The word "Powerhouse" is used to describe the muscles most used in performing his exercises and it's no coincidence that Powerhouse muscles are also the most powerfully stabilizing muscles in your body. Specifically, your Pilates Powerhouse consists of the muscles located between your ribs and your hips, all the way around your mid-section and all the way through the interior of your trunk. Your Powerhouse includes many muscles, most of them skeletal and small, but to help you understand why Authentic Pilates™ has earned its stellar reputation for spine stabilization you'll need to know a bit about the psoas and multifidus muscles.

You probably already know that the way to a strong back is through strong abs and you probably already know a little about the rectus abdominis. Commonly called the 6-pack, it's the muscle most folks work when strengthening their abs (think crunches). Your rectus abdominis is a flat, thin superficial but strong muscle that traverses the entire length of your abdominal wall from your sternum at the top all the way down near your pubic bone at the bottom. The fibers of your rectus abdominis run up and down and are interrupted along 3 and sometimes 4 transverse lines by tendinous intersections of the muscle (hence, definition reveals a 6- or even 8-pack!).

Thanks to countless celebrities and athletes who flaunt their beautiful bodies, we've seen how dramatically cut or rolled the rectus abdominis will become. And we love to look because an aggressively developed 6-pack is quite a spectacle. Recapping, the rectus abdominis is big, thin, flat and the farthest core muscle from your spine.

Look how thin the rectus abdominis is!

Now, let's learn a bit about your psoas, the kingpin of your Powerhouse. Pronounced so-as, it's a massive muscle - in average sized adults the psoas is approximately 12 inches long and in taller folks it can be 16 inches long. You have two of them, one attached to each side of your spine from your 12th thoracic vertebrae all the way down through your 5th lumbar vertebrae just above your sacrum - that's about 1/3 of your spine. From there, your psoas runs virtually unattached through your pelvic bowl and connects with another muscle through a common tendon to the top of your femur, your large thigh bone. Because your psoas helps attach the top half of your body to the bottom half of your body, it's involved in all lower body movement. Think about that - your psoas is either activating, allowing or assisting in your every twist, turn, jerk, step, stride, wiggle, shift, saunter, jump, swish, swing and scoot. Sometimes, the psoas on one side of the spine is stronger than the other (play soccer, figure or speed skate, row?) and when that happens, your strong side might pull your weak side out of alignment - think corkscrew. Some people are so restricted they can't lie down flat on their back or belly. Good news: practicing Authentic Pilates™ can, in time, restore muscular balance. And how convenient that the low back, precisely where the psoas muscles nestle into your spine, is precisely where so many of us experience back pain.

Bottom line: the best way to a strong back is to strengthen skeletal muscles, the ones directly attached to your spine. Joe Pilates knew that and that's why each Authentic Pilates™ exercise is performed engaging the kingpin psoas and other deep muscles of your Pilates Powerhouse.

So now you know what your Powerhouse is but how do you know which muscles you're using? Answer: You don't. And that's precisely why you need us! With our great instructors, the intricacies of this marvelous work become surprisingly do-able and quite fun. There's no way around it, if you don't begin with solid Powerhouse awareness, you won't get anywhere with the Authentic work. And really, that's the biggest difference between Authentic Pilates™ and the Pilates-based knock-offs. It's not about making shapes. It's about getting to the very bottom of things and working from the inside out. At PPNW, that's first and foremost and non-negotiable. It's all about you. We can't do it for you but we go to extraordinary lengths to get the knowledge of this work from our minds and bodies into yours. Once you understand what you're supposed to be using, why and how it works for you and how to access it, you fully understand why you're struggling so hard trying to do it. Magic happens when you learn the huge difference between Pilates being hard because you're doing it wrong and it being hard because you're doing it right!

Our success is measured by one thing only, how well our clients understand and perform Pilates exercises. And here's an interesting fact. Our client retention is excellent, far above what most Pilates studios experience. Impressive under any circumstances but especially so in these difficult economic times. The reason we get you and keep you is that at every step along the way, we help you understand your struggles with each challenging exercise. It's demoralizing to be given inadequate instruction, then criticized when you fail. If your teacher isn't making sure you "get it," you'll eventually get stuck. Expensively stuck. PPNW clients do not get stuck.

It's impossible to learn how to access and develop your Powerhouse by reading these or any flat words and there's no way to duplicate the perspective of trained eyes on you so you can't use the following simplistic description of Powerhouse engagement for anything other than a basic education. That said . . .

Begin with a perfectly neutral spine then pull in your stomach and when you do, many deep and intermediate abdominal muscles fire. Once your belly's in, you've got to lift it up. Pull it in and lift it up, as if your bellybutton wants to come out through your mid-back. It's an almost certain bet that when you get your belly in and up, your ribs pop out so now, you need to deal with them. Keeping the in and the up, isolate and recruit the muscles attached to and between your ribs and use them to knit your ribs down to your spine. Now lift your spine, rising up out of your pelvis as if you are trying to be as tall as you possibly can be. And you can't let all that distort your perfectly long and aligned spine. Turning blue? You've got to find your lungs, which by now feel squished, and figure out how to fill them so you can keep breathing!

And something else really neat happens by default when you pull your belly in . . . that minute-steak of muscles, your rectus abdominis, essentially de-activates, it goes soft even though it's sucked back and up toward your spine. Working deeply, you won't build bulk but you'll be stronger than any of those superficial muscles will ever make you. Lance does not push those pedals with his legs! In fact, he didn't win the Tour de France until he lost most of his bulk to chemotherapy. Big muscles do not necessarily mean you've go what it takes to go long and strong! It's all deep, baby, and the real beauty of this work is that your rewards will be identical to the pros - strength, endurance, balance and control, fewer injuries, long lean muscles and a little taller to boot!

All of Authentic Pilates™ is performed with this foundation engagement - you're multitasking all the way down to your bones in Authentic Pilates™! But no worries, with proper instruction and diligent practice, this sequence melds into one smooth move and, voila, your Powerhouse is onboard 24/7. Second nature. First, even, and it truly will make a difference in your every move.
Call 206-525-PPNW and let's get going.