Pilates, Body Awareness and Getting Back Into Your Body

Women spend decades living in the same body while becoming increasingly disconnected from it. We may notice stiffness, tightness, pain or changes in mobility, but often our attention is elsewhere until something becomes uncomfortable enough to demand it.

In this episode of Before Dieting, I speak with experienced Pilates practitioner Lanette Helene about body awareness, movement and what it actually means to be “in your body”.

This isn’t a conversation about using Pilates for weight loss. Instead, we look at the body as an interconnected system and explore what can happen when we start paying closer attention to how it moves.

Lanette explains that Pilates isn’t simply about reproducing the shape of an exercise or following the person in front of you. Good instruction asks you to listen carefully to what is being asked, interpret that instruction through your own body and then make the movement. That requires a level of attention that can reveal just how difficult it has become to consciously connect with particular parts of your body.

Even breathing provides an example. We breathe automatically all day without thinking about it, yet when attention is deliberately directed towards breathing and how different parts of the body respond, something we do constantly becomes something we can actually observe. Pilates uses this kind of attention throughout movement, asking you to become more aware of what your body is doing rather than simply getting through an exercise.

This becomes particularly relevant as women move through midlife. Changes in muscle strength, stiffness and mobility can become more noticeable, and Lanette discusses why movement and appropriate strengthening become increasingly important. She also talks about problems such as frozen shoulder and explains why an issue that appears in one area of the body shouldn’t necessarily be considered in isolation. How we stand and move involves the whole body, so what is happening elsewhere can be relevant to the part that is uncomfortable.

Our everyday environments matter as well. Many of us spend long periods sitting or standing at a desk, while phones have added another reason to spend considerable time looking down. Over time, the positions we repeatedly adopt become part of how we use our bodies. Lanette discusses paying more attention to the way you stand and move during an ordinary day, rather than thinking about movement only when you are formally exercising.

Our feet are a good example of an area that can receive remarkably little attention. They carry us around every day, yet we may not think much about how well they move until they begin to cause problems. During our conversation, Lanette demonstrates a simple Toe Scrunch exercise using a towel. The toes draw the towel underneath the foot before reversing the movement, working through the feet, toes and ankles. It’s a small exercise, but it illustrates the larger point of our conversation: bringing deliberate attention back to parts of the body we may rarely think about.

If you’re considering Pilates, Lanette also explains why the quality of instruction matters. Pilates is now offered in many different settings and formats, but they don’t necessarily provide the same experience. For someone starting Pilates or returning to exercise after a long break, particularly when there are existing physical limitations or concerns, she recommends beginning with an individual assessment and instruction rather than simply walking into a large generic class.

What I particularly like about this conversation is the shift away from thinking about the body only in terms of what it weighs or looks like. When so much attention has been directed towards changing its size, there is value in becoming curious about the body you are actually living in and noticing how it moves, where it feels restricted and how connected you are to it.

Download the free instructional sheet for Lanette’s Toe Scrunch exercise :

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