Should you keep your shoulders down when raising the arms overhead?

Careful, this might be a trick question.

Your initial respone might have been. Yeah, duh! Of course! Shoulders should never by up by your ears.

Weeeeeellllllll........

Overhead arm movement might be a bit more complicated than...

A muscle that feels tight is not necessarily short. On the contrary, often long, over-stretched muscles that are weak develop facial tightness as a substitute for real strength. Lengthening these muscles feels good temporarily, but it’s not going to stop the tightness from recurring. It...

The ACL is one of the major ligaments that connect the thighbone to the shinbone. Activities that require sudden changes of direction or speed, landing awkwardly from a jump, and collisions can increase the risk of injury. 

If you have suffered an ACL tear or sprain, check out the Pilates...

Words are subjective. I’m sure you’ve tried to name a color, only to hear your friend say, “That’s not purple, it’s blue.” We associate different meanings to different words.

A “good workout” for one person means sweating, huffing, and puffing until...

First, a short recap about concentric and eccentric muscle work. (I’ve stopped calling it contraction because I associate a shortening with the word contraction, which gets confusing as you’ll see.)

Concentric muscle action is a shortening of the muscle while it’s working....

First, a big thank you to Stephanie Singer from Uniquity Pilates in New London, New Hampshire for letting me borrow her Exo Chair for this review.

When picking out a new Pilates Chair for your studio or home, you have probably noticed there are a lot of options to choose from. In a previous blog...

Is Pilates a workout or is Pilates not a workout? This debate is not new. There has been quite a discussion around that subject for a while. Especially teachers who have been trained in the lineage of Romana Kryzanowska are often adamant that Pilates is a workout and that Pilates is supposed to...

For many of us, the hip flexors are overly eager to "help" us. Sometimes, they even show up during exercises we didn't mean to invite them to. Do you or your students ever get a gripping feeling in the front of the hips during a seated exercise? If so, check out today's video to explore several...

I love challenging spinal stabilizers on the transverse plane with weight distribution exercises.

For example, I’ll be teaching Knee Folds aka Marching. You lie on your back and lift or hover one foot above the mat without rocking your pelvis. Many of my students initially...

During certain exercises on the Ladder Barrel, the distance between the Barrel and Ladder has to be adjusted to achieve the optimum positioning. This quick video shows how this adjustment can be made. You'll see that the Balanced Body Ladder Barrel I'm using has 4 screws at the bottom that can be...