Pilates is more than a workout. It’s cross training for life.
When I was 15, I played in a soccer tournament at a local university, excited to get scouted by college coaches. During one of the games, I was particularly amped up because I was frustrated by how easily the opposing players kept taking the ball from us and dribbling toward our goal. As the central defender, I was the last person between the opposing players and our goalkeeper, and I took that job really seriously. If I messed up, they had a clear shot at a goal.
A girl on the other team made her way down the field with the ball for the thousandth time (or so it seemed). I found myself thinking, “We can’t keep letting this happen!”
Me playing soccer prior to my ALC tear.
As I sprinted towards her full force, I realized I was going to have to recalculate my route because of a pothole in the field, but I wasn’t able to adjust quickly enough. I sidestepped the hole, met the attacker, and got the ball, but my approach to the tackle was so bad that I stepped wrong, twisted my leg, and crashed to the ground. I tore my ACL doing something I had practiced thousands of times.
Fast forward one year of poorly managed rehab and time on the bench later. I tore the same ACL a second time playing soccer, which killed my opportunity for being recruited at the collegiate level and resulted in another surgery, year of rehab, and then a decade of knee pain that prevented me from engaging in sports and activities that were meaningful to me.
If you ask me why I think cross training is important, this is why. You practice the same skills in your sport for years on end, but if you haven’t trained the specific muscles used to avoid an unexpected event, your brain may send signals to your limbs to try and move in a way that you are unprepared for. That effort, combined with the speed and strength of your sport-specific movement, may or may not be successful, and can put you at risk for an injury.
Enter cross training.
It closes the strength, mobility, and proprioceptive (body awareness) gaps that are created when athletes only practice sport specific training, so they have less pain and better reaction time and control if something unexpected happens during competition.
The same way that athletes invest time into cross training to reduce their risk of pain and injury during sports, I believe that our workouts should help us cross train to live our lives with less pain and fewer injuries, which we often incorrectly attribute to “aging.”
You aren’t “getting old.” You just aren’t well prepared for the things you ask your body to do.
While it’s true that aging does result in a gradual decline in muscle, stamina, and mobility over time, this can be significantly minimized or slowed if we exercise in a way that promotes full body strength, body awareness, and mobility. This is why I don’t buy into the idea that you can blame everything on age — particularly in your 30’s, 40’s, and 50’s. Rather, I think a more constructive way to look at this is how well have you prepared your body for the things that you’re asking it to do?
Our bodies are very good at adapting. This means that whatever you spend the majority of your time doing, your body will be most prepared to do.
For example, if you spend most of your day sitting, then your hips, back, and shoulders will stiffen to efficiently hold this posture. Likewise, your muscles will become weaker through all of the ranges of motion that you aren’t regularly practicing, which is what results in a progressive loss of flexibility and strength.
Even if you do practice cardiovascular exercise, such as running or biking, these are still repetitive movements that don’t involve moving the joints through larger ranges of motion, so while they’ll support your heart health, it’s unlikely they’ll address your posture, strength, or flexibility.
With this in mind, it shouldn’t be surprising that if you’ve spent a large majority of your week sitting at your desk working and decompressing on your couch watching Netflix, that your back hurts when you go on a hike or after a rec soccer game with your friends over the weekend. In this case, you don’t have an aging problem. You have a cross training problem.
This experience applies to more than physical activity. If you want to be able to bend over to do the laundry, play with your dog, or get on the floor to entertain your grandchildren, you need to regularly practice movements that promote having the mobility, strength, and endurance to do these things.
How we consciously prepare our bodies for life.
Being better prepared for activities of daily living and more challenging physical pursuits does not require a complicated exercise plan. Instead, you may want to consider exercise through the lens of training in a way that is specific to the life that you want to live beyond your desk or couch. For the majority of us, this involves asking ourselves if we are moving in a way that promotes flexibility of the major joints, body awareness, and a foundational level of uniform strength.
This is one reason why I believe so strongly in Pilates on the reformer. It includes exercises that work all of the major muscle groups, not just the ones that you see in the mirror. It also helps you develop body awareness, and flexibility in nearly all ranges of motion, so you’re ready for whatever life throws at you.
If you’re involved in more rigorous activities or specific sports, you may also need to pursue additional training to support what you are doing. However, much like cross training helps athletes close the gap in strength and flexibility from their sport specific training, Pilates on the reformer can close the gap between your work week and more demanding workouts or activities that you do on the weekend.
Ultimately, fitness should not be treated as an end goal. It should be an ongoing practice that helps you get more enjoyment out of life. You may not enjoy every aspect of your fitness routine, but you may come to appreciate it more if you see how much it helps you feel better in your body and enjoy the things that you do outside of your workout.
