Using Pilates in Everyday Life, by Steve Shipside

Changing Your Daily Habits



Pilates isn’t just about classes or mat work. Its principles can be applied to almost any situation, making it possible to do yourself some good wherever you are in the office or on the bus. One of the beauties of Pilates is that you can use it while being physically active or inactive. You can be working out without anyone knowing. We've got some easy everyday Pilates tricks from Power-up Pilates by Steve Shipside.


Are You Sitting Comfortably?

Sitting isn’t as easy as it looks. Most of us manage to put stress on our shoulders, necks and backs just by the way we sit. Pilates posture can help.

First, make sure you’re sitting back in your chair with your feet flat on the floor. Imagine that your coccyx (tailbone) is made of lead and pulling straight down into the chair. Make sure your spine is in neutral and you can feel the middle of your back lightly pressed against the seat back. Your shoulders should be relaxed but not slumped. To get a feel for that position try some leg lifts. Lift each knee alternately up, placing it smoothly down again with the foot flat on the floor. You should be totally stable, if you can feel your coccyx moving, then check that you are sitting back and in the neutral position—you may be sitting too far forward with your pelvis tilted. If you’re not sure about neutral when sitting, then try lifting the knee right up towards your chest. As you do you’ll reach a point where you can feel the pelvis tilt, and the coccyx slides towards the front of the seat. Hopefully that feel for being out of neutral should help you settle into neutral.


With your pelvis and back sorted out, the next issue is your shoulders and the neck strain that all too easily results from tension and poor posture. Hunching your shoulders upwards is a shortcut to tension and trouble as it tightens the trapezius muscle at the top of your back and that transmits its strain into the back of the neck. If you feel tense (and who doesn’t at some point in the working day) then try this.


Slide your shoulder blades towards each other and then down and at the same time extend your neck. You should feel an immediate easing of the pressure on your spinal column, shoulders and neck as well as feeling as if you’ve just grown an inch. Next time you want to shout at someone, try doing that first. A really great time to try the sitting exercises is on the bus/metro or at the traffic lights on the way home. Because we’re tired we’re likely to slump and take all that tension back home with us. Try and make it part of your daily routine to ease that pressure out as a way of leaving work behind before you get home.


Here's another idea for you...


‘The lift’ is another exercise you can do at your office chair or on the bus. The aim is to work on zipping up from the bottom of the pelvis towards your ribs. While sitting upright, imagine that there is a lift on your pelvic floor. As you breathe out try to take that lift ‘up’ to the next floor—you should feel your pelvic muscles go taut. As you take the ‘lift’ further up the floors from ‘first’ to ‘second’, you should feel your lower abdominals tighten. Higher than that and you risk the six-pack muscling in on the action.

Pilates At The Keyboard


Try to get away from the keyboard often enough to give your body a break. But when deadlines are tight, or the boss is hanging over your shoulder, you don’t have to leave your seat to perform simple exercises to release those muscles, help your posture and above all ease the stress.


Since we tend to store up stress in the shoulders, try to roll it out again with shoulder rotations. Mobility exercises—taking the joints through their full range of movement—are a staple of most forms of modern exercising. Your shoulder, like your hip, is a ball and socket joint, meaning it can rotate in any direction, so every now and again you should let it. Sitting in neutral, with your feet flat on the floor and your shoulders relaxed but not slumped, bend your elbows and rest your fingertips on your shoulder (right on right, left on left). Now circle them forwards and upwards so your elbows touch, then lift up above your ears, pull back to be in line with your shoulders and finally come forward again. Now perform the same circle but in the opposite direction—remember the importance of working every equal and opposite muscle so that for every pull there is a push.


The best office distressing exercise is undoubtedly to land a clean right hook on the boss, but since this may lead to ugliness it’s worth looking at other options. Stress balls—those squidgy balls you can squash in your fist when anxiety rises—are a good exercise for your hand muscles. The problem is people often tense the trapezius muscle that leads to the shoulders when they do. If you use a stress ball, then make sure you perform the shoulder roll above.


Now work on the fingers—if you’ve been typing, then they’re probably tense and tired. Despite the publicity about RSI you only have to look around any office for a couple of minutes and you’ll find keyboards without wrist wrests, keyboards set up at the wrong height for the seat and keyboards right at the edge of the desk so there’s nowhere to rest your elbows. Concentrated mouse work, even with elegantly shaped ergonomic mice, can also put real pressure on your fingers. Remember that before you start your fiftieth game of minesweeper.

To release tension in the fingers start by turning your hands palm upwards and bring the tip of each finger in turn to the tip of your thumb then repeat the sequence. Just to make things a little more interesting, try starting with the little finger on one hand at the same time as you start at the index finger on the other so the two hands are out of sync.


Next, hold all your fingers our flat together and then open up the gap between the second and third fingers so that the first and second pull away in one direction and the third and fourth in the other. Now bring the second and third fingers together and keep them together and this time open up the gaps between the first and second, and third and fourth.


This Little Piggy Does Pilates



Next time you put your feet up don’t just give them a break—give them a workout.

