The Rehab Pilates Intensive Course teaches principles that have been adapted to be up to date with recent research bringing together the strengths of different approaches with a model that is clinically relevant and effective.

We aim to create an understanding of how to choose the appropriate programme for your client and how to progress from targeting local stability, where motor control is important, through to global stability and mobility. 

We need great control and strength for us to connect our two large boney structures, the pelvis and the thorax.  The spine is the pathway of weight transference between our limbs.  We recruit oppositional forces to create a structure that is stable on a deep and global level.  (Buckminister Fuller presented the body as a tensegrity structure)

Practicing an exercise badly or exercising without focus can eventually produce harmful consequences. Exercising the body and training exclusively with isolation exercises is ineffective.  The body needs to be looked at as a whole and our exercise programmes need to reflect this to produce effective long term results.

Pilate’s focuses on exercising the body in an integrated manner, not isolating some body parts and ignoring others. When every system is working well together perceived effort diminishes, causing more efficient movement.  It’s a case of brain not brawn with the body becoming the winner, like watching a great athlete make a complex movement look easy! 

In fact, stability training is more effective when less effort is used.  Beith (2008) showed that TVA recruitment was significantly greater when less effort in hollowing was used during stability training exercises.

Our clinical Pilate’s programme is unique as we teach exclusive methods to successfully achieve pain free movement and posture with your clients. The simultaneous use of the breath and deep inner stabilizers provide efficient and quality long term movement patterns.

Research has shown that the costal diaphragm has two roles, respiration and spinal stability with activation being coordinated with the TVA and pelvic floor for trunk stability (Hodges & Gundevia, 2000). When the demand for respiration increases, the role of the diaphragm in stabilization diminishes (Hodges et al, 2001). 

So would you start with breathing when a client with asthma or breathing pattern disorder presents with LBP?  Mosely (2004) demonstrated that people with sub acute neck pain performed badly on the abdominal drawing in task (ADIT) and were at risk of developing LBP in the following two years.  Furthermore, recruitment and endurance in the deep neck flexors (longus colli, longus capitus) is important in treating neck pain (Jull & Sterling, 2005). 

The average office workers scapular stabilization and pelvic posture do not allow for the deep cervical flexors to be recruited. Breathing is dysfunctional and involves the SCM, scalene, and pectoralis minor, promoting a mid cervical give, forward head posture with tight suboccipitals and ineffective pelvic floor making upper cervical flexion not possible.

We now know that the recruitment and timing of local stability muscles is under control of the CNS.  Good motor control and not strength is required for segmental stability.  Afferent input imagery along with verbal and tactile feedback is essential with low load, closed chain training.  This ensures that our deep local stabilizers “wake up” to be team players.

Clinical pilates is a unique programme teaching movement on every level involving the breath, our deep inner stabilisers, to control segmental movement though to the appropriate recruitment of our global stabilisers and mobility muscles for efficient function. We will teach you exclusive methods to successfully achieve pain free movement and posture with your clients.