Pilates for Athletes

If you ask people what Pilates is, most will tell you that it’s similar to yoga. Or maybe they have heard that it’s good for people suffering from LBP (low back pain), that it’s a gentle way to strengthen the “core” muscles.

Many are surprised to learn that Pilates is not a form of yoga, and that flexibility is not the focus. Pilates trains muscle systems. It’s not centered around “accessory” muscles, but on chains of muscles - i.e., groups of muscles working together, or influencing each other, through movement patterns. This includes small and large muscle groups that support joint movements and spinal mobility via a functional stack of the vertebrae. This in turn improves overall motor control.

Pilates, the training method, came into existence at the turn of the last century via Mr. Joseph H. Pilates, the son of a Greek wrestling champion father, and a German naturopath mother. Joseph Pilates was a bodybuilder and gymnast in his youth, he participated in martial arts, wrestling, boxing, and other sports. In his 20’s his boxing and circus acrobatics career brought him to England but it was interrupted by WWI. His exercise methodology began to evolve during his internment in a prison camp. There he developed a set of bodyweight exercises for prisoners to stay fit, these later became his “mat” exercises. He also used bed springs as exercise equipment while working with the prison hospital patients.

In 1925 he and his wife, Clara, emigrated to the US where they opened a body-conditioning gym in New York City. He outfitted it with exercise equipment he built himself, and continued to use springs as a resistance tool, importantly, to increase eccentric loading. Some of the equipment he built: the “Reformer,” the “Wunda chair,” and the “Cadillac” are still used today (the Wunda chair was originally designed to fit into small NYC apartments).

The gym clientele was originally about 60% men but also came to include professional dancers, often rehabbing injuries. Joseph and Clara Pilates were not physiotherapists but they understood that placing someone with lower body joint injuries in a supine, closed chain position, with controlled loading on the “Reformer,”facilitated a return to high level physical activity while maintaining strength and mobility. This also proved to be useful for those with LBP, as they were able to load the core muscles and stabilize the pelvis, while reducing shearing forces on the spine.

The focus on lumbo-pelvic stabilization via the core muscles further aided in maximizing movement potential in all planes. For dancers this was important for increasing power, explosiveness, and long term injury prevention. Subsequently, Joseph and Clara’s gym gained popularity with the dance community and the ensuing link of Pilates and dancers lives on today.

One of the equally important foundations of the Pilates system was diaphragmatic breathing, and its connection to 3 dimensional rib cage expansion. The integration of breathing while moving, keeping the ribcage stacked above the pelvis and allowing the diaphragm to act as a trunk stabilizer, results in it working as a piston against the pelvic floor. All of this contributes to explosive power - “hang time” when jumping for example.

Since Joseph Pilates’ time, his exercise methods have evolved in different directions. Some of today’s Pilates teachers were trained via teachers of the teachers who worked directly with Pilates and Clara, and still retain the original focus of training specific agonist/antagonist/synergist muscle groups to achieve a better work/release balance between the muscles. Most of the Pilates classes you may encounter at public gyms are a hybrid of all different kinds of group fitness, mainly designed to get (mostly older) people to move. They may use elastic bands, or small balls or other fitness props.

In terms of athletics, Pilates as the training methodology that Joseph and Clara envisioned -precise movements to engage specific muscle groups - has been more accepted in Australia and some European countries. In North America there has been limited interest except from primarily female dominated performance based sports, such as rhythmic gymnastics, figure skating, etc., but in general, it’s not widely known to other sports.

So why don’t more athletics programs integrate Pilates in their training plans? Coaches and physical preparation staff may not see the relevance if their only exposure to it is as gentle mind-body fitness. And the connection between long term athletic success and the ability to stabilize parts of the body while in movement is a relatively new concept in the sports science world. For athletic trainers it’s easy to make the connection between gross motor movements and power, strength and speed. Exercises that demand controlled breathing, deep core activation and stabilization are less easily associated with vertical jump, agility and explosiveness, and admittedly the research is limited as most studies have been focused on Pilates with regards to low back pain in the general population.

