Pilates Exercise: The Roll Up

The Pilates roll-up exercise works your abdominals and improves flexibility of your spine. It also stretches out your lower back and flattens your stomach.

This is a floor or mat exercise and involves rolling up your upper body while extending your arms.

What You’ll Need: A Pilates mat or a cushioned place to lie on the floor.

Level: Beginner.

Time Required: 5 minutes.

Here’s How:

1. Lie on your back with your arms and legs flat on the floor. Lift your arms back above your head so that you are stretching long. Take a few deep breaths to make sure you are breathing fully, lying straight and relaxing your muscles.

2. Breath in as you start to lift your arms toward the ceiling and slowly start rolling or peeling your upper body off the floor from your head down.

3. Breath out slowly as you curl forward, keeping your head tucked and pressing your belly-button tightly against your spine to engage your abdominals.

4. Stretch your arms and torso forward over your legs creating a C shape with your body, pushing all the air out of your lungs and feeling the stretch in your back and legs. Keep your abdominal muscles tight.

5. Inhale again as you begin to roll back, vertebra by vertebra onto the floor. Make sure you engage your abdominals again as you roll down with strength from your core.

6. Finish in the starting position with your spine flat on the floor and your arms outstretched and reaching long.

7. Pause for a moment and then repeat five to ten times. Stay focused on your breathing and keeping a smooth, continuous motion.

Tips: Keep the movement fluid and constant. Work with your abdominal muscles. Don’t straighten your spine while rolling. If you feel any stress or discomfort, hold on to your thighs until you are stronger.

Modification: Slightly bend your knees with the feet on the floor, and keep your arms by your side if you cannot roll up smoothly.

Transition: Lie flat on the mat and go into the Single Leg Circles.

View the video below for a visual demonstration.

Pilates Exercise: The Hundred

The hundred is a classic pilates exercise so named because it takes a count of 100 to complete. This exercise strengthens core abdominal muscles and expands the chest and ribcage.

The hundred is a mat exercise often used as a dynamic warm-up for the abdominals and lungs. It requires that you coordinate your breathing while raising your legs to a vertical position and waving or pulsing your arms up and down in small motions.

What You’ll Need: A Pilates mat or a cushioned place to lie on the floor.

Level: Beginner.

Emphasis: Strength.

Time Required: 5 minutes.

Here’s how:

1. Start by lying on the floor with knees bent as if you were doing sit-ups and have your arms resting palm down at your side.

2. Squeeze your abdominal muscles so that your head, neck, and shoulders raise off the floor. Keep your abdominals squeezed tightly throughout the whole exercise. Stretch your arms forward toward your toes and start pulsing them up and down a distance of about 15cm. Stay is this position for a count of 20.

3. Slowly lift your legs to a 90 degree angle with your body. Continue the pumping for a further count of 20.

4. Slowly extend your legs straight up to the ceiling and keep pumping for 20 counts.

5. Begin to lower your legs at a 45 degree diagonal to your torso and keep pumping for 20 counts.

6. Keep your legs straight and lower them as close to the ground as possible without lifting your spine off the floor and keep pumping for 20 counts.

7. Lower your head to the floor. Release your arms, bend your knees, and place your feet back on the floor.

Tip: Draw your stomach into your spine. Use the energy of the arms and hips reaching in opposition to take pressure out of the quadriceps muscles (thighs).

Modification: For lower back pain, keep the legs slightly bent or legs bent at a 90-degree angle. For neck pain, keep the head on the mat or use a cushion.

Advanced Challenge: As your abdominal muscles grow stronger, try to lower your legs as you keep them straight. You may also add more repetitions up to 200.

Transition: Bend your knees to your chest. Then lie flat on your back with your legs straight on the ground for the Roll Up.

See the video below for a visual demonstration.

Benefits of Pilates

Pilates is one of the most rewarding types of exercise because it improves the body’s core. Although it became popular as a way of rehabilitating athletes and dancers, pilates is now used by millions of people across the globe because it is one of the safest forms of exercise.

