Pilates Students' Manual
Pilates Students' Manual
Shapes Of The Spine - Rotation
We saved the best for last! Today's episode looks at the instances of rotation in the Pilates repertoire! We explore the muscles involved in rotating the trunk, the plane of movement we rotate in, and how the shape of our vertebrae impact how we can move our our spine. Tune in!
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Show Notes:
Check out these related episodes to learn more about shapes of the spine!
The Shapes Your Spine Makes In Pilates
Shapes Of The Spine - Lateral Flexion
Shapes Of The Spine - Extension
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Hello. Hello everybody. Welcome and welcome back to Pilates Students Manual, helping you get the most out of your Pilates classes. I'm Olivia. Remember you get the latest updates about everything I'm working on by joining the community at buymeacoffee.com/OliviaPodcasts. And you can follow along on Instagram at@PilatesStudentsManual. Pilates Teachers' Manual: The Book is now available for purchase as both an EPUB and PDF and on Kindle, available on Amazon. But if you purchase it and other podcast merch from me, that's at shop.OliviaBioni.com. As I shared in the last few episodes, we've been exploring all the shapes the spine makes in this little mini series on the show. One of the most unique things about Pilates is that you get to move your spine in all directions when you do Pilates versus more repetitive forms of exercise like golf or running or cycling when you use your muscles in the same way to perform the same general action over and over again. For example, you would never switch which way you're holding your golf club, and you would never do a back bend when you're riding your bike. Today's episode is all about spinal rotation, which is sometimes called twisting, or in my classes, twisty business. We can twist more or less at different points of our spine because, as I've shared in previous episodes, our spine bones don't actually all look the same, which means that they don't all move the same. Our cervical spine, for example, AKA, the bones in our neck, have a really great capacity for rotation because evolutionarily, we had to be able to look around to see what's going on, right? Our top most vertebra C1 is also called Atlas, which is a cute little play on Greek mythology because it supports our head and our brain, just like the character Atlas carried the weight of the world. Our C2 vertebra, and they're just numbered by letters and numbers, so C1 is the top most vertebra in the spine, and C2 is the second one. So that second one is also called axis, and that's where we can really articulate our head. Like we can look in all directions. We can not only rotate, but we can also drop our chin to our chest. We can look up at the ceiling, like we have a lot of movement there because that spine bone is different. It looks different, it moves differently. It allows us to move differently. In our trunk, we're able to rotate a lot more in our upper back, or our thoracic spine, versus our lower back, or our lumbar spine. And this is because our spine bones have what's called processes, which are bumps on our bones. Our vertebrae have spinous processes on the posterior edge, and they kind of stick out of our back a little bit. Like if you do a forward fold and you see those bumps from the bones of your spine, those are the spinous processes that you're seeing under your skin. I always think about the dinosaur stegosaurus when I think about spinous processes, because those big bone plates on the back of a stegosaurus are oversized spinous processes. Vertebrae also have transverse processes, which are bony bumps that stick out on the sides of the bones. The way the spinous and transverse processes of one vertebrae are angled determines how they'll move with the other bones around them. Okay, so in rotation, the transverse processes of our lumbar spine, right, the bones in our low back, they bump against each other, so our rotation in that part of our spine is limited. However, in our thoracic spine, the transverse processes are angled in a way that they kind of slide against each other, which allows us to rotate there with greater ease. The plane of movement that we're working in when we are rotating our spine is what's called the transverse plane. A plane of movement is like if you were cut in two by a pane of glass and the way that you can move without bumping into that pane of glass is is gonna tell you what plane that you're in. So for rotation, we're cut in a plane that's perpendicular to our spine, like separating our top half and our bottom halves, like that magic trick that cuts a woman in half, that's the way the transverse plane goes. We can only rotate in the transverse plane. We can't bend forward or backwards or sideways without bumping into that pane of glass, but we can rotate in alignment with it. Spinal rotation shows up in our Pilates repertoire in one leg circle, depending on how you do it, criss cross, corkscrew, saw, spine twist, and hip twist. The reason I included one leg circle is because there are a few different interpretations of it. If you draw a tiny circle with your leg in one leg circle your trunk and