Pilates Students' Manual
Pilates Students' Manual
Shapes Of The Spine - Flexion
This week's episode dives into one of the most frequent shapes we make in Pilates: spinal flexion! We explore where this shape appears in mat and reformer repertoire, what muscles are involved and making this shape, and why we don't need to be worried about it. Tune in!
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Show Notes:
Check out these related episodes to learn more about shapes of the spine!
The Shapes Your Spine Makes In Pilates
Shapes Of The Spine - Lateral Flexion
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[00:00:09] Hello. Hello everybody. Welcome and welcome back to Pilates Students' Manual, helping you get the most out of your Pilates classes. I'm Olivia. Remember, you get the latest updates about everything I'm working on by joining the community at Buy Me a Coffee. That site is buymeacoffee.com/OliviaPodcasts and you can follow along with the journey on Instagram at @PilatesStudentsManual. Pilates Teachers' Manual: The Book is now available to purchase as both an EPUB and PDF as well as on Kindle. You can purchase it and other podcast merch at shop.oliviabioni.com.
[00:00:54] As I shared in last month's episode, we're gonna be looking at the shapes of the spine in this [00:01:00] little mini series of episodes on the show. One of the unique things about Pilates as a movement discipline is that you get to move your spine in all directions. Pilates is not a repetitive action like running or biking where you're always doing the same thing the same way. Pilates, although the exercises echo each other on different pieces of equipment, there's different bases of support, there's different load being applied, we're in a different relation to gravity or body position as we do those movements. So that is something that's kind of unique about Pilates.
[00:01:35] Today's episode is talking about spinal flexion, which is the C curve shape we can make in our spines, sometimes called a round back. It's the shape we make in cat stretch. I've been affectionately calling this particular shape of the spine, the shrimp shape because it has big shrimp energy. Spinal flexion is another way of saying forward bending or [00:02:00] forward folding, where we are rounding the spine forwards, towards our front.
[00:02:07] When we are doing spinal flexion, the plane of movement that we're working on is called the sagittal plane. Remember, a plane of movement is like if you were cut in two by a pane of glass, that way that you could move with where the pane of glass is, the plane of movement that you're in. For spinal flexion, we're cut right down the middle, separating our right side and our left side, which would allow us to both curl forwards and also extend backwards. Both spinal flexion and spinal extension happen in the sagittal plane.
[00:02:45] I could remember the sagittal plane more than any other plane of movement because of the astrological sign, Sagittarius. Now I'm not a huge astrology gal, but I know that Sagittarius is an archer and the action [00:03:00] of drawing a bow is movement in the sagittal plane. For our spine, 'cause we're talking about movement of the spine in particular, not just, you know, what our arm is doing when we're drawing a bow, so for our spine, the sagittal plane would be going like right through the middle of the spine, separating our right and left side. To stay on that plane, we can both bend forward and bend backwards.
[00:03:24] The shape of spinal flexion shows up a lot in Pilates, arguably more than any other shape of the spine. When I covered lateral flexion last week, you saw there's like a handful of exercises that have a side bend. Like not one, like more than one, but just like a handful. Spinal flexion is a very popular shape in Pilates.
[00:03:43] We see spinal flexion in the hundred, the roll up, the rollover, rolling back or rolling like a ball, the ab series or the series of five, in spine stretch, in rocker with open legs or open leg rocker, in corkscrew, saw, [00:04:00] neck pull, scissors and bicycle, jackknife, teaser, boomerang, seal, crab, control balance, and the pushup. And that's just the mat exercises. There's so much spinal flexion.
[00:04:11] If we look at the reformer, we can also see spinal flexion in overhead, back rowing round back, front rowing bending forward, back stroke, horseback, elephant, stomach massage round back, tendon stretch- the tendon stretch where your hands are on the foot bar, and your feet are on the edge of the carriage, not the calf raise, tendon stretch- short spine massage, snake, short box round back, and knee stretches round back. So like there's a lot of spinal flexion in Pilates. This is a shape that Joe is definitely interested in and we do a lot when we practice Pilates.
[00:04:47] Let's talk about the muscles that are primarily responsible for helping us make that shape in our spine. So the big muscles we're gonna be looking at, first and foremost, is our rectus [00:05:00] abdominis, which is our six pack muscle. It runs all the way from the very front of our pelvis, the pubic symphysis, which is where the sides of our pelvis connect right in the front, all the way up like vertically, up towards your ribs, where it attaches between the fifth and seventh ribs. So not like your bottom rib, like middle of your rib cage is where our rectus abdominis is attaching. Like that's a very long muscle. And what we know about big muscles in our body is that they have really good leverage to help us move.
