Pilates Can Strengthen Your Core

It’s well-known that Pilates can strengthen your core, which most people associate with their abs. Yes, the abdominal muscles are part of your core, but it also includes your sides, back, pelvic floor, hip flexors, and glutes. These are the muscles that hold you up, support your spine, and stabilize your hips and pelvis. Some of these muscles even reach down to your upper leg bone! It’s all connected, and the stronger your core, the better it all works together. 

Reasons to Strengthen Your Core

Since your core muscles support the rest of your body, you’ll see a lot of benefits from working on strengthening it! 

1. Improved posture, which helps you to avoid back pain when sitting at your desk, on your bike, while running or walking, lifting groceries into the back of your car, or picking up your child.  
2. Strong core muscles will help keep your hips/pelvis more stable when you’re doing activities like walking, riding, or running. If you Google images of runners with a lack of hip stability, you’ll see how much one hip will drop. In turn, the knee, ankle, and foot are affected. For those who do activities that involve a lot of repetition, injuries will start to show up.
3. The core works as a natural girdle, supporting your organs and holding everything in place.
4. When your core is strong it will help you with your balance. When my left glutes are weaker than my right, I notice that I’m much more unstable on the left leg when I try to do any balancing exercises. The best thing to do is to keep going as frustrating as it can be to get stronger. 

How Pilates Exercises Strengthen Your Core

There are a lot of Pilates exercises that appear to be similar to a sit-up or crunch. I remember doing a lot of those in school, and even when I first started going to aerobics classes. We’d do crunches, side-crunches, and criss-cross crunches until it burned. Back then, though, the focus was entirely on using the abs to lift your body up.

In Pilates, however, we work on using the glutes just as much as the abs to lift and lengthen your body. We also work on rounding up, reaching the ribs and spine down (or backward) as we move. It’s amazing to feel how much more your core muscles engage when you reach and lengthen. At the same time, you will find a stretch that is often very much needed. 

It’s interesting to play around with getting into an exercise in various ways and to notice how different the exercise can feel from the set-up. Take The Hundred for example. If you start with your feet in table-top, when you curl up and extend your legs you likely won’t feel your glutes at all. Your lower back and tailbone also might not feel very connected to the mat. On the other hand, if you lengthen your legs out on the mat and then lift up from that position, you’ll be using your glutes, hip flexors, and abs (plus a bunch of other muscles) to do the exercise. You can do this with your legs fully extended or with your knees bent, as long as your feet, tailbone, and lower back are reaching into the mat. 

Stronger Core for a Stronger You

When you work on strengthening your core, it won’t take long to notice the benefits. You’ll stand taller, have less back pain, and protect yourself from future injuries. Pilates is one of the best forms of exercise to help you stay strong, mobile, and flexible from your core up to the top of your head down to your toes.