip.
[00:04:50] When I tell you that I did three clams, And could not lift my leg again. Like, all of these older, like, fabulous humans who [00:05:00] were Pilates superstars were just like Energizer bunnying through these clams. They weren't stopping. They didn't seem to be fatigued at all. And I couldn't lift my leg. I was absolutely incredulous.
[00:05:12] How could I not do this simple thing? The task seemed so simple and it's my own leg- I lift my own leg all the time, but I couldn't lift it in a clam
[00:05:25] I remember talking to the teacher after the class and I was like, what am I doing wrong? Why can't I lift my knee and she looked at me and smiled that Pilates teacher smile. It's like Very knowing that, you know, this is a very normal challenge that we go through when we start doing Pilates or we start really doing anything new, this kind of adjustment period. And, you know, the rest is history. I became a Pilates teacher. Now I get to smile that smile at people. But why couldn't I lift my knee? And more broadly, what makes mat Pilates [00:06:00] such a challenging form of exercise?
[00:06:03] So there's several factors, I think, um, that I'm going to discuss in this episode. One is that you're moving in a way that you don't usually move. For a lot of us, myself included, the way you do Pilates is very different from other forms of exercise.
[00:06:23] So this idea that the movement is simple, so it's easy, can kind of sneak up on you, plus this idea that like, oh, I'm not like sweating and shaking, so, you know, I must not be working hard enough, like those kind of beliefs can get challenged. We kind of have to think about the body differently and really concentrate and coordinate movements in ways that we don't always have to in our day to day life. That can be really challenging.
[00:06:54] And then another thing we can think about is the load that we're putting on our [00:07:00] joints when we're on the mat versus on the reformer. This idea of assistance and resistance, talking about levers or levers, however we pronounce that, the length of our limbs. Our position relative to gravity, all of that also makes mat Pilates really challenging.
[00:07:18] So let's look at those point by point. We're moving in a way that we don't usually move. There are very few days where I wake up and like do a teaser out of bed, you know, like I kind of flop out of bed in the morning. Or, you know, if I'm gonna put my shoe on, I can sit on a bench to do that, or I can crouch down into a lunge to do that.
[00:07:42] So the movements of Pilates. are not, not saying that they don't have applications to day to day life, but it is very different from how we usually interact with the world. A lot of Pilates, I had a client once who called it the grammar of movement, like, is working on kind of [00:08:00] simple and foundational things. Some parts of Pilates can be very simple, very foundational, something like a clam, where you're focusing on external rotation at your hip. Everything else stays still. Can you externally rotate your leg? Like, it's a very precise and focused movement.
[00:08:16] And most of our movements, day to day, are compound movements. We're doing more than one thing. We're side bending and rotating and flexing the spine all at the same time. So to be able to isolate movements is hard.
[00:08:31] I talked about beliefs and challenging our beliefs that because the movement Is not complicated. There's like a mental block. Sometimes like you think, Oh, it's going to be easy because it's not complicated, but we know that that's not true because some of the beauty of Pilates is even the most simple things can be very difficult.
[00:08:53] Like one of my favorite ways to kind of feel your abdominals. Um, as a Pilates teacher, you [00:09:00] know, I teach an intro class for people who are brand new on the reformer. And one of the things I have people do is take like a little fit ball and tuck it behind their low back and like a supported chest lift kind of curl there in spinal flexion. And then, you know, you're sitting, you've got the ball supporting you. And I just say, you know, can you lift your arms to the ceiling? And when you do that, you feel your abdominals start to shake. Like we call them earthquake abs because you feel this tremble of truth and it doesn't look like it's a crazy cartwheel backflip movement, but it's still challenging. And so sometimes the beauty is in the simplicity. The fact that it is simple doesn't mean it's going to be easy or hard. It's just going to be simple.
[00:09:44] We also know that there's like a full spectrum of Pilates exercises, right? So there are really simple exercises where you're doing a chest lift or something like that. There's also very complex ones like boomerang, for example, on the mat where you're doing a rolling movement and [00:10:00] you've got long legs and you've got long arms and there's a balance component. So like there are also complex choreography movements in Pilates as well.
