Episode 341
341. There's a grape under your back
A Pilates cue goes off the rails and exposes everything we get wrong about “perfect form.” Expect heresy, biomechanics, and a very small grape that ruins neutral forever.
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Transcript
You're lying on a reformer carriage. Two red springs.
::Your headrest is all the way down. Arms are in straps. Fingers point to the ceiling.
::You're in a perfect neutral spine. There is one small to medium-sized grape
::under the small of your back. You're pressing it with extreme gentleness into the carriage.
::Your legs, perfect tabletop.
::Precisely 90 degrees at the hip, 90 degrees at the knee, ankles, plantar flexed.
::Inhale to prepare.
::Gently engage the pelvic floor. Draw the hip bones together.
::Exhale through pursed lips. Start by slightly flexing your cranium on your C1 and C2.
::Engaging the deep neck flexors, leaving the sternocleidomastoids relaxed.
::As you continue to exhale through pursed lips,
::Press your hands into the straps Keeping the shoulders wide,
::collarbones long Gently draw the straps down towards the carriage Congratulations,
::you are now doing mid-back series Heathlander.
::I'm just shivering in my little PTSD corner over there. Did I traumatize you too badly?
::Properly triggered. There should have been a trigger warning on that intro, dude.
::Fuck me. Did I forget any muscles?
::There was probably about another, what, 214 muscles you didn't mention?
::You've got the big ones, the important ones. I could have said something like,
::use your core to pull the straps down.
::Oh, yeah, yeah. It needs to come from your powerhouse, your core, yeah, yeah.
::So sorry, I could try that again from the core this time. Yeah,
::yeah, yeah. You wouldn't pass your test out on that one, dude.
::Yeah, so what was wrong with that picture that I just so carefully painted for you?
::Ah. Well, Joseph's turning in his grave to start, right?
::Like, mid-back is... Did he stabilise his core before he turned?
::Yeah, that's right. Yeah.
::Well, I mean, I think you're putting that on the table because...
::If you're a group reformer teacher, you teach that movement.
::You don't go very far or very long without being supine hands in straps,
::pressing the straps towards the bed or the foot bar and doing some variation
::of that movement. It's not a bad exercise.
::It's not a bad exercise, if you cue it properly. Yeah, I use it all the time.
::Let's be clear. What I mean is it's like if you're a group reformer teacher,
::you're going to teach that just like you're going to teach long stretch and
::you're going to teach lunges.
::Like this is going to be part of your repertoire day in, day out.
::It's one of the exercises on the reformer where you don't run out of resistance
::very quickly as you get stronger.
::Right. And depending what you do with the resistance, you can take it to some
::pretty interesting places, but not if you do it in neutral.
::All okay so we're we're not doing it in neutral i mean obviously still in tabletop though no.
::Um i said when i was at a class at a studio that shall remain nameless and i
::was waiting for the class to start and.
::I was warming myself up by lying in a supine tuck position. So I had my knees
::pulled to my chest and was pulling them apart and pulling them together.
::My knees, because I can, and it doesn't mean everyone should,
::but I can, when knees were properly at my armpits and that's where they warm up to.
::And the instructor came over and adjusted the, while I was in that position,
::which felt a little bit personal, so I released the position.
::She she adjusted the uh the stopper and the foot bar so that to ensure that
::my knee didn't come closer to me than my hip and then said okay now we've got
::the foot bar in the right place,
::you know that's where you'll do your work from and i said sorry what why are
::we setting it up there and she said i was just so that we don't go into too
::deep an angle of hip flexion i was like you walked up to me and i was like kissing
::my own kneecap and now you're anyway so all that to say,
::no, I don't teach tabletop and I don't advocate it and I think it's a total
::waste of time trying to teach people it.
::You should teach them a tuck position where you're in full flexion and it's
::a shape that actually scales into other movements.
::Well, I must be better at Pilates than you because I couldn't get my knees to
::my armpits unless I chopped my legs off.
::That's because I haven't got quads like this. I'm trying, still trying.
::20 years in, I'm still trying. Well, 20 years in, I'm still working on my splits.
::And you know how well I'm doing in inverted commas. I really will.
::Yeah. All right. So there's a lot to unpack in there.
