Why is Pilates good as a complementary exercise?

If you have a sport of your choice that you've been doing for years, it also means that you've been doing the same exercises and movements for years. It's natural that certain muscles and muscle groups in your body develop and strengthen accordingly.

In many cases, such as basketball, this means a side-to-side movement, which means you have a stronger shooting hand and a stronger jumping foot on the opposite side. Specific muscle use causes us to overuse some muscles and underuse others. This will result in overused muscles pulling joints out of place, which can lead to musculoskeletal pain or injury in the long term. Functionally, a muscle spans and moves one or two joints. If, for example, the biceps in the upper arm is too short, we cannot fully extend our arm. The asymmetry of the muscles on either side of the spine can pull our vertebrae to one side or the other. The opposite side naturally tries to hold the joint in place, but because it is the weaker side, it tires more quickly and sooner or later muscle spasms and pains occur.

Pilates provides the opportunity to strengthen and stabilise weak muscles, thus avoiding the development of pain and reducing the level of pain already present.

We also do stretching exercises in the Pilates classes. In fact, I prefer to say that we stretch with strengthening. . Thanks to the exercises we do, we develop stronger muscles. How can this be? Let's see, through an example, why stretching is important and what do we mean by stretching to strengthen?

If our muscle is shortened by 2 cm compared to a normal length muscle, its contraction will be smaller. But if we stretch it back and the muscle strength remains the same, we will achieve a larger contraction because we will increase the force. In pilates, we also take advantage of the stretching phase because of the controlled muscle work. ( Very briefly and simply put, a muscle can work by shortening or stretching, or when you statically just hold something in place and the length of the muscle doesn't change). So imagine you are holding a bottle of water because you are thirsty. We bend our arm when we lift the bottle to our mouth. When we do this, the arm flexor muscles shorten. While we are drinking, we hold the bottle in place, the muscle length does not change, we just hold it. Gravity would pull our arm down, so when we put the bottle back on the table, the arm flexor muscle is also working as it stretches. In Pilates, this last section is often the main muscle work, so there is often no separate stretching at the end of class. However, if you would like to work specifically on your flexibility, I also recommend our stretching classes where we focus on stretching the muscles.