Pilates Breathing for Spinal Health and Flexibility

A dedicated Pilates practice can be a powerful tool to increase spinal health and flexibility, particularly when Pilates-method breathing is included. I struggled with back pain starting at 9 years old. I am hypermobile and my spine was like a Red Vine in the back of a hot car, all goo and no structure. I was able to touch my butt to my head, but not stand up straight.

Kristina in a deep backbend grabbing her ankles from behind and smiling

My backbend at age 36 was still pretty bendy

My posture was my primary struggle, cutting short my foray into gymnastics as a child and forever frustrating my dance technique. I just couldn’t hold myself up well, and it resulted in such intense lower back pain that it kept me home from school some days, laying on the floor with a heating pad.

As a kid in the 70s and 80s there were very few resources other than my pediatrician who gave me aspirin and some exercises that did nothing at all. I assumed it was something I just had to live with.

Pilates Improved my Back Pain

Nothing really made a huge difference until Pilates. Pilates entered my life when, at 32, I was training contortion 6 days a week at San Francisco Circus Center and manipulating my spine in all sorts of creative ways. Contortion had actually reduced my back pain by giving me an impressive new set of muscles, but I focused almost exclusively on back bending since we all like to do what we are good at.

Tiffany Parish, a member of the cutting edge circus and dance company Xeno and founder of Bodicraft Pilates, with the first person to teaching me Pilates breathing for spinal health. She showed me how changing my breathing patterns could unload my spine and get my hip flexors to chill out, helping me counter the compressive forces of contortion.

The Importance of Spinal Health for Longevity

While my struggle with spinal health and flexibility is extreme, it is not unusual. According to the Center for Disease Control, 30-40% of folks in the US have back pain at least once a year. Untended, postural issues and immobility can lead to a host of unpleasant structural issues that don’t get better with neglect.

The good news is that it’s never too late to start working on improving your spinal health and flexibility!

Numerous studies have shown that regular exercise is an important part of preventing and even reversing lower back pain. No one form of exercise has emerged as the silver bullet because the root causes of pain and the application of exercise is so varied, the important thing is to move, try out different forms of strengthening and stretching, and find what works best for you and your body.

Pilates Breathing for Spinal Health

Pilates breathing patterns that emphasize diaphragmatic and rib cage breathing. That means that the rib cage expands on the inhale and relaxes down on exhale. Diaphragmatic breathing gives us more access to our lung capacity and, importantly, it helps our back muscles to relax so that we can get some ease and movement into our spine.

As I explain in my post on diaphragmatic breathing and posture, this breathing pattern gives us more access to the “meat corset” muscles that support our spine and upper body. These muscles wrap around our waist and protect our spine while also supporting its natural flexibility.

This postural shift has potential benefits for folks with upper back and neck pain, since the muscles in those areas can sometimes take over if the diaphragm is sticky or sleepy. Last month’s post contains a breathing workout specifically designed for folks who suspect they may be breathing with their neck and shoulders.

Below is a slightly 20-minute workout with a series of simple but very effective Pilates exercises that focus on using diaphragmatic breathing to access the “meat corset” core muscles that help to lengthen, support, and stretch the lower back. I hope you find them useful.

Happy Bendings!

What is your “Core Muscle” Group and How Does it Work?

What is your core muscle group and how does it work? Practically every fitness program known to humanity talks at some point about “core muscles” and how to strengthen them. But what are your core muscles? Meet the team of muscles that works together to create mobility and stability throughout your body.

A lot of programs focus on the rectus abdominus muscles (known as the six-pack) but the six-pack is really just a supporting player.

The core muscles aren’t just on the front of your body. They make up a shape like a soup can with a top, sides, and bottom. The core muscles are constantly in dynamic interaction to provide both support and movement to your torso and internal organs and control how you breath, use the bathroom, have sex, digest food, and much more. They need to be trained together so that they can coordinate for both strength and flexibility.

Core Muscle group is like a soup can in the middle of the body

What is Your “Core Muscle” Group?

The Diaphragm

The diaphragm is the top of the soup can, a big dome of muscle at the bottom of the rib cage. It attaches to our spine, rib cage, and the muscles all around our midsection, with holes in it where the aorta, vena cava, and esophagus pass through on their way to the lower body.