::And so I think that really in a little bit of seriousness, there is a serious topic here.
::And so I guess in seriousness, what we're talking about today is really restrictive
::movement cues that really prevent people from actually getting the actual benefit from the movement.
::We're not only using useless cues that are just wasting time and effort and,
::you know, filling up the airspace, we're actually actively doing.
::Just decreasing the value people get from the movement by using just nonsensical ass-backwards cues.
::Now, dear listener, if you are using nonsensical ass-backwards cues,
::no disrespect, that was me for fucking years.
::Years, I did it. That's how come I can still do it after not doing it for a
::decade, because I'd said it so many thousands of times.
::The tape recording is still in my brain. I just press the button and out it comes.
::And so, Heath, I know you you did that also for years
::so no shade you know we look
::at the most the the the log in our own eye
::here as well so you
::know um you know now we're in a safe space uh you know what is what you know
::why why tuck you know let's break it down so there's there's the there's the
::there's so many things about the way that i cued that that exercise at the start
::of the show that both you and I have a problem with.
::One is the use of the tabletop position instead of tuck.
::The other one is neutral spine instead of just pressing your freaking back hard into the mat.
::Third one is just the over-queuing of muscles.
::There's probably more there. And then the other one is where you,
::when the straps go below the level of the shoulder, the question is what muscles are we working on?
::So then it's like, okay, is it mid-back or is it abs? And then,
::you know, I think that there's actually an interesting conversation.
::All right. So let's start with that. Let's start with that.
::So the thing is, and you and I haven't talked about this explicitly,
::but I think at this point I'd know exactly what you're thinking here.
::So correct me if I'm wrong. Okay.
::As your arms are lying on your back, your head's on the carriage,
::your head's on the headrest, your arms are vertical, your hands are in the straps.
::If there's a couple of springs on, the straps are pulling your arms into shoulder flexion.
::They're pulling your arms back past your head. You're working with your shoulder
::girdle muscles, your lats, your pecs, etc., etc., to extend your arms.
::So the shoulder extensors are working, right?
::And so as you pull down and down and down, at some point when your arms are
::parallel with the straps, right, the straps, the ropes are running right along your arms, right?
::So as your arms are vertical, the straps run back away from your arms.
::But as you bring your arms down and down and down, at some point,
::your arms and the straps are touching, okay? And at that point,
::the straps are no longer pulling you into flexion.
::They're also not pulling you into extension. They're pulling you to shoulder elevation.
::Right? They're actually just elevating your shoulder. They're pulling along the axis of your arm.
::Now, as you continue downwards from that point, the straps are actually now
::pulling you into shoulder flexion.
::Right? So you, into extension, my apologies.
::And so now you have to actually work your flexors a little bit.
::Now, it's not a lot of work.
::Right? But now you're working your deltoids, your front deltoids,
::et cetera, in order to slightly flex the shoulders.
::So actually, as the line of pull, the point is, dear listener,
::as you move your arms through the arc from vertical to horizontal in the mid-back
::series position, or the lying on your back, supine, arms and straps,
::however you want to call it, as you move your arms down,
::the line of pull changes such that.
::The exercise, the resistance actually disappears.
::You're no longer working your shoulder extensors. Like you just,
::they're not working at all.
::In fact, they're basically, you're working the opposite muscles by the bottom of the movement.
::So as you go to put your hands on the carriage, number one, the carriage is
::supporting the weight of your arms. So your flexors aren't working.
::And number two, the straps are lifting you up and supporting the weight of your arms as well.
::So your extensors are like nothing's working there, basically.
::It's like almost in equilibrium state, like you're floating in a flotation tank or something.
::So basically, when your arms go below the straps, it's all wasted effort,
::all wasted time from there on.
::There's no resistance, essentially. Is that what you were thinking, Heath?
::Well, that would be what I was thinking before we lift the head and shoulders.
::So if we're doing, like, say, a classical coordination where the head stays
::down, and And if we say that's for, you know,
::that Raf's just talked about the, you know, the paradox of what happens through
::the arc of the movement at the shoulder.
::And, you know, if you were taught about connecting into the shoulder girdle,
::that moment where you feel the push into the straps rather than the pull,
::blah, blah, blah, you know,
::Raf's just described that you, you essentially, you're going into the moment
::where your shoulder depressors become the major movement rather than the flexors extensors.
