The Many Ways Pilates Helps Relieve Back Pain

You may have heard that Pilates helps relieve back pain, but have you ever wondered how Pilates works its magic? It’s actually a combination of things that not only heal back pain, but actually helps it stop recurring. But before we can talk about how Pilates helps, we need to understand why the pain is there in the first place. 

Understanding Common Back Pain

I regularly have clients referred to the studio for the common problem of nagging back pain. What’s so common about it? A great majority of them are experiencing pain due to a lack of movement throughout the day. Our modern lives are nothing like our ancestors from 200 years ago, when they used their bodies all day (I’m sure they hurt, too!). Instead, we sit a lot at work or commuting, or have a job standing in one spot all day, or perhaps repeat a movement pattern day in and day out. 

Poor standing and sitting posture, like hunching over the computer or steering wheel, looks like a forward head posture, rounded upper back and neck, and forward-rounded shoulders. Over time, this creates weakness in the back of the body and tightness in the front, which feels like… you guessed it, back pain! You may also notice tight traps, sore neck, and limited shoulder mobility. Pilates helps all of those things!

How Pilates Helps Relieve Back Pain

If you are weak through your back line and tight in the front of your body, we need to get things back in balance. That means strengthening the muscles in the back (back, glutes, triceps, hamstrings), while also improving the mobility and flexibility on the front side (shoulders and hips). Finally, posture will be improved by lengthening and strengthening the torso by building core strength. Yes, Pilates is a full-body workout!

The Best Pilates Exercises To Do For Back Pain

Okay, the header here is a bit misleading. No single Pilates exercise is “best”; rather, they all will help you to increase strength, mobility, and flexibility throughout your body. Every exercise in Pilates will teach you to find length and connections within your body, and how to move through a full range of motion the way you were designed to do. As you move and practice these exercises, your range of motion improves, your strength increases, and the stretch you once felt will be less and different. It’s through movement that Pilates helps relieve back pain. 

Incorporating the Apparatuses

Several Pilates apparatuses, like the reformer, chair, and tower, are very symmetrically designed. This helps your instructor to see where you have imbalances in strength, flexibility, or mobility.  

Just yesterday, a client was doing the push through exercise on the tower and I noticed that she had one shoulder very rolled forward, no arm to back connection, and she would tilt her head to one side for each repetition. When I helped her find the connection of the forward arm to her back, she said, “But now I feel like I’m not using the other arm”.  The truth was that she still was, but just not as much. That arm was actually doing too much work while the other was doing none.  

With the correction, she was more balanced and is now better able to build strength up on the side she wasn’t using as much due to a recent injury. At the same time, once we evened out her movement, she stopped tilting her head to one side and she had a more uniform curl of her spine as she rounded forward. This also provided a more uniform stretch of the spine.  

The Final Step to Relief 

Have you ever heard the term “use it or lose it”? This is very true of all strength, mobility, and flexibility work. If Pilates helps relieve back pain for you, but you then quit and go back to your old habits, the pain will return. On the flip side, if you keep working on your Pilates practice, you’ll keep the pain from returning. Even the most foundational exercises of mat Pilates will provide you with all you need to feel an improvement. This means that if you only know a handful of Pilates exercises and do them well every day, you’ll feel better. Of course, getting onto all the various apparatuses and building up into the intermediate and even advanced exercises will make you feel great. And isn’t that the point?