Health goes beyond the surface - find the balance in your body

At Movementality, we believe a healthy lifestyle revolves around finding a healthy balance between a strong and nourish body, a sharp and clear mind, and strong but kind spirit. This is not an easy balance to maintain with the many different stressors and lifestyle factors that work against us. But having a positive mindset, and fostering productive habits around clean food, adequate sleep, consistent exercise, plenty of social time and regular meditation can all help with keeping the balance. And when you feel more balanced, you are more likely to feel like you can take control of your own happiness. Creating and paying attention to this mind-body-spirit balance will allow you to feel when things start to go awry, and better prepare you for the myriad of unpredictable daily stressors we all regularly face.

The Body

Numerous others have written on the topic of healthy mind and spirit, so as a movement education centre, we are going to focus on the topic of healthy BODY:  What does a healthy body mean to us?  What would you experience at Movementality in regards to healthy movement? To quote Ash, “The beauty of the Pilates method is that it actively encourages you to explore new and complex movement pathways in your own body with every class.”

To start, a healthy body is more than just about what you see on the outside; it integrates the whole of you from your nerves, to your gut, to your muscles and skin. If we were just to consider out physicality, a healthy body allows for an elongated and effortless resting posture, to facilitate free and fluid movement in all ranges of our joints. Integration of our breath, coordination of our limbs, the ability to generate power at a moments notice, and the ability to build strength and endurance are also physical factors worth assessing in terms of a healthy body.  But they also are incredibly interlinked with many other aspects of our physiology and psychology. For example, good luck trying to generate power through your waist line if you have an irritated bowel, or trying to chase down your kids in the park if you can’t breathe easily. Another angle would be to consider how likely you’d be to get out of bed at 6am for a run when your mental health is poor and lacking motivation.

And all of this is overseen by your main control centre - your brain and central nervous system. The good news is that consistently challenging the brain and nervous system to work towards better coordination, balance, proprioception, and movement will ensure your whole physical body is stimulated towards better health, with knock on effects to your mental health - I’m sure you’ve all heard of the chemical Dopamine? We’ll that’s just one of several feel-good hormones that are regulated by exercise - so when you do get a good sweat on, make sure you take the time to acknowledge that you’ve done more than just ‘sweat it out’.

So why Pilates?

The reason why so many people rave about Pilates, is that it challenges your brain to re-discover dormant movement patterns to facilitate muscles in a way that may have become redundant due to the repetitive movements of daily life. This can often cause some muscles to overwork through compensation of movement, while others get a bit long and lazy without regular contraction. With the literal hundreds of exercises over an array of supportive apparatuses, Pilates encourages you to gently move further through your joints’ range of motion, encouraging your muscles into longer positions and effectively creating an active stretch of the surrounding areas.  This active stretch allows in particular the spine and joints to find a better resting position as the brain and its associated spinal cord reflexes learn that they may be a more efficient place to rest.

Another interesting thing to consider is that our bodies are incredibly efficient; and given the choice they will always take the past of least resistance to conserve energy. If we neglect our body and fail to challenge the way it moves, our body will often stay within it’s easiest movement patterns. However, when this path isn’t the one intended through evolution, we often end up recruiting muscles and patterns that aren’t actually fit for purpose, which eventually leads to postural and movement compensations. Over the long term, this can in turn lead to associated areas eventually starting to get worn down and aggravated, causing injury, dysfunction, or even just constant pain. Pilates will challenge your body to either return to the good old ways, or find new movement pathways, and even ask your body to pattern multiple pathways at the same time because of its focus on coordination. Plus, a good instructor will be able to spot compensations and the more you connect in and feel your own body, the better you’ll get at spotting them too!

Find the joy!

It can be easy to treat your exercise regime as punishment, especially if you feel like you are time poor and want to work as hard as possible in as shorter time frame as you can squeeze in to your day. But it is important that you listen to your body and get in touch with what it genuinely needs. As we mentioned earlier, sometimes Pilates is about switching off muscles, not recruiting more. Often people come into class, carrying the tension and stress from their day and it is apparent that before they work hard, they need to spend some time actually just relaxing their mind, and we do this by releasing their muscles. Dedicating five minutes of your warm up to release work can be incredibly beneficial to your work out and can save you a lot of time re-organising your body later in the session.

And it’s not only your muscles that need some down time either. From the moment we wake up our nervous systems are straight in to survival mode. Modern society has made this even worse with many of us experiencing adrenal fatigue and chronic fatigue because our bodies and minds can’t rest and recharge. Exercise can help amp us up, but it can also be used to help us slow down, and Pilates is a great example of being able to cater for each of these options. One of the main teachings of Pilates is coordinating the breath with the movement. Learning to use your diaphragm to breath well and coordinating your breath with movement can be an excellent way to transition your nervous system from a fight or flight state into a restful, recuperative one through it’s positive impact on the vague nerve. Depending on how you are feeling, there may be times where the benefits of this restorative work outweighs the benefits of an intense workout. Luckily though, Pilates can do both depending on your mood!

How it fits together

Remember, when developing your movement practice and working towards a healthy lifestyle, it is vital to consider the body as a whole. Challenge the brain as well as the muscles, consider making time for release work, listen to what your body is asking for and consider where your mind is at that day. The goal is that we should be able to stabilise daily movement patterns, minimise pain, improve your posture and enhance your overall health and well being.  If we can do that, the rest of the body health should fall in to place - you just need to then make sure your mind and your spirit are feeling nourished too!