::If you're taught as I was, and Raf you can correct me if I misunderstood the
::teaching because you were my teacher,
::if you were taught that this is a movement when you raise your head and shoulders
::that's about the mid-back, now whether that's about using the,
::this was one of the answers I was given, it might have been Raf that gave me the answer,
::using the proprioception of the bed to get the scapula to move more correctly
::on the ribcage because of that,
::or that it's as you press into the bed, the muscles of your mid-back,
::your mid-traps, rhomboids, et cetera, start to be engaged if you were taught that,
::then that's one way to think about it.
::And I would say to that, if you want to work the muscles of your mid-back,
::go and do it in chest expansion or a movement like that, where they actually
::move against load through range of motion.
::But when I ask instructors in workshops...
::What this movement's for, once they've been teaching for a while,
::all of that stuff has evaporated. And they think that the answer is it's for your abs.
::Like when, when I say, okay, when you give this movement to a group,
::what do your clients experience and what is it?
::What do you tick off with the movement? The answer is always abs, maybe hip flexors.
::And in that context, then
::what's interesting about this
::movement the way I teach it now and advocate
::it and how we teach it in our courses is when
::you press the straps down they don't go below the level of your shoulder joint
::head and shoulders curl up and the cue is try and touch the foot bar if the
::foot bar's up so I leave my foot bar up I know that's heresy leave the foot
::bar up press the straps down try and touch the foot bar don't let the straps
::touch your wrists and curl up as high as possible.
::And now the line of resistance from the rope is pulling your shoulders back
::down. So your abdominals actually work against the line of pull.
::If your hands go below your shoulder, then it's actually easier to sit up. Yes.
::Right. So if you think this is for your abs and you cue hands to the bed,
::you're putting your foot on the accelerator and the brake at the same time and the clutch.
::So you've got fuck all, you've got exit, you've got nothing happening,
::brakes, accelerator, clutch. You're just sitting there going,
::I don't know, this is not happening.
::So try it in your own body. I mean, actually, you know, if you want to sort
::of extend that line of reasoning, if you, if you, as you curl up,
::right, if you're curling up and you're actually thinking of this as mainly an
::ab exercise, as opposed to mainly an arm exercise,
::because let's face it, the abs are way stronger than, sorry,
::the arms are way stronger than the abs for most people.
::And so when you, even though you're working your arms a bit,
::your abs are going to get tired way before your arms in this one.
::So if you actually keep your arms vertical, it's actually harder,
::you know, because you've got a longer lever there against the abs. So –,
::But, you know, just leaving that aside for a second, you know,
::going back to what you said about the mid-back, you know, the mid-traps,
::the lower traps, blah, blah, blah, the rhomboids.
::You know, I can't honestly remember teaching you this or, you know, that.
::But, you know, and I think it's just a stock Pilates thing that those exercises
::are called the mid-back series.
::I think most other people call them like arms in straps or something like that.
::And of course, there were specific exercises, like coordination,
::100, and overhead, and blah, blah, blah.
::But I'm just talking about lying on your back, pull the straps down,
::pull them up, pull the straps down, lift them up, triceps extension,
::straight arms, arm circles, blah, blah, blah.
::One leg long, two legs long, all the rest of it.
::Most people do think of it as an ab exercise, but I imagine a Pilates purist,
::of which I was one way back in the day,
::would say something along the lines of, it's not for strengthening meaning, you know, as such,
::it's for control of the, you know, for activation and correct stability of the
::scapulae to maintain your scapulae, you know,
::stabilized on your back as you curl up and bring your arms down.
::And so the challenge is more proprioceptive and stability rather than, you know,
::strength and then we shouldn't add too much load on because then we'll spoil
::we'll lose the benefit of the movement and it won't be about stability anymore
::it'll just be about you know quote,
::muscling through it with your quote global muscles and that's pretty much what i would have said,
::a decade and a half ago so what do you say to that,
::Oh, you're just hurting my feelings.
::All right. So if we're talking about, and you mean, correct me where I missed
::the biomechanical subtleties of this, but if we're talking about stability...
::It's the property of a system to return to its resting state once it's been perturbed.
