Athletics challenge your body, requiring it to move in a variety of ways that place demands on your muscles and skeletal system. And while many athletes focus on practice, practice, practice, it’s also important to consider the training you’re doing to complement your practice and play to boost performance and reduce the risk of injury.
More athletes are adding Pilates to their training regimens both during their regular season and outside of it because of the unique ways it can increase and develop strength, improve flexibility and mobility, support recovery, and more. Pilates can help build a well-balanced, healthy body and support greater power, stamina, and protection during athletic endeavors.
These are some the advantages of Pilates for athletes to consider.
Core Strength
When we say “core” in Pilates, we mean more than the abdominal muscles alone. While the core includes layers of abdominal muscles, it’s also comprised of muscles attached to the spine, ribcage, pelvis, shoulder complex, neck, and head.
Specifically, Pilates targets the deepest layer of the abdominal muscles, the transverse abdominis, which helps stabilize or mobilize the center of the body and core. Most traditionally trained instructors consider the transverse abdominis to be part of the “powerhouse” muscle groups — named as such because of where the power of movements originate. They are essential for athletic movements, including both explosive and endurance performance.
The “powerhouse” muscle groups also include the inner thighs and seat muscles. Traditional Pilates requires the practitioner to engage the transverse abdominis for the entire session. This means the inner thighs and seat muscles work in tandem with the deep abdominals to create stability or mobility of the spine and pelvis, depending on the movement.
Joint Mobility and Muscle Flexibility
The pliability of muscle tissue can directly affect an athlete’s performance. Being stiff in the joints or muscles prevents the body from moving as freely as possible.
Pilates creates pliability by stretching both the joint space and the surrounding muscles. This is done through the use of the springs on the reformer, the Cadillac, or the Wunda Chair, and the tension it creates within the stretch. The springs interact with muscles differently than traditional weights or stretching techniques, allowing the muscles to stretch deeper than most methods.
Proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation (PNF) is a type of stretching in which the goal is to inhibit the golgi tendon organs (sensory receptors activated by stretch or active contraction of a muscle) within the muscle fiber; this allows for a deeper stretch. The springs interact the same way with our muscle fibers, and we tend to see flexibility and mobility progress at a quicker rate as the springs are utilized in this way throughout sessions.
Flexibility and mobility are important for athletes because they need to be strong and mobile; this reduces the possibility of injury, especially noncontact injuries.
Small Muscle Group Development
As a Pilates instructor, I love telling clients, “In the Pilates studio, we train the small muscles so you can then go on the workout floor and train the big muscles.” Strengthening your primary muscles of movement — for example, the bicep in a bicep curl — and large muscle groups is key, but your little muscles also play an important and not-so-little role in being an explosive, dynamic athlete.
For example, the large glute muscle, gluteus maximus, helps with a strong squat, deadlift, lunge, clean and jerk, or snatch by creating power in the triple extension of the body at the hip joint. The littler gluteus medius and minimus also need to be strong to stabilize the pelvis and allow the femur bone to move efficiently in the hip joint for those same movements to be explosive and strong.
We train important small muscles throughout the entire body in every Pilates session — which only makes the bigger muscles more powerful. Many athletes who include a Pilates practice in their routine report seeing increases in their maxes for squats, deadlifts, cleans, and other types of athletic movements.
Recovery
Pilates is gentle on the body and can be a great active recovery workout for athletes. More research is coming out showing that it’s not about how hard you train, but how quickly your body recovers that dictates how effectively you can push your body to peak performance.
Because Pilates requires control, precision, and deep focus, we can customize the exercises to allow the body to move in a gentler fashion. Pilates also has a foundation of working with gravity and the springs on the reformer, Cadillac, or Wunda Chair to lessen the amount of weight on the body and limbs, providing access to ranges of motion that the individual wouldn’t be able to access — or do without intense strain. Think of how a body feels weightless in a pool; a similar sensation can be felt in Pilates sessions to decrease stress and excessive wear on joints and muscles.
Balance
Athletes often need to be able to react within milliseconds while playing their sport — that includes pivoting, turning, or doing an explosive movement. A strong core provides a sturdy center that is less easily knocked off balance. When the body can stay centered, it can be powerful in the activity at hand.
Pilates exercises, especially those performed on the moving surface of a reformer, provide different feedback to the muscles that help stabilize the body when balancing. We can even recreate certain movement patterns that are similar to the sport an athlete is playing to optimize balance and control of their entire body for their activity of choice.
Posture and Body Alignment
Joseph Pilates, the founder of Pilates, once said, “You are only as young as your spine is flexible.” In the development of Pilates, he ensured posture was a cornerstone. Aligning the spine and continuously working for proper alignment can create progress toward correcting postural deviations.
Pilates uses movements that target small muscles along the entire spine, muscles that support the head and neck, and muscles around the shoulder complex. The muscle groups around the spine, neck, head, and shoulder complex support alignment, power, and even deceleration.
Athletes need to be cognizant of having proper posture and alignment because it can make a difference in how the body moves and responds to movement. Both are important because they provide power in explosive movements and precision in specific techniques, as well as help the body better absorb impact in contact sports.
Many sports require athletes to consistently be in a specific posture or position: For example, hockey players are typically playing in a bent-knee and bent-hip position on skates with a hockey stick in hand. They are not standing completely upright when they skate but rather are in a powerful position to sprint or pass the puck.
Working to create better alignment in the body, especially when one side of the body is frequently doing something completely different than the other, helps prevent overuse injuries and combat muscle imbalances.
