Contents
The anti-pain technique that connects Pilates with “mindfulness”
Exercise
Being aware of your body posture and body sensations while exercising is the key to protecting yourself from pain and injury.
When Isabel Rizo, director of the National Institute of the Pilates Method, began to investigate how she could help a group of women with Fibromyalgia to live better incorporating Healthy Habits In his day-to-day life, he never imagined that he was about to create his own method capable of merging the « mindfulness” and the pilates.
For 12 weeks, Isabel Rizo worked with a multidisciplinary team to ensure that a group of women with fibromyalgia incorporated healthy habits into their lives. The idea was to measure the impact that these changes could have on the symptoms associated with his disorder. Some of the ‘key’ prompts given to the participants were: walk a minimum of 30 minutes a day, follow a healthy nutrition with the advice of a dietitian-nutritionist, exercise with pilates for two hours a week and practice «mindfulness»For 20 minutes a day. However, Isabel Rizo quickly realized that many of them were not willing to practice the “relaxation thing.” “I told them that doing” mindfulness “did not consist of doing relaxation exercises but that it was something that went much further, but they told me that it was difficult for them and that they seemed incapable. They did not want to and did not know how to do it. That is why I decided that the simplest thing was to include the principles of mindfulness (concentration, attention, acceptance…) in the Pilates classes. In this way they practiced mindfulness without knowing they were doing it, ”explains Isabel Rizo.
The result of the research exceeded all prognoses: after that period, the participants reduced their “State anxiety” (technical concept that refers to a transitory and fluctuating emotional state over time and is common in people with fibromyalgia). Other cognitive factors such as the memory atención and the concentration, in addition to other more physical parameters such as force flexible and equilibrium. “Some participants were able to reduce their medication, with the corresponding medical advice. Others went back to work and some of the women even told me that they had had sex with their partner again. Something that, by the way, is important and significant ”, reveals the director of the National Institute of the Pilates Method.
Isabel Rizo knows well what it means to live with “constant pain” because her mother suffers from fibromyalgia: “I remember perfectly having hugged my mother when I was little while she made a gesture of pain. When a person lives with pain on a daily basis, it affects them, but also their family. Your condition can cause insomnia, depression and that can also affect your attention and memory. It generates constant anxiety that does not allow them to work normally, “he argues.
The “real” union of mind and body
Based on that experience with fibromyalgia patients, which will be announced during the I Congress of Science & Mindfulness (March 13 and 14) held in Seville, the expert designed a method that combines Pilates and mindfulness and that allows “Be aware of every moment of training.” To explain what exactly it consists of, he gives the following example: when we are practicing the “hundred” (traditional Pilates exercise in which the arms move up and down, pumping) the instructor gives the necessary coordinates so that while we do the exercise we can Give mental and physical answers to the following questions: where and how is your lumbar? Are you tilting correctly? Do you keep your ribs inward? Have you lowered your shoulders? Are you projecting your head well? …
Maybe they may seem instructions Similar to those given during a traditional Pilates class, but the difference is, as Isabel Rizo explains, in that, while in a traditional class the instructor focuses on encouraging, motivating and marking the number of repetitions of the exercise, His method focuses on helping people to work on their body awareness and be aware of their posture, the signals they receive from their body and to execute the exercise correctly. «The instructor never loses the visual, verbal and tactile contact with the student so that he or she maintains concentration. If in a “mindfulness” session the instructor constantly reminds you how to focus your attention on the breath and does not let you get carried away by your thoughts, in our Pilates training we will not only be attentive to the breath or the images or sounds that they propose to us, but to our posture and the correction in the exercise, “he clarifies.
For Isabel Rizo the expression “Unite mind and body” it does not make sense because, for her, it is not that the mind and the body are united, it is that they are the same. “The human being is an entity, or we go for little bits,” he explains. That is why he defends a discipline that unites mind and body in a regulated way.
Now Isabel Rizo works, through the activities promoted by the National Welfare Center, so that her work can be disseminated and expanded so that it is representative as scientific research.