If you're reading this, I would wager that you are probably, at this very moment, slumped forward, developing tension at your occipital ridge (the base of your skull), rounding your shoulders, and collapsing your upper spine forward in the direction of your screen. You may or may not be leaning to one side in order to compensate for one arm being on the ready to use the mouse and/or sinking deeper into one hip than the other.
You're so busted!
Let's face it, no matter what your vocation, you likely spend three or more hours in front of a computer. If your job requires it, you spend even more time. Even if you aren't required by work to be in front of a computer, you there is so much recreational fun to be had. I am right there with you. I spend at least two hours a day coordinating your schedules, communicating with instructors and business partners, and in addition to do love online shopping and a video game or two. I am fortunate enough to have equipment steps away, and while I am not as religious about it as I would like to be, I do often walk 10 feet away from my grunt work and lie back on the spine corrector and open my chest and relax my neck when things get tiresome. Some of you, I'm sure also have the benefit of expensive Herman Miller chairs or those stability ball chairs. Still, all of us slouch, and the more we do it the worse it can get.
What this is creating is something that I call computer neck. You can't usually see it because it's behind you, but often this chronic slouching makes your head pitch forward or your body and the base of your neck sitck out to the back, and that's just the visual. The misuse of your muscles creates an imbalance of the spine that can cause fatigue and headaches and even blurred vision.
Let me tell you why repetitive slouching gets harder to correct the longer that we do it. Our muscles are coated in the thin layer of tissue called fascia. Fascia is a connective tissue that is found throughout the body. Like other structural elements in the body, when stress is applied to it, it thickens. Therefore, extended periods of slouching can lead the the thickening of the fascia of the muscles holding you in that position. Essentially, it's like when your mom told you not to make ugly faces because you'll freeze that way. The buildup of the facscia surrounding your body can cause you to "freeze" in that position. You aren't likely to freeze solid, but fascial thickening is one of the reasons why if you have become a chronic sloucher or developed a computer neck that it is tiring to return your body to an upright position. The other reason it is difficult is that you are not habitually using the muscles that hold you upright and they have weakened.
SO, how do we escape this downward spiral before we all look like humpbacked little tired people?
We move.
Two things will help break down fascia that has thickened: massage and movement. So now that I've given you an excuse to go get a massage, know that you should also head down to your friendly neighborhood Pilates studio www.pppilates.com to train those muscles that have fallen out of balance.
You'll find that with a focused diligence, you can rediscover the alignment you had before you had that 9-5 (or for some of you that 24/7) job.
Friday, July 30, 2010
Monday, July 26, 2010
The MAN behind the Method
I used to hear this a lot, "So is Pilates a kind of yoga?" Nope, no it's not, and the explanation of the differences is another blog entirely, but one of the primary differences is that it's not ancient. The fact that it is not ancient is what makes it even more accessible. While it's too late to train with the man himself, it is still possible to work with people who have been worked out by or worked with him, which is pretty amazing.
In the years that I have been teaching, more has been discovered about this remarkable innovator. Here is my attempt to put it all together.
Joseph H. Pilates was born sometime in 1880's in Mönchengladbach, Germany. His father was a prize-winning gymnast of Greek ancestry, and his mother a naturopath. In his youth, he suffered from asthma, rickets, and rheumatic fever. One source that I have read says that his last name prompted the kids at school to call him a "Jesus killer" which caused many fights. Since he was so scrawny and didn't fare well in these fights, he dedicated his life to improving his health and his physical strength.
I also read somewhere that a family physician gave him an anatomy book: "I learned every page, every part of the body; I would move each part as I memorized it. As a child, I would lie in the woods for hours, hiding and watching the animals move, how the mother taught the young." He studied both Eastern and Western forms of exercise including yoga, Zen, and ancient Greek and Roman regimens. By the time he was 14 he had developed his body to the point that he was modelling for anatomy charts.
It could be both of these things, or part of none of it could be true.
When he moved to England in 1912, he earned a living as a professional boxer, circus-performer, and self-defense trainer at police schools and Scotland Yard. Nevertheless, the British authorities interned him during World War I along with other German citizens in a camp on the Isle of Man. Not many of my students even know what an interment camp is. A handful of people come to me and tell me that they heard that Pilates was in prison. Let me break it down for you to dispel the myth. The Isle of Mann is an island in the Irish Sea between Ireland and Great Britain. During World War I, people who were from "enemy combatant" countries we detained there. At first, when I pictured this, I thought of concentration camps. Horrifying. It turns out that on the Isle of Mann, people were allowed to do pretty much what they wanted, they were fed, they were taken good care of a led comfortable lives. They just couldn't leave. It was during this involuntary break, he began to intensively develop his concept of an integrated, comprehensive system of physical exercise, which he himself called "Contrology." He studied yoga and the movements of animals and trained his fellow inmates in fitness and exercises. The legend is that that these inmates survived the great pandemic of 1918 due to their good physical shape which was a result of exercising with Joseph Pilates.