The primary job of the diaphragm is breathing. When it contracts, the dome drops down pulling air into the lungs. When it relaxes it lifts back up into its original dome shape as the lungs empty out. Having the ability to fully relax and contract the diaphragm is very important for taking full, deep breaths. This is called diaphragmatic breathing, not because it only uses the diaphragm (other muscles also play important roles) but because it makes full use of the diaphragm.

The diaphragm also works with the rest of the core muscle team to stabilize the upper body. When other core muscles aren’t working well the diaphragm ends up needing to work overtime as a stabilizer, making it hard to relax. This can have a big effect on important stuff like your breathing patterns and neck and back flexibility.

The Transversus Abdominus

While the six-pack muscle is the showboater of the core muscle group, the transversus abdominus is the real power behind the throne. This is the deepest of the three muscles I like to call the “meat corset” because they wrap around our waist and, when they contract, they squeeze in to stabilize us from all sides. The meat corset makes up the sides of the soup can.

The TA attaches in back near your spine and wraps all the way around your waist where it comes together at a thin line of connective tissue in the middle of your belly. A happy TA works together with the other meat corset muscles as a primary stabilizer for the spine and entire upper body.

The Internal and External Obliques

The obliques are the second and third layer of the famous meat corset. They wrap around your waist over the TA at slight angles, providing even more stability and adding a dynamic side-bending and twisting ability that gives our spine it’s famous mobility.

The meat corset muscles work in constant coordination with the diaphragm so that when the diaphragm relaxes and you exhale the meat corset ramps up to take over most of the job of holding you up. If the meat corset is sleepy and uncoordinated then the diaphragm doesn’t get to relax and you can end up with breathing issues, back and neck pain, poor posture, stiff spine, and a long list of additional issues.

Check out the work of the Postural Restoration Institute if you want to do a deep dive here.

The Pelvic Floor

The pelvic floor muscles are a basket of interwoven muscle fibers that sits at the base of your pelvis. They are the bottom of the soup can.

The two main muscles are the levator ani and the coccygeus, that support your internal organs and have little holes in them to control your poop and pee, and the opening of the vaginal canal if you are AFAB (assigned female at birth).

The pelvic floor muscles are part of the intricate choreography of the soup can. When the choreography is off the pelvic floor can become sleepy and under-working, or stressed out and over-working, which can have unpleasant repercussions for digestion, pooping and peeing, and sex.

The Erector Spinae

The erector spinae are a bunch of small muscles that stick out all along your spine like little pine tree branches, connecting the vertebrae together. They are the solid seam in the side of the soup can that provides extra stability and helps to keep your body upright but mobile. If the rest of the soup can gets sleepy and squishy the erector spinae can end up very over-worked and tight. Unpleasant outcomes include tight back muscles, back spasms, and even displacement of the vertebrae.

The Rectus Abdominus

Here we have arrived at the six-pack, all the way down at the bottom of the list. The rectus abdominus attaches to the bottom front of the rib cage and the top front of the pelvis. It’s sole job is to forward flex the spine (like in a sit-up) but it isn’t really awesome at stabilization. It’s a bit of a one-trick pony: very good at an important job but not good at anything else.

When the soup can is squashy the rec abs can end up over-working. You can tell if you have too much rec ab in your life if, when you try to do a sit-up, your abs push out instead of in. This ultimately robs you of a lot of your strength and stability.

Honorable mention goes to the Iliopsoas

Even though it isn’t technically part of the soup can, you can’t talk about core muscles without mentioning the iliopsoas. This is a loving union of two muscles, the iliacus and the psoas, that attach to the spine at the same place as the diaphragm and swoop down inside your body, through the pelvic floor, to attach to your upper inner thigh. I have a lot of content on the iliopsoas and how to fall in love with yours, so I wont get into too much detail here.

Key Takeaway about the Core Muscle Group and How it Works

The most important thing to remember about the core muscle group and how it works, is that these muscles all work together and what affects one of them, affects all of them.

The core muscles are always moving because you are always breathing and breath is the first and most accessible way to start to feel how they work and interact. Coming soon is a series of workouts and tutorials on how to coordinate and strengthen your core muscle group so that they work together as one happy team!

Happy Bendings!
Kristina

How to Have a Strong Flexible Psoas for Healthy Hips

A strong flexible psoas muscle is fundamental to a healthy back and mobile, balanced hips. The psoas attaches all along the lumbar spine in the lower back then swoops down under your internal organs to attach to the top inside of the femur. It is the only muscle connecting the upper and lower body, and it has multiple jobs including spinal support and movement, hip stabilization, and internal rotation and flexion of the thigh.

