Pilates for posture

1950's posture lesson

Years of being slumped over an office desk, slouching on the sofa and even crossing your legs when sitting down are all big no no’s when it comes to having good posture.  What does this have to do with running I hear you ask? Good posture is vital for running. By slightly leaning forward, which is my problem at the moment, will result in long term lower back pain. So basically, if I improve my posture this will help my running by staying injury free and longer distances should be more comfortable. Yay! So instead of walking round the house with a book on my head (does that really work?) I've booked myself on a beginners pilates course.

Everyone has heard of Pilates and Yoga.  Yoga is more stretching based whereas pilates is a body-conditioning routine designed to increase physical endurance, flexibility, posture, coordination, and core strength. It involves focused controlled movements training muscles to become stronger - BUT ONLY IF YOU DO IT CORRECTLY.

Now I have participated in pilate classes before at my local gym. But you know how it is, the class is always full and you end up straining over tops of heads to see what the instructor is doing and by the time you have copied the pose she has moved onto something else. I’ve never really known if my poses were correct, but as no improvement to either posture or core strength has been seen I think we can safely say the hours that I have spent at these classes have most probably been a waste of time. 

So instead of just turning up at a random class my six week beginners class started last Wednesday evening in a local school hall with a group of ladies of all different ages but beginners just like myself. Now a friend did tell me that he made the mistake of eating before a pilates lesson and with the slow movements and controlled breathing ending up bottom burping throughout the whole lesson! So, not wanting to make a bad impression on my new classmates I took heed to that advice and didn't eat before my evening session. This, however, just resulted in a slightly different problem to my bottom burping friend which a few of my classmates also joined in with. Our tummies were screaming "feed me" so for a good few minutes when we were supposed to be concentrating on our breathing there was a chorus of loud gurgling rumbling of tummies practically all at the same time. It did make me giggle - I didn’t realise pilates could be so noisy!

I’ll be honest, at first I still didn’t know what I was doing and whether what I was doing was correct. But this was a small group and the instructor came round to each of us and made small adjustments to make sure we were in the correct position, checking with each of us to make sure we understood the movement before moving on. I think there was still a few of us that just agreed "oh yes that make sense" when actually you're thinking I’ve got no idea what’s going on here, but at least here my moves were being monitored. I think it will take some time before it all becomes natural, but I am now much more conscious that my tailbone is pointing down and my head is held high. Watch this space and I’ll let you know how it goes. Hopefully I’ll soon be walking like an A-list movie star on the red carpet with an elegant straight back rather than the hunchback of Notre Dame. And you never know, I might just start walking round the house with a book on my head as well just for the fun of it.

Balancing the book