Why Pilates Native runs the way we do
If you’ve been in any gym or studio of any kind, you’ve noticed that Pilates Native is operating far outside the fitness industry norm. We don’t offer group classes and we don’t focus on weight loss. We also follow the “Engage to Serve” method, meaning we focus on your needs, not ours.
Extensive Intake Form
We have a wicked long client intake form that asks a bunch of random questions beyond the usual emergency contact and injury history. You are much more than your knee pain or back surgery and the questions on this form are designed to give me a better idea of who you are as a person and how the studio can best serve you.Often, the answers to these questions help me prepare for your Initial Assessment and give me a chance to create a list of recommendations for chiros, massage therapists, PT’s or personal trainers that may benefit you and your situation.
Fitness Tests, PT Evals, and Pilates Native Initial Assessments
Since day one, Pilates Native clients have been required to complete an Initial Assessment before signing up for any of our Pilates packages. This is probably the strangest experience for most of you as you wonder what the hell me watching you balance on one leg has to do with anything.
A normal gym fitness test typically utilizes dynamic exercises like pushups and sit-ups paired with a cardio test to determine your overall “fitness”. Unless you are working with an extremely skilled and educated trainer, this fitness test doesn’t usually tap into injury or disfunction and focuses primarily on “fitness”. Reps, weight lifted, heart rate, body composition, body weight and measurements may also be included as part of a fitness test.
A PT evaluation, on the other hand, will typically focus on the point of pain or injury and use muscle testing, range of motion tests or other PT tools to pinpoint the dysfunction at that exact spot. PT tends to be extremely focused on the area of interest, so you may spend an entire evaluation focused on just the knee or just the shoulder. Subsequent sessions will again focus primarily on the area of interest. PT isn’t typically designed to be a full body focus. This is targeted recovery work.
The Pilates Native Initial Assessment is a series of static exercises that assesses your balance, core strength and functional range of motion. Each of the balance and core strength assessments are composed of 4-5 levels, with each designed to provide insight on how your body is functioning as a whole and how systems are interacting with one another.
Your form, effort, posture and muscle recruitment during each level tell me what’s working and what’s not.
The “probable suspects list”
By pairing your symptom profile with the IA results, we can create a “probable suspects list” for the root cause to injury, pain, irritation or lack of mobility.
For example, many clients seek out Pilates for back pain, hip pain, hip tightness or lack of mobility through the back and hips. What I’ve learned over the years, is that dysfunction at the hip shows up as poor balance. Poor balance is typically associated with weak or under active hip stabilizers. This in turn causes the rest of the hip girdle to have to over compensate, leading to over-use in muscles who are taking on an extra job. That overuse and over compensating then causes tightness all around the hips, which can then cause pain, irritation or injury in the hips. It may also creep into the low back.
By simply focusing on balance work, we can turn on the hip stabilizers while also turning off the rest of the muscles who are over working, allowing them to rest and return back to their normal function. Adding targeted range of motion work to the balance work ensures that the functional balance between the muscles pairs is restored.
Even more reasons to love balance work
Because I like efficiency more than anything else, the targeted balance work also improves proprioception (body’s awareness of self in space), which keeps us from bumping into things, falling, or stumbling down stairs and cleans up dysfunctions at the foot and ankle, which allows for proper utilization of the muscles and joints in the feet and ankles. When our feet and ankles work properly, we can stabilize in mud, ice, and snow and prevent further hip issues that may be caused by weird stuff going on in our foundation.
Proper standing posture can also provide relief from global tightness or stiffness in the body. Practicing standing balance and standing Pilates in the studio, gives us a real world scenario to practice in. We don’t have mats or reformers strapped to our bodies all day long providing tactile feedback to relax the shoulders, soften the knees, untuck the pelvis or pull in the ribcage. By practicing standing balance in the studio, we learn how to tune into these things on our own. This is probably the most valuable component that the standing work brings to our training.
But what about my issue?
You may be thinking, “ok great, you explained why standing balance works for hip and low back pain, but what about my issue? Why the hell am I doing XYZ when my issue is ….?!?”
That’s a great question. The first and easiest answer is we’re not doing PT. Again, PT is extremely valuable and targeted work for a specific location and a specific injury.
We, on the other hand, are looking at the body as a whole. Simply put, when talking about non-traumatic issues, pain, injury or irritation occur because something is not working while something else is overworking.
Neck and shoulder issues are typically because the neck, upper traps, and rotator cuff muscles are overworking while maybe the obliques, abs, lats, and other larger muscles have stopped working or are delegating their work way too frequently. The smaller muscles aren’t designed for this work and that’s what leads us to injury.
You may find that when you have an injury or a complaint, we completely avoid the area. That can be absolutely maddening!
For example, if you have shoulder pain and scored low on your lateral core strength assessment, we have to strengthen the abs and the obliques while also breaking overactive neck muscle memory, before we can even get into any shoulder work.
What we’re doing is focusing on strengthening the area around the injury, turning under active muscles on, while also turning over active muscles off and purposefully giving the cranky area a break.
Working in this way is what helps break old muscle memory patterns and prevents us from reinforcing the bad habits that led to the initial problem.
Muscle Work + Brain Work!
While the majority of what we do looks like it’s just muscle work, it is also a lot of BRAIN work. We are constantly re-creating neural pathways and teaching the body new ways of understanding movement.
This is why we do six weeks at a time, to give the body and brain time to adjust and adapt.
It’s why we run a trauma informed studio, so your brain and body feel safe and able to grown/learn/change.
It’s why we use the 80/20 method, building sessions off of 80% familiar material and 20% new material.
It’s why we move slowly and focus on quality of movement and proper muscle engagement.
Now, I get that this can feel like an extremely round about way to get what we want. And I get that this method just isn’t for everyone. And that’s ok.
But if you’re like me, and you love solving puzzles and you fully intend to keep your movement practice going until you die, you are welcome to join me here in the studio, geeking out over biomechanics and how we can best hack them for better strength and mobility!