::So you do stuff and it comes back. Stability in biomechanics is very, very poorly defined.
::No one's come up with an agreed upon definition of what it actually is.
::And generally what physios and Pilates instructors mean when they say stability
::is keeping your body part still.
::Now, sometimes we mean keeping your scapula flat on your spine and on your ribcage
::and not winging or anteriorly tilting or whatever.
::Yeah, but basically what they mean is nebulous and ill-defined and everyone
::means a different thing by it and you can't really measure it.
::But yeah, aside from that, pray continue. Yeah, well, often just,
::I mean, so often what I think people have been taught, if only by inference,
::what stability means is essentially dissociation.
::Like you're demonstrating your ability to stabilize when you can keep one thing
::in one place and do something with something else.
::Hold body part A still, move body part B.
::B, right. And teaching that adds a complexity to what could otherwise be a pretty
::intuitive movement. So it affirms our expertise rather than empowering the core.
::Oh, and a really cynical, a really cynical, a
::much more cynical podcast host than me would say that that would be a great
::way of making up some kind of dysfunction so that your clients feel bad about
::their bodies and you're the only one with a secret answer that can cure their made-up dysfunction.
::Right. And then if you scale that out, you've got a population of people who
::think they're unsafe in movement, shit at Pilates, and if they don't do it right,
::they're going to injure themselves so they don't train in a way that actually
::gives them healthier, happier, longer lives as an outcome.
::You'd have to be really fucking cynical to say that though, Nate.
::I know, it's dark. We're in dark waters here. All right, so coming back to the
::scapular stabilization thing.
::So one way we seem to be taught what stabilization is, is dissociation.
::And we can talk about dissociation in another session because there's lots of
::movements that do that really well and that we can unpack.
::Another one would be that your scapula are flat and flush on the rib cage.
::And when you protract and slightly
::upwardly rotate your scapula that's a damn good place
::to put them flat and flush on the rib cage because your rib
::cage folks is not a rectangle it's an oblong one of my favorite words in the
::english language and so when you move the scapula in that way they they suck
::on so if you're really interested in training scapula on the rib cage that hands
::position where the hands are not to the bed is a great one and then paradoxically
::as your hands come below the line of your shoulder,
::the humeral head follows the glenoid, so the scapula is actually going to change
::its position, and it won't be as stable,
::except that it is stable because stability is its ability to manage force through,
::like we probably need to do a full thing on, or you can do one on,
::the glenoid follows the humeral head.
::But what I wanted to say to what you said, Raf, is...
::As you increase the load, and by that I mean as you add more springs and you
::do the movement the way I sort of laid it out, where the hands don't go below
::the line of the shoulder,
::the heavier the load becomes, the more you can tolerate that load,
::the easier it is to pull your knees to your chest and bring your hips up.
::And you start to be able to get to the rib cage and to the shoulder blade,
::and that starts to open up the movement that I learned with my hands pressing
::into the bed as, now I've forgotten the name, overhead.
::And now overhead pressing your hands into the bed is one thing.
::I'm going to stick my hand up and say, I like to stick my hand into the bed when I do overhead.
::Yeah, of course. Which is like jackknife, right? Overhead is jackknife on the reformer.
::Overhead is jackknife, 100%. And so if you're working with someone who's working
::on jackknife, overhead, or they've got quads like RAF, they're going to want
::to press their hands into the bed because they've got to generate a lot of force.
::Try lifting your legs up over your head when your legs weigh freaking 70 kilos. Right.
::Like if Raph was in my class, I would call, hey, Raph, press your hands into
::the bed until we get used to getting the hips off, right?
::But I'd also look at Raph and think, well, he's got pecs that are commensurate
::to his quads and biceps that are commensurate to his quads.
::So I think if I can get him the skill, which is to manage the load,
::then I reckon I can get him to his shoulders, but it would mean I have to put
::a lot of load into the strap. I was just going to say, if you give me all the springs.
::Yeah, well, that's what I would do. Like I, more and more, the further along
::I go, the more often I teach full spring hands and straps towards overhead if
::the clients can come with me.
::And the paradox of it is once your arms, which as Raf said, are strong relative
::to your abs can tolerate the load. And that's also getting used to it.