To get started with pilates, all you need is a pilates mat. But for more advanced pilates exercise enthusiasts, a pilates machine and other equipment can be added to perform simple routines. Whatever your level, you will begin to notice healthy improvements in your body.

Pilates can work for anyone – male or female, old or young. No matter what condition you’re in, the health and fitness benefits are endless. Pilates improves flexibility, core strength and range of motion. It is also known to help alleviate chronic health ailments as well as back pain.

The best part about Pilates is that it’s fun! It’s an exercise that bonds the mind and body allowing them to work together to establish balance. Pilates also improves overall body alignment, making it less prone to injury.

Some additional benefits of Pilates are that it:

• Improves breathing.

• Corrects spinal and pelvic alignment through the concentration of slow, flowing, smooth movements with maximum power.

• Builds long, lean muscles that are less prone to injury, while building strength – without the bulk.

• Improves flexibility and range of motion.

• Improves back and abdominal strength.

• Creates balance between muscles – as weak muscles become stronger and the strong muscles also gain more strength never over training or under training any particular muscle group. This balance makes it easier to enjoy daily activities with less risk of injury. Pilates allows you to retrain your body to move in smoother safer, more efficient patterns of motion, which is essential in optimal performance and overall health.

• There is no pounding or bouncing in Pilates. It is the safest form of exercise. This is why it began as a rehabilitation exercise system for sports athletes and dancers. It is an intense exercise system working all muscle groups but still sustaining and improving overall balance.

If you are looking for a fitness routine that’s safe and easy to do, Pilates is an excellent choice. But best of all, with the popularity of this system, it can be performed in the comfort of your own home! Many pilates DVD’s are available for beginner and advanced users alike. So, if you need the right exercise system, pilates may be just the right thing for you. Fun, easy and relaxing exercise that strengthens and restores flexibility… Doesn’t get much better than this!

History of Pilates

The Pilates Machine was the brainchild of Joseph Hubertus Pilates, a German who was born in 1880. As a child, Joseph Pilates suffered from asthma, rickets, and rheumatic fever. Determined to overcome his ailments, he began to study anatomy as well as Eastern and Western forms of exercise, including Yoga, weight training, wrestling, and acrobatics. He was particularly enamored of the ancient Classic Greek “ideal man” who was equally schooled in cognitive thinking, philosophy, and history, but also maintained a finely tuned, athletic body.

When World War I broke out, Joseph Pilates found himself interned in England as an enemy alien on the Isle of Man. The health conditions in the internment camps were not great, but Pilates insisted that everyone in his cell block participate in daily exercise routines to help maintain both their physical and mental well-being. However, some of the injured German soldiers were too weak to get out of bed.

Not content to leave his comrades lying idle, Pilates took springs from the beds and attached them to the headboards and footboards of the iron bed frames, turning them into equipment that provided a type of resistance exercise for his bedridden “patients.” This equipment was used to correct muscular imbalances and improve posture, coordination, balance, strength, and flexibility, as well as to increase breathing capacity and organ function.

In 1926, Joseph Pilates moved to New York and brought along this method of exercise, which he termed ‘Contrology’. He defined Contrology as “the comprehensive integration of body, mind and spirit.”

The earliest American students of Contrology were professional dancers, because they repeatedly injured themselves. Soon the choreographer George Balanchine and other movement visionaries became believers in Contrology. From there the exercise, but not the name, caught on–everyone seemed to prefer to call it ‘Pilates.’

Today, many famous athletes, dancers, models and actors, as well as business professionals, housewives, and retires have taken up Pilates as their regular exercise routine.

An excellent book on presentation of the original Pilates matwork has been written by Brooke Siler. In The Pilates Body, she provides simple and easy to follow explanations for both novice and advanced Pilates students. She also provides photos, detailed text and analogies that make it ideal for home use.