The Pilates Mind-Body Connection: Less Burn, More Ease

I get my greatest inspiration for writing about Pilates and movement when I’m actually practicing. I could easily start every post with “Recently, while doing Pilates …” - but that might become repetitive after a while, wouldn’t it? So, this time, I’ll start differently. Before sharing a bit about my own experience, I’d love to ask:

• What is Pilates to you?

• What keeps you coming back to it?

• Is it a certain studio, a certain teacher, or a goal you want to achieve – looking a certain way, becoming stronger, mastering a certain movement?

• Do you see Pilates as a workout where the harder it feels and the more it burns, the better it must be?

For a long time, I would have said ‘yes’ to all those questions. But over time, what Pilates means to me has evolved and will probably continue to evolve. My focus has shifted from external motivations to internal ones.

On a basic level, my external motivations were once all about appearance and “burn”. Whether a session felt “good” depended on how much it burned. More burn meant more effort, and more effort meant better results. After all, isn't it all about the harder the better? Except, over time, I began to realize that harder is not always better. These days, the “hard part” of Pilates for me is not whether I can push harder – it’s whether I can make movement more effortless, more flowing, more connected to my breath.

My training with Polestar Pilates has deeply influenced this evolution. One of Polestar’s motto is “A much as necessary, as little as possible”. That idea completely reframed how I move. Now, when I practice, I look for places where I can let go a little more – not where I can add more strain. And guess what, even without the burn, I still feel deep effects. In fact, I feel them more because my focus during my Pilates practise is that mind-body connection more than ever.

Let me give you a recent example.

I was working on the Ladder Barrel – a wonderful piece of the Pilates equipment  - doing an exercise called Horseback. If you don’t know it, imagine straddling the barrel as if sitting on a horse (hence the name),  lifting the body slightly away from it, and then moving from a neutral spine, pelvis and ribcage position to flexion and extension.  It is a beautiful, demanding exercise that - like so many others – requires great mobility, control, postural awareness and precision. You need to know exactly where you are in space, how your ribs stack over your pelvis and how to move your pelvis, spine and ribcage smoothly between positions - all the while holding yourself up with your inner thighs, lightly floating over the Barrel. If I focused only on the burn (say, the squeezing of the inner thighs against the barrel) I would completely miss out on all the other components of the exercise: the coordination, the timing, the conversation between stability and release.

After the exercise I had that feeling of “wow, this was intense”. But it wasn’t a muscle-burning kind of intensity. It was something deeper – a reorganization of my nervous system. Pilates exercises often require stabilization of one part while another part moves freely. Learning and mastering that interplay of control and mobility, getting the timing right of letting go and holding on re-educates the nervous system. It’s not about consciously commanding your muscles to “engage now”. The magic is in allowing and trusting the subconscious, anticipatory activation of the right muscles at the right time to organize movement in a natural, fluid way. Afterwards, the conscious mind catches up, realizing what the body already knew – what the muscles and the nervous system had to do to make this movement happen. (And restoring these natural ways of moving takes time. That’s where the practice comes in...)

That, to me, is the true intensity of Pilates: the integration, the awareness, the sense of being fully in my body. Today, I prefer this effect over the temporary “muscle burn”. I want to leave my practice feeling reinvigorated and refreshed, not exhausted or “burnt out”. Life can provide enough of that already.

I want my practice to be a way to recharge and to teach me how I can find ease in the most challenging moves. So now, my practice, and my teaching, is about finding ease where there once was effort. If that idea speaks to you, I invite you to come and explore it with me. I’d be happy to share what I’ve learned about discovering lightness, precision, and flow in Pilates. One mindful movement at a time.

This is me practicing another challenging exercise, the Roll Over & Shoulder Stand on the Ladder Barrel. I'm being assisted by my amazing teacher, Shelly Power, from Polestar Pilates.