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MOVEMENT to help aid recovery from illness

9/12/2020

I have had so many messages via Instagram lately asking me for advice on using our classes to support their recovery from illness, especially post Covid. Maybe you want to move but you don't have much energy yet, so what do you do?

I think the thing to remember if that movement is always going to help you to feel better, so long as you do something which works with, and not against, your body. So please listen, and tune in and don't push through how you're feeling right now. If you fall asleep mid-class then that is totally ok!

So here are my suggestions of a couple of shorter classes from our sister site MoveBetter.TV that I think will support you with feeling more in touch with your body again so that it begins to heal from the inside out and your nervous system can feel restored and your immune system boosted once again.

YOU CAN TRY THEM FREE FOR 30-DAYS by signing up at Soul Pilates at Home

35mins Grounding Class with a Focus on Breath
This class will really help you feel restored and relaxed.

WATCH

30mins Lengthening Class
This short class feels so delicious on your body.

WATCH

You DO NOT have to just LIVE with pain

9/12/2020

I had a breast reduction at 19. My boobs were massive by the time I was 13 / 14. I gave up sprinting and long-jumping along with any hope of wearing pretty tops and pretty bras. My shoulders hurt and my back constantly ached from standing. So by the time I was 19 I decided I had had enough. The boobs were going and my life would begin again. Running and strapless tops here I come.

Then I was in a car accident. I got whiplash. The proper type. Not the claim blame type which just goes away. I had severe shoulder pain. I spent a year in physio working on my shoulder. I ran out of credits with my insurance company who insisted I see a specialist. I turned up only to find I was seeing a neurologist. I was so embarrassed. “I think there’s been a mix up, I’ve hurt my shoulder and just need you to sign off some more physio sessions I said”. He spent some time looking at me and then told me “there’s nothing wrong with your shoulder, it’s your neck. You’ve damaged a facet joint but it’s so minimal you won’t see anything on a scan which is why it wasn’t picked up but it’s impinging a nerve as this is giving you the pain in your shoulder and the tingling in your hand.”

This was the first time I started to appreciate that where you feel the pain isn’t always what is causing the pain.
I started seeing a Pain Specialist, had some injections into my neck which helped a little and then told they could “burn” the nerve to stop it firing which didn’t sound so helpful to me. “It wasn’t that bad” I told myself. I can live with this.

A few years later I fell running for a train. I wasn’t drunk I promise. I hurt my ankle and was then told I needed surgery to repair it. I had the surgery and whilst it was technically repaired I had exactly the same pain post surgery as pre. I did my physio, did a lot of Pilates (this was all before I trained as a teacher) and told myself that “well this is as good as it gets” and got on with it.

I then decided to train as an instructor with Polestar Pilates who are the most wonderful training body. The level of detail they go into really is astounding. It’s very rehab based but you realise very quickly that really everyone has some sort of rehab need. And that rehab is really just about making your body work better, be more efficient so it’s pain free.

This is when everything changed. I learned myself that we are not meant to be in pain. That it’s not something you’re supposed to just put up with. That you can change it. You can feel better.

Now let me make this clear. Pain is a very big topic and I’m not pretending to cover everything off here. But here are the things I find myself saying time and time again to my clients.

The LANGUAGE you use to describe your body affects how it feels
The language you use about yourself really matters when it comes to pain. Your “bad leg” will always be “bad” if you label it as that. Your “painful shoulder” will be in pain and your “weak ankle” will always stay weak. And of course we have the “bad back”…well…

Change the way you talk about your body and it will change the way it behaves.

Chronic pain is often linked to your emotions
This is not to say it’s not real. It’s very real. Your body is a system of communication and it’s always communicating with you about how it feels both on a physical level but also about your relationships, careers, lifestyle etc. The you don’t listen it shouts. And shouting is pain.

I have worked extensively in rehabilitating people with long term pain and I would say nearly every time we get to a point where someone realises that instead of “I just put the bins out and my back went” actually “my mum died suddenly around the same time” and the penny drops.

