Pilates is a great system for improving your health, it has helped dancers, professional athletes and the general public and often used in rehab. We use Pilates exercises all the time in our classes as they are so beneficial for so many people.
There are also times when we may need to use different exercises to help individuals improve how they move.
Let's explain a little further
What we may not realise is that there are traditional methods of exercise/movement that will look at the problem you have in a specific way. Take for instance a squat exercise where generally it will be taught in a precise way and anything slightly different to that will be seen as faulty movement, where we are often told that we need to keep a neutral spine, no rounding of the spine as we go down into the squat as it may lead to injury and pain, if we do it another way it will often be labelled as a dysfunctional movement. But say you had a back pain which has now affected you squatting. When trying to perform the squat now, you use some sort of muscle guarding or tensing up of the muscles as you try to perform the squat and do not feel safe to do that motion any more. Even if you kept performing that squat over and over in that position you may not improve.
With an updated view of performing the squat exercise in this instance - if we changed your foot position or put a chair behind you and that eased the muscle guarding which allowed you to squat, we may have either altered your perception, or changed the angle at which you squat. Either way you could complete the task at hand. In one respect we have varied your movement which has allowed you to get past your experience in performing the squat with a back ache. Although with traditional thinking this is seen as dysfunctional movement, in our updated view no movement is dysfunctional it is just a variation that you may have needed to use for a while to achieve that movement.
We can apply this model to pain experiences that you have, pain is complex but will prevent you doing certain moves or achieving positions which may not be due to one joint or muscle causing the issue. But if we can apply different models of movement to traditional thinking we may be able to help restore function.