[00:10:11] But sometimes when you're starting Pilates, they don't usually hit you with those right at the get go. They usually start simple and running up against that wall that like, Oh my gosh, this is so simple and I'm young and strong. Why can't I do this? Like that was a mental block for me, certainly. Pilates is sneaky hard. Sometimes the challenge sneaks up on you. Sometimes you feel it the next day. Um, and sometimes you feel things that you didn't expect in places that you didn't expect. Potentially places you didn't know that you could feel things. Sometimes we feel those things in Pilates.
[00:10:46] We're also thinking about the body differently because Pilates is not like other forms of exercise where the goal necessarily is speed or the goal [00:11:00] is like the heaviest weight possible. A lot of it is, you know, moving your body in a coordinated way and there's a learning curve towards learning a new choreography of things. So the type of movement is also a little bit different, I think. And people who come to Pilates potentially from sports, like me, I mean, yoga is not really a sport, but like also I played soccer, so coming from a sport where, and I was never like a professional soccer player, but it was more about executing like a task, it was like trying to score a goal or stop someone from scoring a goal, it wasn't like, What is the place that I should put my shoulder in when I do this? It was just like stop them from scoring, you know like the task is a little bit broader in some ways, like how you accomplish it is a little bit more variable.
[00:11:53] And professional athletes, of course, I watched a video of you know various pitchers [00:12:00] pitching and how similar all the pitches were that they could literally overlay all these different people on top of each other because there is like an optimal way to like make the ball go really fast when you throw it and you're pitching a baseball.
[00:12:15] But for, I would say the majority of people who aren't professional athletes, most of our life is like get the groceries out of the car, empty the dishwasher, vacuum, you know, it's not about optimizing as much. So to suddenly think about movement and like a very specific way is also a little bit of an adjustment.
[00:12:39] There's such a mental component to doing Pilates in general. And we'll, this feels like Pilates in general, but like, we'll talk about the mat specifically when we're talking about load and stuff. But there is such a mental component. There is such deep focus and concentration that you're linking your breath with this. You're [00:13:00] linking, you know, what are your arms doing? What are your legs doing? Sometimes it's really small. Sometimes it's multiple limbs at the same time. So doing something like teaser or doing something like a roll up involves a hugely coordinated effort on our part and a really clear like degree of body awareness of like how to get things to work together in ways, again, that you may not have done before. Yeah, the coordinated effort I think is huge.
[00:13:29] And part of it I think is also just because everything's hard the first time you do it, because everything is brand new. Once you get the frame of reference, like of course you can improve, but definitely I'm thinking back to that first class and I was like, holy moly, that was so difficult in so many ways.
[00:13:47] So, mat Pilates specifically, when we're on the mat, we don't have assistance from the springs, if you were on the [00:14:00] reformer or the Cadillac or the springboard or the tower, you could change the exercise in a way that the equipment was helping you when you do it. Mat Pilates, you don't have equipment to help you. It's you. 100 percent of your body weight and gravity, 100 percent of gravity, like in the reformer, take like a squat, for example. You want to sit down in a chair, you're standing up, you bend your knees, you send your butt back into the chair. Amazing. Uh, on the Reformer, we can take gravity out of that squat. We can take your body weight out. Footwork is doing a bunch of squats, but you're lying down.
[00:14:42] So, if you don't have the ability to provide some assistance to yourself, you're dealing with like 100% Right from the start, it's, it's not necessarily a gradual build. And if you're thinking about this and you're a Pilates teacher and [00:15:00] you're like, Oh, well, we could change, like, maybe you have a straight leg, maybe you have a bent leg, like legs in tabletop doing the hundred, for example, versus legs two inches off of the ground all the way straight. Of course, legs in tabletop is going to be lighter than straight legs hovering off the mat when we go into the hundred, but you still have to be able to lift both of your legs. And that is a really steep, I always think of activation energy in chemistry, but it's like you have to overcome a lot to start the movement, you know, to be able to hold both legs in tabletop.
[00:15:37] If you've been doing Pilates for a long time, you're like legs in tabletop is maybe nothing, but think of a person who's never held their legs up. Like, it's huge. It is a big barrier to entry. It can be, you know, and you could say, Oh, well, you could do the hundred with your feet, you know, resting on the ground and just do the chest lift and just do the arm pumps like a hundred percent.