We store our emotions in our body. And when you get an area moving which hasn’t moved in a while, because it’s been holding on or keeping everything inside, then you might feel emotional and notice a memory that you had blocked out.

So understand that pain isn’t always a pathology. It can often begin with a life event and later become a pathology such as a bulging disc.

A PAIN-FREE MOVEMENT experience is literally the best medicine
This is well documented. If you can move in a way which is pain free then your nervous system starts to recalibrate. Because often long term pain can be more about the pain receptors being heightened than anything physical. A pain-free movement experience starts to retrain the body as to what is possible.

Surgery often doesn’t always FIX the pain
I have worked with so many people over the years who’ve had surgery and, like me, afterwards said, “I don’t really feel pain free and I expected to”. This is because you had a movement pattern that caused the issue. Maybe the way you walk led to compression in your spine which cause you to prolapse a disc. You had surgery to remove the disc and fuse the spine. The problem was removed right? Wrong! You still move the exactly same way only now you’re putting pressure on the disc above or below the one you had removed. So now another area is inflamed.
As well as any surgery you must learn to move with ease, un-learning any bad habits and re-learning efficient ones.

In fact the best results I’ve ever seen from surgery are when a client has come in before surgery to work on improving their movement patterns so they can much more quickly feel the befit of their surgery.

Your body can literally do ANYTHING
Our posture isn’t fixed. We’re not born with it. It changes throughout our life and can continue to change. Our brains are equally plastic and continue to be shaped through out life depending on our experiences.
We have the power to shift everything.

Master the EASE
In terms of movement, learning to move with ease, mastering the basic strategies with utter efficiency is the key to being able to get stronger and fitter without injury and pain. When you meet restrictions in your movement this is exactly where you need to be. If you get stuck on your roll up, spend time on the "stuck" section rather than just giving up because you can't do it. Unless you have been told you shouldn’t do something by a medical professional often it’s the lack of movement in an area where you’re going to get the most benefit when you learn to move it.

I spent 3 years trying to extend backwards over the ladder barrel in the studio. Spine extension was so painful for me with my injury but I kept working on the strategies I needed and one day I realised I was ready to attempt it again and it felt easy. It still feels easy 8 years later.

I promise you that this approach will last you a lifetime. But that also means it's not a quick fix. It takes time but it's well worth it.

LOWER BACK PAIN is often caused by the wrong muscles working too hard
Let go of the “I must do more to sort out my back” approach. The truth is lower back pain is often caused by your global muscles doing too much and your local muscles not doing enough. Pilates is all about getting the local muscles to do their thing, not just in class but in life. Any active engaging will only ever work the global muscles. You want the subtly in movement.

This is going to be your life long friend.

THE FITNESS MISTAKES TO STOP MAKING

9/12/2020

I started Pilates in my 20s following a car accident which left me with severe chronic neck pain which lasted years. After seeing several specialists and pain management consultants and a lot of lying inside MRI machines, I found Pilates and instantly fell in love with how it made me feel. In fact it was the only thing which removed my pain completely and also toned me up (I dropped 2 dress sizes) and gave me mental clarity like no other workout. I decided to train as an instructor and now 15 years later I own two Pilates studios in Bristol, England and our wonderful online community MoveBetterTV where we bring movement into your homes in our unique way.

What I love most about being an instructor is that you never know everything about the body. There is always more being discovered and therefore more to learn. I find it fascinating and have spent thousands training with some of the best movement and anatomy experts in the land to really understand how our bodies work and how to get the most of them while keeping them pain free. A lot of what I learned really went against everything that was being said to me in most movement classes, everything I read online and really goes against the grain of the fitness industry in general.