Like most adults you tend to hide your feet away and if we’re going to be brutally honest you probably consider them a bit ugly. Time to change all that and for two very good reasons:


You don’t have to be a reflexologist to realize that the feet hold the key to easing stress and keeping the rest of the body happy.


You might not think it as you apply that corn plaster, but the feet themselves are a miracle of anatomical engineering and deserve the best maintenance you can give them.


The first point is easy to prove. Next time you get back home from the shopping trip or from work, kick your shoes off, lose those socks/fishnets and with your bare foot just try to grip the carpet, then relax. Doesn’t that feel good? Doesn’t that feel good right through to your shoulders? In fact it feels so good you should do it right now. I don’t care if you’re in the office, tell the boss I said it was OK. We all know that daily stress makes its way into the shoulders, and while I’m not knocking the divine beauty that is the back rub, if you forget about your feet, then you’re only dealing with the most obvious symptom of stress.


Your feet contain 52 bones, and more than 76 muscles and ligaments. More than a quarter of all the body’s bones are in the feet, most of them are small and delicate, and yet everyday we expect them to handle the equivalent of hundreds of tons of force with barely a thought for their well-being.




A foot workout doesn’t have to take long and will go a long way to easing stress. As ever, even though you’re thinking of your toes you shouldn’t neglect your posture. As you sit, park your pelvis in neutral, and pull your head and spine upright as if being pulled up by a string running right through your spine and out through the top of your head. Scoop your stomach and now focus on your feet.


Start with a little ankle rotation to ease swelling and increase mobility. Rotate each foot in a circle while keeping the knee and lower leg still. Now try rotating them both together but in opposite directions and then change direction to circle the other way. If you’ve been walking all day, and especially if you’ve been carrying heavy bags, then this should ease the pressure immediately.


Now try pointing and flexing both feet together. Pointing means pushing your toes as far away from you as you can but try not to curl the toes, instead keep them straight and in line with the foot. Flexing means turning the ankle the other way so that the toes point back towards you, again the toes should be in line with the foot rather than trying to bend right back.


Here's an idea for you...


Try playing imaginary piano scales with your toes (you’ll need to be barefoot for this). Joseph H. Pilates was a great believer in body control and this is a great exercise for trying to re-establish the links between brain and body. With the soles of your feet flat on the ground, spread your toes as wide apart from each other as you can and then try to touch them to the ground one after another in order. It’s not as easy as you might think. Remember they have to touch one at a time and in order. Got that? No problem? OK, then I’ll bet you just did it starting with the little toe. Now try to reverse that and do it the other way, starting with the big toes.


Let’s Twist Again


Rotate to rejuvenate, work your waist, stretch your obliques and mobilize your spine. Go on, put a twist in your tail.

Mobility and flexibility are the key to staying young, avoiding injury and making the most of daily life, but they are the classic examples of the rule of ‘use it or lose it’. You don’t have to be a senior citizen to find that out. Spinal mobility is an issue for anyone who works at a keyboard. The good news is that you don’t have to leave that keyboard to do something about it.



Seated on a chair, put your arms out straight, then bend them at the elbow so they cross in front of you like a Russian dancer with each hand flat, extended and parallel to the floor. One hand rests on top of the other elbow, the second hand is under the elbow of the first. Slide the shoulder blades back and down, and extend the neck as if that string was running through your spine and out the top of your head pulling you upwards.


Scoop the stomach, park the pelvis and without moving the pelvis at all start breathing out, pivot the spine and head together slowly through 90 degrees so you are facing sideways. You should count five seconds to complete the move, breathing out smoothly all the while. Breathe in and return for the same count, then breathe out again and do the same to the other side. Six to ten twists to each side will help stretch and work the oblique muscles down the sides of your torso, and maintain the mobility of your spine while tensing the transverses for good measure.


As an alternative you can extend the arms straight out to each side for the movement (be careful not to take out any desk lamps/potted plants/co-workers as you twist) to work the obliques a little harder and emphasis the movement. If you do that you will also add to the work done by the shoulders so it’s important to ensure that they don’t hunch up. Although it feels as if all of the work is being done by the upper body, this also brings in the lower body which is working unseen as it stabilizes the pelvis to stop it from turning with your torso. By focusing on sliding the shoulders back it also helps open up the chest and encourages you to breathe deeply. All this means it can be a nifty little stress buster into the bargain. Ideally the move should be combined with some lateral stretching, to get all-round spine movement and stretch the muscles of the ribcage.


Here's an idea for you...


The idea of having a full glass in each hand is a sure way of ensuring you’re twisting smoothly and evenly, particularly if the glass happens to be full to the brim of precious liquid. If you do perform twists with anything in your hands, be particularly careful to slide your shoulder blades back and down. Otherwise you can end up using the shrugging muscles to help do the work and that creates tension in the neck.


A slightly more common (but ultimately less fulfilling) prop is the simple pole or broom handle. Place the pole on the shoulders behind the back of the neck, with your elbow in front and beneath it and your wrists wrapped around so they rest on each end. You should look a little as if you’d been put in the stocks. Turning this way helps keep your arms and shoulders in line, and makes it much easier to feel the pivot at the hips and so keep the pelvis out of the movement.