::Then you can use that as a platform to roll your hips off the bed and it's an.
::Unstable platform. Like you're not pressing into the bed, but it's actually very stable.
::Like it's, once you get used to the load, it gives you a lot because as Raf
::said, the higher your arm, the longer the lever, the more load there is.
::So paradoxically, the skill of jackknife comes from heavy springs and that makes
::your scapula connect to your rib cage more effectively because all the muscles work harder to do that.
::I'm talking about paradoxical things. I think it's kind of paradoxical that, you know,
::we're here sort of advocating for this worldview of Pilates,
::that it is in fact a fucking system and that you, when you're doing your mid-back
::or your arms and straps in 90-90, you know, tabletop,
::like that's overhead, right? It's just the baby version of overhead.
::And if you do it in tabletop, you're breaking the system. Right.
::And if you do it in, like, if you do it in tabletop in neutral spine,
::because overhead, you have to flex your fucking spine and flex your hips maximally to get up there.
::If you think about it as a system, and, you know, we can't know what Joseph
::Pilates were thinking, but, you know, people always, you know,
::all the Pilates purists, they talk about, oh, Pilates is a system,
::you have to understand it, you can't just do it on the reformer.
::It's like, I think we fucking understand it at this point. I think,
::you know, I think this is what it's about.
::It's like you're working up to those bigger, you know, expressions of the movement.
::And so if you don't get there, that's fine. You know, we all have our strengths
::and flexibilities and our body proportions and whatever.
::It's like understanding that, you know, exercise A is just an easier version
::or a prep or a piece in the puzzle towards, you know, exercise B or exercise C.
::You know, to me, that's understanding the system of Pilates. Pilates is a system.
::And when you, you know, I think the people who break exercises down into smaller
::and smaller parts, you know, conversely by going like, okay,
::when you're doing mid-back, think about this in your scapula and this in your
::humerus and this in your hip.
::And this is like, okay, what about making the movement bigger?
::You know, um, I think they quite mistake the matter. And I think that's actually
::not what the system of Pilates is all about.
::You know, it's like what, what we were talking about last time,
::count the legs and divide by
::four, you know, like it could give too many cues to do a simple movement.
::Um, let's move on to. And so just quickly as a quick aside on that, you know, um.
::A counterpoint to that, that I've talked about a lot with people is, and it simmers down to,
::as an instructor, as a facilitator of movement for other people,
::you're going to be vulnerable to those narratives if you don't feel confident
::about adding load to a movement.
::And the thing that unlocked all of this for me years and years ago,
::now thank God, was understanding, as we've said before, that load is the important variable, not form.
::And then more than that is.
::What does it look like when someone is approaching a point where the load is
::too much? And too much means they can't do another rep.
::And then unlocking the truth that the form as it's laid out in what you ask
::for, so the rules of the game that you make, will dissipate as people approach fatigue.
::And if that hasn't happened at eight or ten reps you're
::in you're in the go zone for making things harder either
::through bigger movements or through more load like
::you've seen that the person can control that movement for eight to ten reps
::you can add load or complexity yeah so you actually so it completely flips the
::paradigm and that does take some thinking so you know i think as as because
::we don't no one wants to hurt their clients so if you're told at pilates school that,
::moving incorrectly is dangerous. Well, of course you don't want to move people incorrectly.
::But the sad truth is that if you've been taught that like that.
::What if that was not true? What if it was just 100% untrue bullshit?
::Right. Right. That's the question you've got to ask yourself.
::What if it's not true? And then work back from there.
::And it's like, because it's not, right? The thing is, if you can do the movement
::and it looks smooth, you don't need to break it down any further.
::You need to look at where it's going.
::But if it wasn't true, then people could do all kinds of things.
::Like if it wasn't true that moving wrong you
::know will hurt you then we'd see
::i mean that that can't be right because if
::it was if it wasn't true then we would see people doing things
::crazy things like wrestling bridges without hurting themselves or break dancing
::without hurting themselves or like advanced yoga poses i mean a leg behind the
::head uh non-neutral spine without hurting like we'd We'd see powerlifters lifting
::like hundreds of kilos with a rounded spine.
::Like we'd see all of those things if it wasn't true that moving wrong would hurt you. Oh, hold on.