I don’t ‘engage' my core (or my glutes)
This is a HUGE one for me. Let me explain: Our body is the most amazingly complex system that does all this ‘stuff’ without you ever consciously thinking about it. In fact this subconscious thinking is the key here. When you walk, you don’t tell each and every muscle to engage and release. You just walk. So why then do we think that the only way to get our abdominals muscles working is to engage them? Our brains literally don't have this conscious connection in this way. We don’t know exactly which part of your core to engage, or by how much. So when you “engage your core” (this goes for ANY muscle in the body) you literally stiffen it, shorten it and actually start training hypertension into your core. When in fact what you want are muscles which know exactly when to engage, when to release, when to be short, when do be long. And to do this you have to ALLOW your muscles to do their job by putting yourself into the correct position. When you’re in the correct position your core will do its thing, your glutes will fire. I hear so many people telling me that they’ve been told they’ve got weak glutes and do lots of glute exercises only to find they still don’t fire when they run. Because the issue is not that they don’t engage or are weak and need strengthening. The AREN’T engaging because your movement pattern is out.

So let me sum this up: Put your bones in the right place and your muscles will do their thing, in exactly the way they were designed. You just need to allow them to.

Actively engaging leads to stiffness, shortness and this puts a huge amount of pressure on the lower back. Pulling in your core when walking around does not reduce your back pain. It is probably causing it.
Seriously don’t do it. But yes do get a strong core! Just in a functional way.

I don’t push myself to breaking point
I was recently chatting to our wonderful manager Dani (she’s also a totally awesome PT) about a client of hers who had talked about how her pain was holding her back in her trianing and made her feel like a failure and it brought me right back to a time when I had felt exactly the and I literally nearly cried thinking about it.

Before I was an instructor I used to do a lot of boot camp type classes. You know the type you’re supposed to be when you want to tone up, loose weight and get fit. The type which push you to your limits so you can see what you’re capable of. But the thing is I had severe nerve pain originating from my neck which ran all the way through my left shoulder and down onto my arm.

I would keep pushing in class, my arm would be screaming at me to stop and I would literally hear “push through the pain” shouted at me. I would end up in tears feeling like an utter failure at my inability to push through whatever I was supposed to push through.

But I wasn’t a failure. My body was literally shouting at me. It knew, for whatever reason, that what I was doing was not right for me in that moment.

It’s important to recognise if you’re just being lazy and need a bit of a (gentle) push OR if your body is telling you it’s unhappy. And there could be a lot of reasons why it’s unhappy but that’s a topic for another day. I'm currently doing Our 10-Day Challenge and woah it's pushing me for sure: cardiovascularly, muscularly YES. But pain? Absolutely not - well apart from the sore muscles the next day which ease off with a bit of stretching.

I stopped thinking it needed to be hard to be any good
Carrying on from number 2, through Pilates I learned to train ease into my body. To find efficiency in my body.
The Pilates classes I attended felt more like massages then workouts but somehow I noticed that I got stronger and leaner than I had ever done from working out 4 times a week AND my pain literally disappeared. I mean it actually went. I cannot stress how many specialists I had seen and was left believing that this was my lot.

What I learned is that pain is never something you should just live with but that you need to really create efficiency in your body before you can push it to its limits. So that pushing becomes a challenge not just something which is “hard”. Because if it’s “hard” it’s probably because you can’t do it. And if you can’t do it, what are you training into your body?

Think of your body like a car. We service a car so it runs smoothly and can therefore manage journeys with ease. If the suspension was a bit out your car would wear out quicker. Your body is exactly the same. You need to service it with efficient movement training so it learns to run smoothly then when you had extra load, speed your movement up, challenge with a lack of support, you’re doing it on a machine which is running smoothly. Which won’t wear out. Which won’t scream at you.

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MOVEMENT to help aid recovery from illness

You DO NOT have to just LIVE with pain

THE FITNESS MISTAKES TO STOP MAKING

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MOVEMENT to help aid recovery from illness

You DO NOT have to just LIVE with pain

THE FITNESS MISTAKES TO STOP MAKING

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about us:

follow Soul Pilates:​

useful information:

special offers & retreats:

DOWNLOAD OUR APP:

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