[00:15:58] I'm not saying you can't, but especially [00:16:00] if you look at Pilates, like Return to Life Pilates, the first exercise is the hundred. The first exercise is the hundred! Like that is such a steep starting place to start from. It can be, it can be really intimidating.
[00:16:17] I think to start things like a plank, for example, if you're going to do leg, pull leg, pull front leg, pull back. You've got a hundred percent of your body weight in your hands. If we were on the equipment, we could put our hands on the foot bar, which is going to decrease the load in our shoulder, because think of doing a pushup on a wall versus doing a pushup with your hands on the ground, of course, doing a pushup on the wall is taking a lot of pressure off of our hands, off of our shoulders, but on the mat, it's just you on the mat. And like, what's the option to come down to your forearms. You're like, great. Now the angles even steeper, you know what I mean? So again, the starting point can just be really high depending on [00:17:00] how strong you are when you're starting.
[00:17:02] You know, there is a whole realm of pre Pilates exercises that amazing people like Kathy Grant have worked on like amazing Pilates- Elders who have contributed to the Pilates work to like help prepare you to do mat Pilates because the hundred being the first exercise in mat Pilates just tells you that like this is going to be rough, you know.
[00:17:25] Or take sidekick, for example. So clams are not even an original Pilates exercise. They're kind of, uh, like a derivative exercise. Like the side lying exercise in mat Pilates in Return to Life is side kick is both legs straight, hands behind your head, straight leg, kicking yourself in the face, and then trying to touch the back of your head with your foot, like huge range of movement, really long leg. So it's heavy. And like, that's the side exercise. It's not clams. It's [00:18:00] not lift your leg to the ceiling and put it back down. You know, it's like sidekick, it's full sidekick. So it can be a really tough place to start if you're looking at like the original mat exercises, because your body weight is your body weight and gravity is gravity. Like rolling up
[00:18:21] from lying down is hard to do. It is not an easy thing to do.
[00:18:27] So what do we do to make mat Pilates a little bit more accessible? Of course we can use a bolster. We could put a pillow underneath our upper back so that we aren't doing the full range of movement. We're propped up. We have like an easier place to start from. It's little bit less body weight and gravity to overcome. But even that, it's hard. It's hard. So, when we're looking at, I've talked about like mat Pilates and Reformer Pilates, like, is mat Pilates harder than Reformer Pilates? I think that mat Pilates can be harder to start [00:19:00] from. And if you're starting with mat Pilates, like, I really encourage you to talk with your instructor and find ways to make the exercises more accessible, because there are ways to modify or use props and find a little bit of assistance.
[00:19:15] But, you know, working with your body weight is just a difficult thing to do. You can get very strong doing body weight exercises. This isn't to say that mat pilates is easier than reformer pilates, but there is a tipping point where you master using your body weight and then using the equipment can make the movements harder than moving your own body weight, because now the springs can start working against you. So there is a little point. But for the vast majority of us, and for myself included, just moving your body on the mat, especially with the quick movements and the transitions and all of the coordination and concentration that Pilates requires, like mat Pilates is hard. It's not a bad thing, it can be a great [00:20:00] thing.
[00:20:00] There's so many wonderful things like mat Pilates comes with you wherever you are. You don't need a fancy studio or fancy equipment. You can just do mat Pilates in your house on the floor. Um, but that doesn't mean that we should take for granted that learning curve that we do have to overcome when we start doing Pilates in general and mat Pilates specifically.
[00:20:21] Huge thank you to all my supporters on Buy Me a Coffee. Can't wait to meet up with you for a March coffee chat. We can do some mat Pilates together, talk mat Pilates if you'd like. I really encourage you to check out that Pilates Teachers' Manual Instagram and that Buy Me A Coffee page for updates because there is some exciting stuff coming out with that book super duper soon.
[00:20:44] I hope you have a great couple of weeks and I'll talk to you again soon.
[00:20:57] Thanks for tuning in to this week's episode [00:21:00] of Pilates Students' Manual, a podcast helping you get the most out of your Pilates classes. Be sure to check out the podcast Instagram at @pilatesstudentsmanual and subscribe wherever you're listening. Interested in teaching Pilates too? Check out Pilates Teachers' Manual, available everywhere you listen to podcasts.
[00:21:21] I hope to see you next episode. Until next time.