Call me crazy, but sometimes I think, "How nice! I wish someone would put a roof over my head and feed me so that I can develop my own system of exercise." I know, it's naive.
After the war (WWI), he returned to Germany and collaborated with important experts in dance and physical exercise such as Rudolf Laban. In Hamburg, he also trained police officers. When he was pressured to train members of the German army, he left his native country, disappointed with its political and social conditions, and emigrated to the United States.
The year 1925 is the approximate time when Pilates migrated to the United States. It is thought that he was brought over by a boxing promoter to train boxers in his method. On the ship to America, he met his future partner Clara. I recently attended a presentation by Ken Endleman, the founder of Balanced Body (a great guy if you ever have the chance to meet him). He has been doing some research on his own and discovered that there is no official record of Joseph and Clara ever actually marrying. Is has long been assumed that Clara was his second wife. Ken's research finds that Clara may have actually been his third wife, if they married at all. What a cad!
In truth, it's really none of our business, and we always talk about him nowadays as a man before his time...maybe he was just setting a future trend for eternal cohabitation. I digress.
The couple founded a studio in New York City and directly taught and supervised their students well into the 1960s. Joseph and Clara Pilates soon established a devout following in the local dance and the performing-arts community of New York. Opera singer Roberta Peters, well-known dancers such as George Balanchine and Martha Graham became devotees and regularly sent their students to the studio for training and rehabilitation.
Joseph Pilates wrote two books, that we know of: Return to Life through Contrology and Your Health. He was also a prolific inventor, with over 26 patents cited.
Joseph Pilates died in 1967 at the age of 84 in New York. I used to tell, which great dramatic flair, the story I heard of how he died of complications from a fire in his studio. In the tale that I was told, Joseph went to the studio to rescue his equipment and fell through the floor. When the firemen arrived, they found him hanging from a rafter by his hands and he had been there for hours! That just goes to show that you can't believe everything that you hear. I just came across this quote from Mary Bowen several places on the Internet:
"The Fire" - People often ask me "Did Joe Pilates die in a fire?" One woman in London where I was giving a workshop at the Pilates Foundation of UK last May said she had read that it was so in The New York Times. To set the record straight - no, Joe did not die in a fire. He died two years later, in 1967, of advanced emphysema from smoking cigars for too many years (which he took up out of disappointment that he wasn't taken more seriously by the powers that be, especially physicians, during his lifetime). His personal friend, Evelyn de la Tour, shared that with me. There was a fire in 1965 in the storage room at the back of his floor. The studio and his and Clara's apartment were in the front of the building and were undamaged. Bruce King had an apartment near the storage room. He had to move out due to severe smoke damage. The day after the fire Joe went to inspect the extent of loss to his possessions in the storage room and one of his feet fell through a hole in the floor scrapping his leg. That was the extent of his injury from the fire.
That just goes to show you, you can't believe everything you hear.
My mentor, as a joke, told someone in teacher training that Eve Gentry died doing Eve's lunge. A spring snapped and hit her in the jugular. Within a week, all of the teacher training students were retelling the story with passion.
I will be really intrigued to see what truths and what myths survive about Joseph Pilates a century from now. He will probably have a harem and will have been able to fly.
In the years that I have been teaching, more has been discovered about this remarkable innovator. Here is my attempt to put it all together.
Joseph H. Pilates was born sometime in 1880's in Mönchengladbach, Germany. His father was a prize-winning gymnast of Greek ancestry, and his mother a naturopath. In his youth, he suffered from asthma, rickets, and rheumatic fever. One source that I have read says that his last name prompted the kids at school to call him a "Jesus killer" which caused many fights. Since he was so scrawny and didn't fare well in these fights, he dedicated his life to improving his health and his physical strength.
I also read somewhere that a family physician gave him an anatomy book: "I learned every page, every part of the body; I would move each part as I memorized it. As a child, I would lie in the woods for hours, hiding and watching the animals move, how the mother taught the young." He studied both Eastern and Western forms of exercise including yoga, Zen, and ancient Greek and Roman regimens. By the time he was 14 he had developed his body to the point that he was modelling for anatomy charts.