Athletic therapists and physiotherapists may be hesitant to transfer athletes on to an activity that they are unfamiliar with, and may feel more comfortable sending clients to a gym, where they know and understand the equipment, and feel confident asking their patients to use a leg press or do heel raises holding a dumbbell, etc., where load is more easily monitored because if Pilates training has a weakness, it is that progressive overload is rarely addressed. Spring weights vary from manufacturer to manufacturer and they are never classified in volume loads, the springs are usually labeled “light,” “medium,” or “heavy.” Generally, the onus is on the instructor to adapt to each person’s perceived needs (as an athletic trainer might do with elastic bands), rather than systematically loading to encourage adaptation. Finding Pilates instructors with enough experience working with the athletic population and progressive tissue loading can be difficult.

It takes time to learn the equipment set-up, and the range of exercises but the benefits to athletes - the lumbo-pelvic control that gets the pelvic floor to fire with other muscles that make up the core sling (rectus, transversus, obliques, multifidus, etc.) goes a long way to preventing ACL, MCL, patellofemoral pain, ITB syndrome, hamstring injuries, etc. Many young athletes have more joint mobility than muscular control and are one wrong step or cut away from injuries that might take them out of the competitive sport stream.

Pilates mat work (the syllabus of “core” exercises done on a thick exercise mat) provide a reliable, relatively simple to learn, system to train the core. Venu Akuthota’s 2008 study on the correlation between core stability, motor control, and the resulting functional limb movements in athletics stated: “The transversus abdominis and multifidi have been shown to contract 30 ms before movement of the shoulder and 110 ms before movement of the leg in healthy people, theoretically to stabilize the lumbar spine.” Performing these exercises on a regular basis, concurrently with traditional Strength and Conditioning, could also go a long way to heading overuse injuries off at the pass.

Very recently some athletic programs have started introducing joint and mobility methods into their training that on first glance appear similar to Pilates. The main difference I see is that while the exercises are designed to increase ROM, they are performed with all kinds of structural compensations. For example, a hip mobility exercise may have the athlete grinding away at moving one hip without having the strength and/or mobility to fully extend the hip of the support leg. This is counterproductive if the athlete is reinforcing compensatory patterns while simultaneously gaining a negligible amount of mobility that they will not be able to access at top speed (it reminds me of when American football players tried implementing ballet into their training in the 1980’s with equally negligible results). At the end of the day, it’s efficient movement that makes someone faster or more powerful. In order to be efficient one must have the thorax and pelvis stacked in order for the limbs to be able to move freely. Joseph Pilates said: “A few well-designed movements, properly performed in a balanced sequence, are worth hours of doing sloppy calisthenics or forced contortion.”

Joseph Pilates also said: “I was 50 years ahead of my time,” and in many ways he was. At a time when calisthenic strengthening exercises were mostly performed in the sagittal plane, Pilates addressed spinal movement in all planes, and importantly, also in the rotational plane. In this century, mostly over the last decade, we have become aware of how important rotation is in terms of physical preparation for sport and how training the muscles of the trunk in rotation is as crucial as strengthening the limbs for generating power. Rotation allows us to compress one side (bias it towards internal rotation) while opening the other (biasing it towards external rotation). In this way the oppositional force of rotating the trunk over the pelvis is necessary to internally rotate the hip and lengthen the gluteals.

In 1934 Pilates wrote a book called “Your Health: A Corrective System of Exercising That Revolutionizes the Entire Field of Physical Education.” It’s a short book but has a noteworthy illustration of how the body should be stacked in order for the muscles to work optimally. Pilates’ ideas from almost 100 years ago are expressed in somewhat dated prose, but the theories and principles still hold up today. As a Strength & Conditioning coach I often had athletes approach me to ask how they could get faster or more explosive because in spite of all the S&C work they felt they were hitting a plateau. Pilates exercise is not cardio, and an athlete will not get the same endorphin rush like pump as from the weight room, but in terms of building a solid base to breathe and move without restriction, the benefits can be invaluable.

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Akuthota, Venu1; Ferreiro, Andrea1; Moore, Tamara2; Fredericson, Michael3. Core Stability Exercise Principles. Current Sports Medicine Reports: January 2008 - Volume 7 - Issue 1 - p 39-44

doi: 10.1097/01.CSMR.0000308663.13278.69