A question raised by one of my clients – they had been told they need to increase their Core Stability and their question was “what exactly is Core stability and will Pilates help me with this?”
Ask any Fitness Professional or Health Professional and you will no doubt get 10 different answers, all of them will be correct in one sense and at the same time wrong in another sense.
So, here is my take on Core Stability – firstly I think the name is misleading, we would be better calling it Core Control as control is really what it is all about. We need Mobility and Stability to achieve Control. You cannot have stability without a certain amount of mobility and vice versa.
The interesting thing is that we tend to gravitate towards the one that we are nearest……….that means that if you are very flexible, you will tend to use your flexibility to help you achieve stability i.e your body is using compensations or cheating, if you like to think of it that way. If you think about when you’re doing a Pilates exercise that you love, it’s usually because you feel you can achieve it, are good at it – if you’re very flexible say in your hamstrings you will enjoy exercises like scissors, double leg lowers, leg circles etc.
If you are very stable you will like plank, push ups ,all the hard abdominal work etc as this is where you will gravitate too. However, in both cases we need balance, we need to make sure we don’t keep increasing our mobility without increasing our stability and of course it goes the other way too – think bodybuilders!!! They have stabilised soooo much that they have lost the ability to move!
Pilates is about balance, it is very easy to over recruit (stabilise too much) and if we do this we end up losing movement (mobility) – your body is amazing, it wants to function at its best with its full range of movement using the right amount of stability 🙂