21 Oct Why Pilates is awesome for Pole Dancers
Pilates is a great way to help you with your pole dancing.
During Pilates we encourage you to concentrate on what your body is doing. We encourage you to use the correct posture and positioning, movement patterns, muscle activation and breathing. We are trying to retrain your brain and body to function more efficiently. This makes it easier for you to activate the correct muscles during your pole moves.
Pilates is focused on the activation of the centre of the body or core muscles of the body. Tightening these core muscles improves your posture and prevents injury. It provides a stable base for the rest of the body to work from to produce movement and strength. All of your pole moves require a stable base to be able to execute them correctly.
The breathing pattern for each exercise helps us to activate the correct muscles required for the exercise and helps to supply oxygen to the muscles, remove waste products and prevent breath holding. It is important to keep breathing when you are pole dancing.
Pilates is not only about strengthening the muscles but also about controlling the way they contract and the way the body moves. Uncontrolled jerky movements don’t effectively tone and strengthen the body but they also lead to injury. To control a movement correct activation of the smaller stabilising muscles is required rather than the larger superficial muscles. We require significant muscle stabilisation during pole dancing so it does not look jerky or uncontrolled.
In Pilates we use precise body positions to achieve the correct activation of the muscles we need to strengthen to prevent muscle imbalances.
We encourage continuously flowing movements to keep the muscle under tension for set time and the muscle is worked in all directions of the movement and more eccentric control is required.
Isolation of the specific muscle that is required to perform the movement ensures that the correct muscles are stabilising and working to perform the movement. Some people have difficulty activating some of the stabilising muscles and ‘cheat’ using their bigger muscles that are not as effective as stabilising and therefore can lead to injuries.
Pilates focuses on posture, muscle imbalances, muscle recruitment, stability and movement patterns and the implications these have on a particular injury. It is therefore very beneficial for pole dancers to assist them to have correct posture as they perform their pole moves, it corrects muscle imbalances and helps them to have a stable base/core to be able move their arms and legs from which will help to prevent injuries.
~ Mumma Diamonds; Physiotherapist and Pilates Instructor
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