The Iliopsoas

Despite its extremely important role in our mobility (the psoas plays a part in anything we do from the waist down) it is often neglected. Part of this is because the psoas runs deep under other muscles and guts, so it’s hard to touch it or have a strong awareness of what it’s up to. It’s also because sitting too much, as most of us do, makes the psoas squashed, weak, and tight.

The Consequences of a Tight, Weak Psoas

Many people have issues strengthening and stretching their psoas and experience some kind of sub-optimal consequences. If you experience back spasms (“throwing your back out”), snapping hip syndrome, SI joint pain, sciatica, or myriad other issues, it’s good to take a close look at your psaos health.

My own psoas was very unhealthy during my years as a dancer and contortionist. It was chronically tight, which I found extremely frustrating. I over-stretched it and it spasmed on a regular basis. It wasn’t until I learned how to feel my psoas, which took some concerted work over a period of months, and strengthened it, that I was able to finally get it to relax and my hip flexibility and back health improved.

How to Have a Strong Flexible Psoas

The routine in this video is basically the format that I used to create a strong flexible psoas. I progressed slowly. It took me many months to be able to move through the exercises that I show in half an hour. In the beginning I kept offloading the work to the other hip flexors (see this post on hip flexor anatomy if you want to know who they are).

So you may want to just start with the first exercise, the foot slide on an elevated surface, and stick with that until you have a sensation of where the psoas is and how to use it, then progress slowly at the pace that works best for you.

This is not the most glamorous, social media-worthy work but it has changed my life to have a better relationship with my psoas, and I hope it changes yours too.

Viva el psoas! Hail the psoas! Psoas forever!

How “Fixing Your Posture” Could be Causing Your Back Pain and What to Do About It

Earlier this year I made a post called 4 Tips to Get More Flexible Without Stretching, and the #1 item on the list was to improve your posture. This post offers a deeper dive into posture, how some “fixes” can actually create back pain, and a checklist with alternatives.

We all know that hunching over like a buzzard is not good for us. The “tech neck”, rounded back, forward-thrusted head, and drooping shoulders characteristic of our modern lifestyle is obviously problematic. But how do you fix it? What should you do instead?

The most common “fix” that I see is to thrust the chest forward, lift the chin, and pull the shoulders “down and back” like a proud peacock. While this posture may work for peacocks, it isn’t so great for human anatomy and can actually cause more chronic pain, especially in the mid and upper back.

This tutorial is a little step-by-step bottom-up checklist for getting your bones stacked up and your muscles gently but firmly engaged for relaxed, healthy, mobile posture.

It is important to note that “perfect” posture is not a requirement for health or the same for all bodies. There is tremendous variety in the way our bodies are formed so this might not be what is optimal for you. This is just a set of guidelines you can use to check in with your body if you are having back pain or if you notice that your posture is feeling weird.

Posture Checklist to Align Your Spine

1. Notice How your Posture is Now

The textbooks have some guidelines for correct posture that I take as a loose jumping-off point, understanding that all bodies are different. Look for the landmarks of your ear, your shoulder bone, bone on the outside of your hip (the greater trochantur of the femur), the middle of the knee, and the ankle bone and get them all lined up one on top of the other.

Noticing where you deviate from this vertical line can help you identify some postural corrections that might help with chronic pain or tightness.

2. Check Your Pelvic Bones

All of us have different sizes and shapes for our hips, butt and bellies that make our posture look different, and that is part of what keeps the world interesting! Instead, I like to assess pelvic position using the bones, since those tend to be more (but by no means completely) consistent.

The two hip bones in the front (the anterior superior illiac spine or ASIS for those who care) and the pubic bone make a downwards-facing triangle in the front of the hips. With some variation for anatomy, you want to make these boney landmarks flat and symmetrical with each other so that the pelvis isn’t tilted side-to-side or front-to-back.

This generally involves a gentle engagement of the muscles of the pelvic floor and the illiopsoas. I have a number of workouts on pelvic stability if this feels mysterious and inaccessible for you and you can see how this looks in the video below at 2:00 minutes.