::We do see all of those things. Yeah. Huh.
::All right. So tell me about why you've got a thing about tuck versus tabletop.
::Uh, I've got a few things about why I've got a thing about tuck versus tabletop,
::but one of the things I've got is, or, or hold on, hold on, hold on,
::tell me why you've got a thing about not moving the carriage stopper out so
::that you can't bend your hips beyond 90 degrees when you do footwork,
::which is kind of the same thing, right?
::Uh, my, I'm not sure I'm catching. Well, like that lady, like that Pilates instructor,
::I'm assuming she was a lady, like that Pilates instructor came over and adjusted
::your carriage so that you couldn't flex your hips past, you know,
::the quote, you know, the point of no return, you know,
::90 degrees of hip flexion. Oh my God.
::If you ever do, if you ever do go past 90 degrees of hip flexion,
::I'll feel a disturbance in the force. I'll know, I'll know you're gone. Yeah.
::Well, if you don't do that, then you.
::You can't bring, so bringing your knees to your armpits or as deep as you can,
::is going to help you posteriorly tilt your pelvis, which is going to help you
::flex your spine, which is going to help you go into the tuck shape.
::Going into the tuck shape is the only way that you're going to be able to do
::rolling back, jackknife, roll up, roll over, uh, like insert Pilates exercise here.
::When you do the mat work exercise, which apparently, you know
::is the true thing which i mean i fucking love
::matt is it's essentially
::a rolling practice when you do return to life
::through contrology in sequence you're just rolling back and forth and when people
::come and do my mat class they go dude you do a lot of rolling it's like yeah
::rolling's kind of like you know so that and i say that i mean any of the movements
::where you want to get to your shoulders, you're going to need to go into flexion.
::And that's tuck. That's a tuck position.
::It's just not. And then you look at the photos of Joseph doing long stretch,
::which is an upside down hollow body on the reformer.
::He's in full flexion. Full flexion of the spine is the tuck position.
::And, you know, Raf could explain it better than me, but the full flexion of
::your lumbar spine is flat.
::It doesn't flex, and some people do, but roughly speaking, it flexes too flat.
::So putting your lower back on the bed, which allows you to roll back and forth.
::That is the natural end range of your lumbar spine.
::It's designed to go there and it's functional in Pilates because you want to roll.
::Not to mention, it's actually what Joseph wrote in his books and instructions.
::Yeah. Right. And it's just fucking cat stretch. Like when you do,
::why is it, you know, it's like if you're doing cat stretch, you should do tuck position.
::If you, if then maybe some of us are still queuing not to go into full flexion in cat stretch, which,
::uh i'm just looking here through um return to life through contrology and um,
::looking at say the double leg stretch uh,
::he says draw both legs upward and forward with lock wrists and hold them firmly
::in the double up position, pull the legs towards you and press them firmly against chest, end quote.
::Yeah. It's like, that's pretty cool. That's not tabletop.
::It's not tabletop. Single leg, the one leg stretch, the one leg stretch,
::pull left leg as far as possible toward chest, you know?
::That's pretty clear. Going back to Raf's point about if bad movement was dangerous,
::then we wouldn't see, insert high-level movement athlete person here.
::Then the argument is, yeah, but the people I teach are not athletes.
::Yeah, why not? Because you never let them move. Right.
::What do athletes do different? Oh, they move. Okay, great. So if you want to
::be more like an athlete, what should you do?
::Do more of that. They load, right? Right. They load and push into their capacities
::at an appropriate level.
::Seriously, again, I don't want
::to be facetious here. And I was that instructor for many years, right?
::I've done all these things many, you know, hundreds if not thousands of times.
::But, you know, thinking about this, right? Okay, my clients,
::you know, my clients can't do X, Y, and Z.
::They can't do a full back bend. They can't do, you know, knees to chest.
::They can't, you know, get up out of a chair properly.
::They've got a sore shoulder, right? and then there's
::this athlete you know a break dancer oh they can do the splits and
::touch their toes and do this spinal extension and put their
::head on their butt and whatever right okay so my
::clients shouldn't do those things and shouldn't train like that person because
::they can't do those things no your client can't do those things because they
::don't train like that person that is why it's the reverse causality right it's
::like saying like oh my client can't get my client can't go to hospital because he's not well.
