Pilates boosts performance in other sports and activities

If you are taking part in sports and activities, and you want to add a workout to improve your performance, you can’t go wrong with Pilates.

Heck, even if your only activity consists of gardening, carrying your kids, or simply the walk between your car and your office every day, Pilates can help you perform movements with ease and reduce your risk of injury.

The 3 main pillars of exercise are:

1. Strength
2. Flexibility
3. Cardio

Let’s look at how Pilates builds on these.

Strength from the inside out

With Pilates, the focus is on “core” strength during movement. But what exactly does this mean?

Think of the action of reaching up to grab something heavy off a high shelf. You stretch your arms up overhead and grab the object. The object in question is heavier than you thought, and now you’re holding it over your head! The muscles in your arms and shoulders kick into overdrive, and perhaps the grip in your hands also intensifies. All the weight goes into your arms and shoulders. You tense up, and perhaps you squish up your neck and shrug your shoulders. A few minutes later, you’re left with intense shoulder or neck pain.

Now, if you had a little help from strong core muscles – the group of muscles around the spine and centre of the body – you would have relied on strength and stability through the whole body to support the weight of that heavy object, and to help you move it around with ease.

Don’t believe me? Next time you’re reaching up to take something out of a cupboard, check whether you’re shrugging your shoulder up to your ear.. 😉 

Flexibility to move

Let’s use another example here. We all know how we’re told to “bend your knees!” when picking up a heavy object from the ground. But what if the body does not have enough range for us to even reach the ground?!

In Pilates, we incorporate stretching exercises to create strong, lean muscles. This benefits us in movement, as the body has more mobility to move.

Flexibility also assists with joint health, and helps us move with ease. Muscles that are tense tend to either work harder, or force opposing muscle groups to do the work in a movement. This can lead to injuries in and around joints. When performing sports or activities, or even when we’ve been sitting or standing in 1 position for an extended period of time, we’re more likely to have stiff or tense muscles. Stretching helps to increase range of motion.

Low cardio with focus on breathing

Being able to perform a movement slowly helps us to maintain more strength when we move at speed. Pilates helps to strengthen deeper muscles that support movement in cardio-based exercises such as running, soccer, dancing swimming, golf, tennis, hiking.. the list can go on forever!

Since we also focus on our breathing during slower, controlled movement, this falls into place more naturally when we start performing more intense exercise.