It could be both of these things, or part of none of it could be true.
When he moved to England in 1912, he earned a living as a professional boxer, circus-performer, and self-defense trainer at police schools and Scotland Yard. Nevertheless, the British authorities interned him during World War I along with other German citizens in a camp on the Isle of Man. Not many of my students even know what an interment camp is. A handful of people come to me and tell me that they heard that Pilates was in prison. Let me break it down for you to dispel the myth. The Isle of Mann is an island in the Irish Sea between Ireland and Great Britain. During World War I, people who were from "enemy combatant" countries we detained there. At first, when I pictured this, I thought of concentration camps. Horrifying. It turns out that on the Isle of Mann, people were allowed to do pretty much what they wanted, they were fed, they were taken good care of a led comfortable lives. They just couldn't leave. It was during this involuntary break, he began to intensively develop his concept of an integrated, comprehensive system of physical exercise, which he himself called "Contrology." He studied yoga and the movements of animals and trained his fellow inmates in fitness and exercises. The legend is that that these inmates survived the great pandemic of 1918 due to their good physical shape which was a result of exercising with Joseph Pilates.
Call me crazy, but sometimes I think, "How nice! I wish someone would put a roof over my head and feed me so that I can develop my own system of exercise." I know, it's naive.
After the war (WWI), he returned to Germany and collaborated with important experts in dance and physical exercise such as Rudolf Laban. In Hamburg, he also trained police officers. When he was pressured to train members of the German army, he left his native country, disappointed with its political and social conditions, and emigrated to the United States.
The year 1925 is the approximate time when Pilates migrated to the United States. It is thought that he was brought over by a boxing promoter to train boxers in his method. On the ship to America, he met his future partner Clara. I recently attended a presentation by Ken Endleman, the founder of Balanced Body (a great guy if you ever have the chance to meet him). He has been doing some research on his own and discovered that there is no official record of Joseph and Clara ever actually marrying. Is has long been assumed that Clara was his second wife. Ken's research finds that Clara may have actually been his third wife, if they married at all. What a cad!
In truth, it's really none of our business, and we always talk about him nowadays as a man before his time...maybe he was just setting a future trend for eternal cohabitation. I digress.
The couple founded a studio in New York City and directly taught and supervised their students well into the 1960s. Joseph and Clara Pilates soon established a devout following in the local dance and the performing-arts community of New York. Opera singer Roberta Peters, well-known dancers such as George Balanchine and Martha Graham became devotees and regularly sent their students to the studio for training and rehabilitation.
Joseph Pilates wrote two books, that we know of: Return to Life through Contrology and Your Health. He was also a prolific inventor, with over 26 patents cited.
Joseph Pilates died in 1967 at the age of 84 in New York. I used to tell, which great dramatic flair, the story I heard of how he died of complications from a fire in his studio. In the tale that I was told, Joseph went to the studio to rescue his equipment and fell through the floor. When the firemen arrived, they found him hanging from a rafter by his hands and he had been there for hours! That just goes to show that you can't believe everything that you hear. I just came across this quote from Mary Bowen several places on the Internet:
"The Fire" - People often ask me "Did Joe Pilates die in a fire?" One woman in London where I was giving a workshop at the Pilates Foundation of UK last May said she had read that it was so in The New York Times. To set the record straight - no, Joe did not die in a fire. He died two years later, in 1967, of advanced emphysema from smoking cigars for too many years (which he took up out of disappointment that he wasn't taken more seriously by the powers that be, especially physicians, during his lifetime). His personal friend, Evelyn de la Tour, shared that with me. There was a fire in 1965 in the storage room at the back of his floor. The studio and his and Clara's apartment were in the front of the building and were undamaged. Bruce King had an apartment near the storage room. He had to move out due to severe smoke damage. The day after the fire Joe went to inspect the extent of loss to his possessions in the storage room and one of his feet fell through a hole in the floor scrapping his leg. That was the extent of his injury from the fire.
That just goes to show you, you can't believe everything you hear.
My mentor, as a joke, told someone in teacher training that Eve Gentry died doing Eve's lunge. A spring snapped and hit her in the jugular. Within a week, all of the teacher training students were retelling the story with passion.
I will be really intrigued to see what truths and what myths survive about Joseph Pilates a century from now. He will probably have a harem and will have been able to fly.
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