::It's like, no, you go to hospital to get well, right?
::My client can't, you know, doesn't have the flexibility, therefore he shouldn't stretch.
::Yeah, my client can't do a push-up, therefore he shouldn't do push-ups.
::It's like your client can't do a push-up because your client doesn't do push-ups,
::right? It's back to front.
::It's totally back to front. Anyway, back to you.
::Sorry, I deroured your train of thought. Yeah, I don't know.
::I don't even know what I was talking about. But you're a...
::What did you ask me? What's my thing about tuck? Yeah, so where did we get to tabletop?
::You know, like, so tuck is the position, right? So when you're thinking about
::pelagias as a system, you're thinking about we're moving towards,
::you know, these body shapes that impacts person a full exercise.
::And whether, again, whether any individual person gets to each particular move
::doesn't fucking matter at all. who cares if you can do it, you know,
::overhead or whatever. Absolutely.
::But that's where it's going, right? That's where it's heading towards,
::right? So we've got to do something.
::We can't just roll around on the floor, you know, in a sock and say it's interpretive dance.
::Like we have to have some kind of structure activity that we do when we come into a Pilates class.
::And so what do we do in Pilates class? We work towards doing the Pilates moves.
::I mean, that seems pretty, I think we can probably all agree on that.
::That, and so tuck really is, you know, the essence of, you know,
::so many of those Pilates moves.
::If you think about the hundred, any of those things, it's like it's back flat
::on the mat, it's rounding the low back, it's, you know, all of that stuff, right?
::And then you go into hundreds, you go into rolling back, you go into all of
::that, you know, they're the same rolling up, et cetera.
::So, but what's wrong with doing tabletop?
::Well, nothing. The tabletop's a place that you stop at on the way from flexion to extension.
::Problem is, to quote our boy, what's his name?
::Did you want to do a middle split? Got to spend time in middle.
::Oh, yeah, Christopher Summer.
::Yeah, he was asked about neutral spine, and he said, to quote, fuck neutral.
::We don't teach neutral. It's not an athletic position, because you can't do anything from there.
::Christopher Summer, 20-year coach of the U.S.
::Men's gymnastics team. I think he knows a thing or two about gymnastics coaching.
::I'm not sure, but I think he does. Yeah, he's probably got a few thoughts on it.
::Well, and they're his words, not mine, from a podcast I heard years and years
::ago, which as you can probably imagine made me sit up and listen.
::And in deference to people who've been taught that the significance of neutral
::is your ability to co-contract the abdominals,
::the spinal extensors, and then can you manage your hip flexors and somehow turn
::them off while you do loaded hip flexion, right?
::To Raf's question of what's wrong.
::Learning to co-contract muscles to stop movement is a dissociation game.
::And every now and again, dissociation is something you need to do as a skill
::to make a movement more efficient.
::But in that case, you're learning the skill of
::dissociation to make yourself less efficient and it doesn't
::protect you from injury and it doesn't build strength because
::it's held over long periods of endurance
::until your hip flexors freak out and you can't do Pilates
::because you can't do 58 reps without your hip flexors
::freaking out i want to just take i want to take the last three
::four minutes that we got here before we got to finish up and i just want
::to talk about that concept and how it relates to learning and skill because
::you touched on like efficiency there and efficiency is one of the hallmarks
::of skill like as you become more skilled in the movement like by definition
::you become more efficient so you use less effort to achieve the same output
::and um when you're teaching somebody you know dear listener you you'll know
::this from your own experience.
::When you're teaching somebody something, you can basically teach anyone anything
::if you've got long enough, right? So if you had a thousand years, you could.
::Probably it's not worth the time and effort, but if you had enough repetitions, you probably could.
::And so, dear listener, if you're teaching somebody to do something really that
::they know how to do really well, right?
::So just say you're, you know, you're coaching some kind of like super advanced,
::like elite, you know, tennis player or something like that, right?
::And they're in the middle of a match and you're like, okay, you know,
::see when the opponent's hitting the ball, like they're always hitting it a bit
::short. So what I want you to do is I want you to place it just a little bit
::longer in your next volley, right?
