Pila-tease. It’s not easy!

This past week I worked at Pacific NW Pilates with several new students and each of them remarked, in their own way, about how difficult pilates was for them to do. I hear people comment about this frequently, and I can assure you, after teaching for over ten years, that it is quite normal to find Pilates difficult to do well.

This is primarily because Pilates requires attention. It is not a mindless exercise. You can’t do Pilates while doing something else, like reading a book or watching television, and if someone tells you that they do, they are fooling themselves.

Deep at the heart of the this technique is the principle that quality of movement is far superior to the quantity of movement. So, at any given time, a student may be thinking about their body alignment, the way in which they move a limb, sensing if the movement is being generated from the appropriate group of muscles, and many other personal corrections that he or she needs to think about to conduct the exercise in a more coordinated and balanced fashion.

In order to make profound change using an exercise technique such as Pilates as the channel, one must learn new movements or “motor skills.” A motor skill, is a highly coordinated movement that allows for investigation and interaction with the physical and social environment (O’ Sullivan & Schmitt 1994 in Motor Control).

Motor skill involves learning new strategies for sensing as well as moving. Generally, there are three stages to learning a new motor skill: understanding what change has to be made, experiencing what adjustments have to be made to implement a change, and making the change automatic.Learning new motor skills takes time and, in most cases, requires guidance through each stage.

A qualified pilates instructor should be able to direct you through each of these phases in order to help you reach many of your exercise goals. Tools that your instructor will use to help you with motor change will include helping you understand how your body moves, improving your attention and awareness skills and providing you with feedback.

Adequate practice time is also needed to build new motor skills. Each time a signal passes through a series of synapses, the synapses become more capable of transmitting the same signal in the future. If pathways are facilitated enough, memory of that signal is created and can be recalled to program future movements (Gyton 1981).

So, real change through exercise, like pilates, requires getting correct information in order to facilitate a desirable change, building new movement patterns by becoming more aware (this occurs by getting consistent feedback), and having enough time to practice the new movement pattern.

So, next time you think to yourself, “Pilates is hard!” You will know why.