shoulders stay still on the mat and your hips don't move so your spine isn't twisting. But if you draw a really big one leg circle, where your hips move as you draw the circle, like when your leg comes across, the hip lifts, when you come down and over to the other side, the opposite hip lifts, right? There's a little swiveling action. Your shoulders are still, but your spine rotates. So if you're drawing a big circle where your hips move, then you are in fact rotating the spine. On the reformer, we also see spinal rotation in stomach massage in that twist variation, in snake and twist, in corkscrew, and in the short box series in the exercise twist. The muscles that are primarily responsible for rotating the trunk are muscles that are in the front, back and sides of our body, and that makes sense because rotation is happening involving our front, back and sides of our body. The muscles are primarily our internal and external obliques, but secondarily, our rectus abdominis, our transversus abdominis, latissimus dorsi, multifidus, and our deep spinal muscles called the rotatores. I am gonna go ahead and apologize right now for my pronunciation of muscles because these are all words that I've read in books, but I don't always hear people talking about. I'm hoping they're called the rotatores, but they're these cute little spine muscles that run up the length of our spine. They only cross like one vertebrae at a time, so they have a very limited ability to like affect change because they're so small. But they were like primarily spinal stabilizers because they're so small they can't like do really big movements, but because we're moving the spine and they're attached to our spine, they're also gonna move a little bit too. So that's a lot of muscles involved in doing an action. And thank goodness we don't have to know the names of the muscles performing an action to do the action, or we would all really all be outta luck. But let's look at where each of these muscles kind of exist in our body, and then we can see how they're involved in rotation. So the external obliques are large muscles on the sides of our body that run from our ribs, like number five through 12, and then kind of on the side, and then they insert or connect into like our pelvic crest. So that hip bone that kind of comes up on the side of the pelvis, they attach there so high on our side, ribs to low on our side pelvis. They are superficial, so they are closer to our skin. A little bit deeper than our external obliques are our internal obliques and they run from our lumbar fascia, which is at our low back, right? Same as lumbar spine. So from our low back, which has this huge mass of connective tissue where lots of muscles insert into that low back space. It's called an aponeurosis. It's actually really cool if you wanna Google it. Um, but they go from there to the front of our hip bone crest. So they're going from our low back, kind of higher on the low back, and then inserting a little bit lower on the crest of the pelvis. Our rectus abdominis is our six pack muscle, and remember, it attaches higher up in like the middle of our ribs in our front body, and goes all the way down to the front of our pelvis. So again, it's a bigger muscle. It has more leverage. Our external obliques are also pretty big, and honestly, our internal obliques are pretty big too. Then we've got our transversus abdominis, which is kind of like a weight belt. If you've seen, uh, people wear a weight belt to lift heavy weights. I mean, it's a little bit lower than that. It's below our belly button and it wraps around the lowest part of our body. Those muscle fibers go horizontally. When we're vertical, they're parallel to the ground, kind of like a belt. And so you can see, okay, I can see how that could also be involved in rotation. Our latisimus muscle is our lats, often called colloquially our lats or your lats, and they look like a big diamond on your upper back. They kind of attach on one side, like from the side of your neck. They come out to your shoulder at a diagonal, and then they also attach along the spine and then mirrored on the other side. So it's this big muscular diamond on our back. When you see someone who lifts, and you see them doing their poses, like a lot of times it's showing off that muscle because it's another really big superficial muscle. And then we've got our multifidus, which is a spinal extensor. It runs along our spine. It is bigger than our rotatores and it runs along the length of our spine. So again, it's our spine. We're rotating our spine. We see how something's contracting somewhere. And then I talked about the rotatores, which they do stuff, but they don't do a lot of stuff because they're small. They are less powerful in that. As I was researching and gathering my thoughts about rotation of our trunk, a quick search said this, and I have to share it with you because this is why rotation is so hard conceptually, very important and a good movement to do, but conceptually quite difficult. This is what the internet said:"During trunk rotation, the external obliques, rectus abdominis and multifidus muscles act contralaterally. Whereas the Latissimus dorsi, internal obliques and transverse abdominis muscles