Forget Vaporfly, Is Pilates An Athelete's Secret Weapon?
2/06/2020
Pilates is a great companion activity to athletes in many sports, with stars such as Christiano Ronaldo, Harry Kane, Andy Murry, Tiger Woods, Mo Farah & Fabian Cancellara all adding Pilates to their routine. I have worked with many amateur athletes to help them achieve their goals and here are some of the key benefits runners in particular can achieve with a regular Pilates workout:
Developing and maintaining running form. To be able to run efficiently your body needs to be able to hold itself upright so that your limbs can move freely and propel you forward. This requires strength and power from your core, this means all those muscles need to be doing the job they evolved for. Many running coaches and experts advocate maintaining ‘good posture’ without really talking about how we achieve it. In Pilates our aim is to develop all the muscles of the body so that our head, rib cage and pelvis all balance one over the other and are supported effectively by strong legs. In this position we are ready to move effectively in any way we choose.
Lengthening and decompressing. By developing small muscles as well as large in Pilates we ensure we are developing all the muscles that help decompress, support and also stabilise our joints. As our joints take the bulk of the impact during our running any imbalance around them can be exacerbated and potentially lead to injury if they are not addressed.
Moving from muscles not joints. Central to Pilates is the importance of being in control of your body’s movement. Really paying attention to how you move your body can highlight any unhelpful habits you may have developed such as relying more on gravity, rather than your own musculature, acting upon your limbs and joints as they fall, rather than move, through space. We have no doubt seen, if not experienced, this as the feet and knees lag behind the body and the rib cage slumping down toward the hips impeding the runner's efforts to move forward.
Breathing. Of course this comes naturally to us all but as exercise increases our body’s demand for oxygen we need a breathing mechanism that can meet those demands. In Pilates our aim is to increase our ability to take a more capacious breath as often the exercises make it challenging to breathe into the places we’re used to breathing. This gives all the muscles involved, from our ribs to our abdominals, a great workout that can then pay dividends in other areas of our lives including running.
Stretching. Adequate stretching to maintain the length and supple quality of muscles is something many runners admit they don’t do enough. Pilates exercises have stretching built in. Whether this is because we are straightening our legs, thereby stretching our hamstrings, or we are extending our hip joint and stretching our hip flexors. This means you're getting more bang for your buck without having to think about a separate stretching routine.