[00:05:35] So the biggest mover in spinal flexion is gonna be our rectus abdominis because when we draw the two ends of the muscle together, 'cause when we move, we're making the muscle shorter, we draw the ends of the muscle together. If we draw the front of our pelvis and the middle of our rib cage together, that's how we get spinal flexion.
[00:05:57] If we're also [00:06:00] flexing our neck, because our neck is part of our spine, we lift our heads a lot to do a chest lift in the mat work, or we draw our chin towards our chest, if we were doing something like piking on the chair or on the reformer. So we have neck flexors and they have lots of names, but as a group, they're neck flexors, and that tells you that they're going to flex the neck. The same thing that our rectus abdominis is doing, pulling our ribs towards our pelvis, our neck flexors are doing, pulling like the top topmost part of our chin or uppermost part of our neck, towards our chest. Bringing those two ends of the muscle together is gonna give us neck flexion.
[00:06:39] When we round our back, we're shortening those muscles in the neck, we're shortening those muscles in the front of the torso, but our external obliques also help us out a bit here because they do kind of have origins and insertions that when they get shorter together, they like assist in flexing. They're not the biggest flexors of our trunk, but they do [00:07:00] help a little bit. We definitely see our external obliques a little bit more in rotation and side bending, but they don't stop existing when we do this shape either.
[00:07:10] Also our psoas muscle, which kind of attaches at our low back and then wraps around inside our hip crease to attach to our thigh bone on the inside, on the inner thigh. It also is a flexor, it's not the strongest flexor. You can see that that's a shorter distance to travel from our low back and then around to our inner thigh.
[00:07:32] It's not as big of a path, so it's not gonna be able to move as much as our rectus abdominis, but it is also the direction that our psoas goes, so it assists with that movement too. But all of those muscles are gonna work together to round us into that tiny ball shape that we see in like rolling like a ball or rolling back. When we round our back, all those muscles get shorter. We draw the ends together and that changes the shape of our spine.
[00:07:59] In [00:08:00] order to get shorter in our front body and make that ball shape, we have to get longer in our back body. So the muscles that help us extend our spine, that take us into shapes like swan or cow stretch, they're stretching in order to allow that movement where our spine's rounding. Everything's connected, we know in the body, and so there's like a teamwork that's happening between our flexors and our extensors in our spine that are helping us make those shapes.
[00:08:28] Naturally, this is super duper simplified, but that's the general idea of what's going on, at least muscularly in our body when we do a forward bend.
[00:08:37] Another thing you wanna keep in mind when we look at spinal flexion is what our relationship is to the load that we're moving. Load is any external force. So it could be a hand weight, like that is an external load. It could be gravity, which is a constant on our planet, or it could [00:09:00] be like the tension from the springs if you're working on a piece of Pilates equipment like the reformer.
[00:09:06] Even though doing a roll up where you start lying flat on your back and then curl your head and shoulders and ribs and roll your whole self off of the mat up to seated, and standing up and doing a roll down where you're folding forward and reaching for your toes. Those are both the same shape of the spine, right? That's the exact same movement of the rollup. But one of them is really easy to do and one of them is really hard to do, and that's because the relation to the load in those two movements, even though it's the same movement, the relation to the load is different.
[00:09:49] Gravity is always gonna pull our weight straight down. So that makes holding a bowling ball, like if we're holding a bowling ball close to our chest, it's [00:10:00] easier to do that than to hold the bowling ball out in front of you with an outstretched arm. That is much more difficult because gravity is always gonna pull the load, whether it's your arm by itself or your arm holding a bowling ball straight down, and it's more difficult to do that when we're holding the load of the bowling ball farther away from the muscles that are resisting gravity.
[00:10:25] When we're lying on our back and trying to roll up to seated, we have to overcome gravity and the weight of our own body in order to get from lying down to sitting up. That is the toughest part about the rollup is there's that point where you have to be stronger than your body weight and gravity. It's not easy to do. It makes it very difficult.
[00:10:52] But when we're standing up and then rolling down towards our toes, our body weight is going in the same direction [00:11:00] as gravity. Even though we're making that rounded shape with our spine, the muscles that are actually doing the most work when we're standing are the muscles on the back of our body that are stopping us from collapsing onto the floor.
[00:11:16] And I know that that sounds very counterintuitive, that your back muscles that are gonna help you do swan are helping you when you do a standing forward fold. But you can ask yourself what would happen if the load won when I was doing a standing rolldown, like if gravity wins, I end up in the same shape. So my muscles aren't resisting gravity in that shape. Like it's not that you aren't using them, but they're not being forced to work against the load, they're actually working with the load.
