Transform How You Perform through Pilates
Amsterdam is the heaven of marathon runners, weight lifters, body builders, equestrians, swimmers, tennis players, football players and many more sports professionals and enthusiasts. Are you one of them and willing to add Pilates in your routine? Continue reading 🙂
Here is the list World Top Athletes who are doing Pilates: David Becham, Maria Sharapova, Cristiano Ronaldo, Tiger Woods,Lebron James, Tom Brady, Missy Franklin, Stephanie Gilmore, Andy Murray, Dana Vollmer,Kerry Walsh-Jennings and many more.
All athletic performance professionals and lovers do Pilates as a fundamental warm up because they want to pursue their athletic career for a longer period of time without injury.
Pilates is the ideal form of cross-training for any athlete and will allow for the undesired compensations to be detected and corrected. What are the undesired compensation? Let’s say you are doing Chest Lift to engage and control abdominal muscles. Most of the time, I see people having neck pain. If abdominals are not strong enough, you do this exercise by pushing your neck forward or you squeezing your elbows to your head to lift yourself up. Yes, it is possible to purely activate your core without any compensation.
Pilates works the whole and this will improve the athlete’s awareness, breath, balance, control and ability to centre and concentrate on efficient movement with flow. It is a very important change when a runner uses back and core muscles and gives less weight to the knee joint. When I was teaching Pilates for Runners Workshop, they told me how fast and easy they run after strengthening their back and core muscles. Through learning intercostal breathing, learning the functions of spine,hips, knees, arms, how to articulate foot and getting used to do full body exercise, the senior ladies in my group became stronger, had less injury over time and enjoyed running more often-they told me as feedback at the end of the workshop.
The precision of instruction during Pilates will give the athlete the opportunity to transform how they perform – the outcome can only be beneficial and harmonious. The advantage of working privately is that you as an athlete have certain needs and goals depending on your field and the specific corrections you will get is the life long transformation you will invest in your body. Yes, every athletic professional has different needs, different body types and needs different precautions while training certain muscle groups. For example, weight lifters need to be careful about how their spine aligned while lifting heavy weights. Otherwise, they may face a risk of herniation. Equestrians need to do Pilates for full body exercise. On the other side their spine has to be flexible in order to balance and be harmonious with their horse.
I help train athletes specifically for each discipline to achieve stability, flexibility, strength and to enhance their performance, reduce injuries and improve race results. What more could an athlete want!