3. Engage Your Meat Corset

The meat corset is my fond nickname for a triple-layered band of muscles that wraps around your waist like a corset made of you. The transverse abdominus, internal obliques, and external obliques are a vital set of postural muscles, and like all postural muscles they are ideally awake and responsive almost all the time.

You can feel your meat corset by putting your hands on your waist and coughing or laughing. For postural work these muscles only need to be awake and lightly engaged. The “suck in your gut” cue that I loathe does not encourage sustainable posture, and endless crunches aren’t going to help either. I find that breathwork can be a good entrée to building that healthy meat corset structure.

Again, check out some of my workouts for some meat corset strengthening ideas and see the visual at 2:50 in the video below.

3. Open The Shoulders Without Squishing the Shoulder Blades

Forward rounded shoulders are the scourge of modernity, with so many of us sitting hunched over keyboards, phones, steering wheels, gaming consoles, textbooks, food preparation, sewing machines, antique scrolls, you name it. As previously stated, the common “fix” of thrusting the chest forward, squeezing the shoulder blades together, and lifting the chin is suboptimal. It strains and compresses the muscles of the upper back in a way they will not enjoy long-term and can create ongoing back pain if you try to maintain it.

Those gimmicky postural aides that encourage squeezing your shoulder blades together are just going to create a host of new issues for you.

The trick with shoulder blades is actually to pull them apart, while externally rotating the shoulder socket. This will get your upper back engaged sustainably while opening up the front of the chest and shoulder, and stacking that shoulder joint over your hip.

For an exercise to help you find this tricky position, please check out the video embedded below. For this specific tutorial skip to 4:00.

4. Stack that Ear

The head and neck come last, stacking them comfortably over the nice foundation you just built along the rest of your spine.

Many of us have a forward thrust to our head, so that the ear habitually sits in front of the shoulder instead of over it (see previous list of reasons). This position makes the neck muscles have to work much, much harder to hold up that heavy coconut of a head.

My favorite quick exercise to start to bring that head back in line is to interlace the finger into a basket cupping the back of the head, elbows wide, and gently press the head and hands together, feeling the inspiration of the muscles in both the upper back and the front of the neck. The chin should not be lifted or dropped, but remain parallel to the floor.

For that tutorial, skip to 6:30 in the video below.

Now What? Why is Good Posture so Awkward?

The first time I ran through this checklist and tried to align my posture correctly I got mad. How the hell was I supposed to walk around like this? It felt foreign, difficult, and uncomfortable.

The good news is that perfect posture is not a requirement for a rich, full, happy life or even for pain-free mobility. Like so many other things in life it is pretty much always a work in progress, something you chip away at, check in on, and use as a tool when you need it. If your current posture doesn’t cause you problems and is working for you, you may not need to change it. If you start to have pain, then running this checklist may provide relief.

When I was really dedicated to improving my posture to address my hypermobile back and a lower back pain I set an alarm on my phone to go off every hour on the hour to remind me to run through the check list. After a while I didn’t need the checklist, my body just started to remember to do it.

My posture now definitely isn’t perfect, but it’s good enough that I don’t have back pain any more and I still run through the check list if I’m on my feet for a long time or feel like I need it. It’s change the way that I walk and run, and vastly improved my forward bending which was always pretty crappy.

I hope this checklist is useful for you too!

Happy Bendings,
Kristina

Tight Hip Flexors? Try These Lunge Variations for Better Results

The humble lunge is a staple of flexibility training designed to target the front of the hips. With lunges, small details in alignment and positioning can make a huge difference in outcome, and we can use that to our advantage.

Understanding how lunge alignment emphasizes different muscles in the hips can help you target the muscles that really need the stretch.

Get to Know the 6 Primary Hip Flexors

First, let’s define our terms. There are multiple hip flexors, but six of them do most of the work and are our primary focus when we talk about stretching. These are the psoas, iliacus, pectineus, tensor fasciae latae, sartorius, and rectus femoris. To learn more about each of these muscles, where they live and what they do, please check out this blog post on hip flexor anatomy.

Once you know where your muscles are and how they work it’s much easier to delve into the mysterious habits of your own hips.

Find Your Square Lunge

Before tinkering with our lunge position, let’s start by finding a lovely, square lunge. The hips are square when both hip bones and the pubic bone are on the same plane, so the hips are not twisting, one hip bone is not higher than the other, and the pubic bone is not behind the hip bones. Your back leg should be coming straight back behind you, and your front leg straight out in front.