[00:11:49] If you wanna get stronger in the muscles that flex your trunk, your rectus abdominis muscle, your external [00:12:00] obliques, your psoas, you know, your neck flexors, if you want them to get stronger, you wanna ask them to do more than they normally do, right? That's progressive overload. That's how we get stronger in all parts of our body. If you wanna get stronger in spinal flexion, you gotta practice spinal flexion working against load.
[00:12:18] You can think about doing teaser on the mat where again, you're lying down and you're pulling yourself up in this flexed shape to make that V shape that is teaser. Teaser also has hip flexion 'cause we're lifting our legs towards us, whereas the rollup also has hip flexion because we were lying straight down, but it's not as much flexion as lifting your legs up against gravity, but that's the general idea.
[00:12:38] When you do teaser on the mat, you have to overcome your body weight and gravity, and that's hard. It's harder than the rollup, arguably. When you do teaser on the reformer facing the foot bar, the traditional teaser, not only are you overcoming your body weight and gravity, but then you have your hands and straps, so you have to push through spring resistance, which is [00:13:00] also trying to stop you from getting up to seated in your teaser. Like, that is why it is an advanced exercise. You have to be really strong in your entire front body in order to do that and really coordinated 'cause the carriage is moving, and you have to be really good at balance because you're coming to this like perched place on your tush after overcoming all of this load to get up into that teaser position, like you can see how that is gonna be an advanced thing to do.
[00:13:31] If you're interested in how to get stronger in those exercises. The rollup and the teaser in particular, I do have episodes where I do kind of a deep dive breakdown into those exercises, so be sure to check those out. I'll link them in the show notes and in the episode on YouTube as well.
[00:13:50] I also just wanna point out very loosely, and I talk about this in another episode, where I do a deep dive into shoulder bridge. But if you think of a [00:14:00] bridge, we think of bridge a lot of times as an extension exercise, and we have to be careful when we're labeling exercises as certain things because depending on how you do your bridge, it could be a hip extension exercise in that you are not bringing your thigh closer to your face and shortening the space between your thigh and your torso, which would be hip flexion. You might be in hip extension if you find a really big back bend, so that your thigh is further back relative to your hip versus closer to you. It's even further away from you. So you might have a hip extension going on.
[00:14:43] You could have some extension in your lumbar, in your thoracic spine when you do a bridge, if you take your bridge into higher than a diagonal line. If you're in a diagonal line, like in a hinge bridge, for example, you [00:15:00] aren't actually extending your spine, but you are extending your hip, at least hip extension to neutral, I would say, if you're in that diagonal line. If you get your hips and your back higher, so kind of like a yoga style shoulder bridge, you could go into extension in your thoracic spine, which is the spine bones that correspond with your rib cage and in your lumbar spine, which is the lowest part of our spine.
[00:15:27] But I do wanna throw out that shoulder bridge- and this isn't like a bad thing, but it in a shoulder bridge, your neck is flexed. Your cervical spine, so your neck bones are closer to your chest. Like a bridge is the reverse of a chest lift, if that makes sense. In a chest lift, your ribs stay down and your head and shoulders come up and get closer to your ribs, right? In shoulder bridge, your head and shoulders stay down, but your chest gets closer to your [00:16:00] chin. It's like the inverse of a chest lift. It's like a torso lift instead of curling up. It's like your body comes to your face kind of thing. And sometimes people think that like cervical flexion or spinal flexion is like a bad thing. It's just a way that our spine can move. We can get strong in this shape the same way we can get strong in any shape. It's not something to be avoided unless your doctor has told you not to do that shape under load. Potentially, if you had osteoporosis or were at risk for a fracture for another reason. But there's nothing wrong or bad about spinal correct. It's just a shape that our spine can make.
[00:16:42] And there's a few more shapes of the spine to chat about. Stay tuned and learn about spinal rotation and spinal extension over the next couple months. I'm loving this series because the shapes of the spine are universal. Whether you are doing yoga or [00:17:00] doing Pilates or a skateboarder, or literally whatever you do. Like our spine moves in these ways and it's really fun. So it's great because it's very general. It's great for Pilates students, it's great for Pilates teachers who are learning more about, you know, what spines can do, how they can move, and just anyone interested in learning about how their spine can move. I'm really digging this series.
[00:17:22] Huge thank you to all my supporters on Buy Me a Coffee. It's May, so there's another newsletter on the way with that option to have a coffee chat and hang out with me. I'm really looking forward to that. I hope you have a great couple weeks and I'll talk to you again soon. [00:18:00]