act ipsilaterally." And honestly, in a nutshell, this is why people dislike anatomy. What was the internet saying in the least helpful, but accurate, but not helpful way? So let's translate: the external oblique, the rectus abdominis and multifidus on the opposite side get shorter to rotate the spine and the latissimus dorsi, internal oblique and transverse abdominis on the same side get shorter to rotate the spine. I know, rotation kind of makes my brain explode too, and that's why I saved it for last. But let's keep thinking about it. The way we use our muscles to move ourselves is all about drawing the two ends of a muscle closer together. So if we visualize spine twist on the mat. You're sitting on the mat with your legs long outstretched in front of you. You have your arms out in a T. That's cute, but we're really just talking about the spine, but that's how we set up for spine twist. We imagine that we're turning to the right, and even when you're listening to this podcast, can you turn your trunk to the right? What happened to make that happen? Well, our left external oblique shortened. So even though we're turning to the right, our left external oblique, when the two ends get closer together, they shorten that turns our ribcage to the right. Our right internal oblique also shortens. So it's the external oblique on the left, turning you to the right, the internal oblique on the right, turning to the right. And no matter how many times I say that, I will still confuse myself. But it's the opposite side external oblique, same side internal oblique. And remember, your obliques are like the primary movers, but we can talk about what other muscles are doing. So at the same time, we're turning to the right. Left external oblique got shorter, right internal oblique got shorter. What else gets shorter? Our opposite side multifidus. Our multifidus that's on our left side of the spine gets shorter and that also turns us to the right. The opposite side, rectus abdominis. So we're turning to the right, the left side. Rectus abdominis also gets shorter to turn us to the right. Our latissimus, that diamond shaped muscle, the right side, the same side of our latisimus gets shorter and that's gonna pull our shoulder back, right? Because our latissimus attaches at kind of that shoulder cap, if you think of your deltoid, which is that I don't, I always think of it like your little shoulder cap muscle. Um, our, our latisimus is attaching, like right in that area on our back. So it's pulling our shoulder back, the right side latisimus is also pulling our shoulder back, turning us to the right. And the right side of our transversus abdominis, so that low belly weight belt that wraps around that flattens our belly when we are doing abdominal exercises, that really deep abdominal muscle, the same side one is also gonna pull us to the right. Even a simplified explanation of rotation is still pretty complicated, and that's just for like a pure twisting movement, like spine twist. That is the only plane of movement that our spine is moving in and spine twist. But some exercises in Pilates are compound exercises where we're moving in multiple planes of movement and we are moving our spine in more than one direction at the same time. Think of snake and twist on the reformer, there's extension and rotation. Or corkscrew, we're flexing and rotating. Or saw, we're flexing and rotating and side bending all at the same time. If your goal is to build strength in rotation, you have to strengthen the muscles that perform spinal rotation, that's gonna be our obliques, both internal and external. Our rectus and transverse abdominis muscles, our latisimus and our spinal extensors will all be assisting in those movements. I would recommend starting with exercises where more of you is on the ground. Things like spine twist or one leg circle or crisscross where your body is mostly supported by the mat or the movement is a little bit simpler in terms of like spine twist is just a twist. Because even though corkscrew is a rotation exercise, in corkscrew, you're doing the rollover. Your legs are over your head and you're twisting in midair and you're rolling around, like it's complicated. So start with things that are a little bit more grounded to build up to things like corkscrew. The beauty of the Pilates method is that the exercises build on each other, and that's why you do crisscross and one leg circle before you get to corkscrew. Although corkscrew is still really early in the order, which is a little too early for me sometimes, and as with everything, we get better at what we practice. So practicing exercises that have rotation in them will help you to improve your rotation. Thank you so much for tuning in and learning more about the shapes that the spine makes with me. I hope you've enjoyed this series because I certainly have. I also wanna say a huge thank you to everyone who has purchased my book. We just crossed the threshold of a hundred copies sold, and that is so exciting. Extra special thank you as always to my supporters on Buy Me A Coffee. Thank you for your continued support. I am really looking forward to our coffee chats this month. I hope you have a great couple weeks and we'll talk again soon.