We just finished a Pilates Excel course in my Seattle studio and we discovered something interesting about one of the teachers who was here. She has no basement in her Powerhouse.
As the 4 day course was unfolding, she wasn't getting sore in her abdominals and I became curious and we investigated.
It turns out, she has no detectible engagement in her lower TVA fibers - nothing moves, nothing flattens, nothing works.
Pilates people, we cannot have this.
In a bit, I'll talk about our plan to fix this problem in the visiting teacher but first, let's figure out if this is happening for some of your clients, too.
It turns out that this is not terribly uncommon, at least it's not in the folks I work with and I work with a lot of folks. If you are teaching your heart out and your clients aren't getting sore, check out the integrity of their transverse engagement; they might be missing their Burmuda Triangle!
That's what I call the triangle that's formed if we draw a line across the hips and then down to the public sympysis. Pretty much everyone knows about the Burmuda Triangle and when I call that lower triangle of the tva the Burmuda Triangle, most folks realize they're lost in it just like all those poor sailing souls and airplane pilots and passengers who've disappeared in the real Burmuda Triangle.
The triangle at the other end, the top end, of the tva is also an issue but most of your clients will be able to fire there because it helps tack down the base of the rib cage and most folks can cough, sneeze or laugh their way to find those upper fibers. It also fires when we throw up but let's not even think about that. Okay? Ok.
The lower triangle is another matter entirely.
Often, our sensation, our strength, our awareness seems to vanish from this special place and when that happens, there's usually a pretty good reason for it.
A car accident, surgery, even a fall can disrupt the way our bodies work and the way our muscles fire. Sometimes years of neglect fly by and when we reintroduce ourselves to ourselves, we find we're missing most of our muscular workforce.
Hmmmmm. How to get the masses back to work?
A queue I love to get those top to bottom fibers to engage goes like this. Imagine a cross, not a Jesus cross but a Switzerland cross, or a Red Cross cross. The horizontal bar of the cross runs across your tummy just above the hip bones, right where your waist high-belt (nerd!) would go. The vertical bar of the cross runs from your xiphoid process all the way down to your public symphysis. With you laying on your back, imagine that cross laying on your tummy and with your scoop muscle, you've got to sink that cross square to the floor underneath you, back into your spine, and up just a bit so that when you stand up and walk out of the studio, you've patterned a lift up up up and away from our needy friend Mr. Gravity.
The vertical bar is every bit as important to your success in Pilates and for the health and strength of your spine as the horizontal bar because it's the vertical bar of the cross that helps lift our weight up and out of our hips, preserving those joints and the ones downstream in the legs, and it's the vertical bar of the cross that helps lift the base of our rib cage up up up and away from our hips giving us beautiful posture and lifted chests. Upper back muscles and spinal extensors help there, too, but getting everything you can out of your big strong tva is the contribution of the front of the body to help the work of the muscles in back. Make sense?
Back to our visiting teacher.
She's strong. She's fit. She's smart and gorgeous. She has no basement but she's building one and here's how.
Patience. Diligence. Focus. Commitment. Effort. Integrity.
Using the cross image, she's practicing her engagement several times a day. And by that I mean that for minutes at a time, she's laying on her back, hands on the fronts of her hips and belly, and she's trying to make those lower fibers work, she's trying to put that cross on the floor.
When we have parts of us that have checked out like this, the reestablishment of the relationship is tedious but essential to the support of her spine and to her pelvic stability. Not only do her pelvic floor muscles accompany those low TVA fibers, but on down the line to her inner thighs, everything is waiting for the call from on high. The chain is broken, the linkage is weak and her stability is impaired without that baseline snuggle.
Within about 10 minutes of trying to find the trigger, with great focus and elegant effort, she began to make the connection to fibers ever lower. I put an Easy Button from Staples on her low belly and asked her to pull it to the back of her waistline. Pictures were taken and as soon as someone sends me one, I'll add it to this piece.
She had a private with Heidi that ended mere moments prior to me wisking her off to the airport for her long flight back to Europe, and together they came up with a plan to help her excavate her Powerhouse floor so she can enjoy a stronger foundation underneath her.
When a muscle or parts of a muscle stop working, they can be brought back on board and rehabilitated back to full function but only with purposeful consistent work.
Neurology remaps. Connections are renewed. The body remembers.
I will see her again this summer on her turf in Europe and we'll have ourselves a Powerhouse Basement Tour and see how far she's come.
Building a basement isn't easy but it's absolutely essential for stability, strength and control. And isn't that the very definition of Pilates? I think it is.
I'm tired, I'm still not unpacked but I'm off to practice my Roll Up before collapsing into bed - g'night dear Pilates People. Sweet dreams.