::That is the level of instruction you would give to an elite tennis player, right?
::Notice I gave zero instructions about which fucking muscles to use,
::what to do with your fingers on the grip, on the maturial racket,
::your follow through, any of that, right?
::It's place the ball a bit longer, right? So it's the outcome of the movement.
::Whereas a beginner, first tennis lesson, what would you say?
::You wouldn't say place the ball a bit longer.
::You'd say, here's how you hold the racket and your fingers go here.
::Okay, now you put your foot here, you put your other foot here.
::Now you swim, here's how you swing, right? You would give them like much more
::minute, detailed instructions, right?
::And that is, you know, somewhat appropriate for a beginner to get more,
::you know, like if you're teaching someone to answer emails in your business,
::you would like, okay, a total beginner, imagine you're teaching my mum to send
::emails. You're like, okay, this is a computer.
::Here's how you turn it on. This is the email program we use.
::Here's how to type. Like you would have to go through all the basics, right?
::Then if you didn't get someone who's very advanced, you'd be just like,
::okay, the templates you're
::in a folder called xyz you know you'll figure it
::out right and then off you go give them less instruction they can
::figure it out now when somebody's really good at pilates
::dear listener here's where we get back to the actual point okay and you're saying
::they've done like 100 pilates classes and you're saying to them okay we're going
::to do this movement so start by gently engaging your pelvic floor don't move
::your hips beyond 90 degrees be a neutral spine contract your transverse abdominis
::and your lumbar multifidus okay lengthen your shoulder blades any back,
::you're doing the equivalent of saying, here's how you hold your racket and.
::Put your feet here, et cetera. And that is how you make people regress in terms of their skill.
::Like if you take that, imagine if you gave that elite tennis player and they're
::like, you know, two match points short of winning Wimbledon and they come like,
::okay, coach, what should I do in this last point? You know, it's match point.
::And the coach is like, okay, well make sure you hold your racket like this and
::swing when you follow through and don't use your shoulder too much.
::Cause sometimes, you know, use your shoulder too much and put your feet here
::and make sure you keep your weight balanced.
::They're going to cause them to overthink the fuck out of that movement and stuff it up, right?
::So you want to keep them, you want to use the highest level of instruction possible
::given that person's level of skill.
::And so this is like when we like quote teach in Pilates a lot of the time,
::we're teaching more advanced people, we're giving them the super basic instructions
::like put your foot here, swing through, bring your arm up, et cetera.
::It's like they already fucking know, dude, they already know it.
::So the point is, when we give people more detailed instructions than they need,
::it's not actually just a waste of breath. It's actually actively regressing
::their learning, is making them a worse mover.
::That's what it's doing. All right, rant over.
::So, um, at the end of the day, I've got to,
::I just want to catch that as you know, as I've got to jump on teacher class,
::but I think we should bookmark a continuation of this conversation and talk about dissociation.
::We'll talk about the movement that we call flamingos and how that relates to
::hands in straps and to reverse knee stretches and talk about, um,
::you know, cause the whole idea of neutral, keeping neutral while you do the
::strap press or the leg extension and however many more muscles you cue to while you do that.
::The dissociation game is one that's really, really viral in Pilates teaching.
::And I often get people saying, so you don't teach dissociation.
::I teach it all the time when it helps people be more efficient at the movement that I want them to do.
::And i think that deserves an unpack because we're not you know dissociation is not a bad thing,
::but teaching it like raf just explained for the
::sake of making well what the first long for making
::things more exactly so dissociation's everywhere right right right right exactly
::so i think we should next time we talk we should talk about this idea of flamingo
::and when you teach it and how dissociation is a, it's a good thing to teach because,
::but it's taking the dissociation somewhere rather than just continually drilling it.
::Well, it's just, it's just taking one thing in isolation.
::You're going shoulder flexion. It's like, okay, don't you teach shoulder extension?
::No, we don't teach shoulder extension. It's like, no, sometimes flexion's good.
::Sometimes extension's good. Sometimes you're in the middle.
::It's like, you just do whatever's appropriate to the movement.
::Like you need a full repertoire and vocabulary of movements.
::Yeah. Don't get obsessed with one freaking thing.
::All right. Good talk. Ciao, bye. See you later.