You can read more about square hips and why they are important in this blog post on square splits. And this workout video has some great basic lunges so you can get the hang of it.

I’m compelled to remind you (and myself) that doing square lunges means that you will not go as deep into the stretch. They may feel awkward if you are used to letting the pelvis do its own thing. If you like to arch your back or if your hips aren’t used to supporting this position, a square lunge could feel more like a workout than a stretch. It’s ok. Keep doing it anyway, it will get easier over time. I promise it’s worth it.

This square lunge gives a pretty even stretch across the front of the pelvis, not targeting any specific hip flexor but not leaving anyone out. If you allow the pelvis to tilt or twist or the back to arch you will start to skip some of the hip flexors (usually the tightest ones that most need the stretch). For you naturally bendy people this is especially important to keep your pelvis healthy. After years of extravagant over-stretching, this is now my pelvic theme song: Hip to Be Square…

Emphasize the Satorius and Rectus Femoris

The satorius and rectus femoris are the two muscles that cross both the hip joint and the knee joint. That makes it very easy to emphasize them in your lunge: just bend your knee. You can either do this in the traditional couch stretch, with your shin up against the wall, or by just reaching back and grabbing your foot and bringing it in towards your butt.

I don’t teach this lunge variation in my beginner/intermediate videos because it can be so hard on the knees, but there is a more gentle version of this stretch in the Happy Hips workout.

However you do it, please put some nice padding under your knee and stop if you feel any knee pain. And of course, keep those hips square.

Emphasize the Tensor Fasciae Latae

The TFL attaches to the outside front of the hip, so in order to emphasize that muscle you will want to externally rotate your back leg. The tricky thing here is to rotate the thigh bone but keep the hip bones square. For most of us, that means that the amount of external rotation will be quite small, so if you look back and the back leg has barely moved off center, don’t worry.

The front leg can externally rotate a little bit too, if that helps with the balance.

The TFL can be targeted a little more by shifting the pelvis slightly off center in the direction of the back leg, and leaning away from the hip. That means if my left leg is back and I am stretching my left hip, I will slide my pelvis slightly to the left and lean slightly to the right. No twisting in the hips though, both hip bones pointed straight ahead like headlights on a foggy night.

For you visual learners please check out the video at the end of this post!

Emphasize the Psoas and Iliacus (Iliopsoas)

These deep hip flexors are often both tight and weak because most of us sit too much, and these muscles hate sitting. When they work well, they are our most powerful hip flexors and stabilizers, but when they are tight they can lead to a very cranky pelvis, back spasms, and tight hips.

This lunge is one of my favorites because the iliopsoas difficult to target but terribly important. If this lunge variation feels challenging… yay! You’ve found something that could be very useful for improving your hip health.

To emphasize the psoas you will internally rotate your back leg. The front leg still comes directly forward and the hips stay square. Just like with the TFL lunge, the hips slide out to the side in the directly of the back leg, and the body leans opposite. Again, check out the video below for a visual.

Keep in mind that if your iliopsoas muscles are very tight, it might be challenging to get them to stretch. If you don’t feel a stretch, don’t be discouraged. Keep playing with the position, building the strength in the supporting muscles, and working into the lunge over time. When I first started it, this lunge felt like a lot of work with no payoff but it’s made a massive difference in my hip functionality over time.

The Sets and Reps for Lunges

A lunge is a mixture between a passive static and an active stretch. I do a million different variations to get the results I want in a particular session.

Lunges with the knee on the floor tend to be more passive, and unless you have knee issues I recommend these if you are just starting out with square lunges and lunge variations. An emphasis on static passive stretching and isometric contraction of the supporting muscles can be a very effective way to start to shift hip alignment.

I recommend doing all 3 lunges, 3 sets of 30 seconds each (9 lunges total on each side). Over time you can vary the number of sets of each lunge variety according to what your body needs most. For example I only do 2 sets of quad/sartorius stretching but 4 sets of iliopsoas stretching because that’s where I am most tight.

Feel the support from the butt muscles and torso muscles, building strength and control. Alignment is more important than depth. You can build depth over time but it is very hard to fix alignment once you are deep.

Happy hips come from consistent investigations into pelvic alignment and imbalances. The better you know your hips, the better you can tailor your training to your body’s needs.

Happy Bendings everyone!

Flexibility

Category: Flexibility