Pilates Central » Pilates And Sport
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Pilates And Sport:
Introduction And Overview
A growing number of athletes across the widest range of sports use Pilates for everything from injury prevention and recovery to building flexibility, suppleness, co-ordination and core strength; or else, just to build longer, stronger muscles in general. More and more sports coaches now employ structural fitness exercises based on Pilates principles.
Top athletes who know first-hand the benefits of Pilates range from golfers like David Duval, Seve Ballesteros and Annika Sorenstam to tennis players like Venus Williams and Lindsay Davenport, to the England cricket team (with Andrew Flintoff and Graham Thorpe being particular fans) the Welsh Rugby Union squad and rowers including Matthew Pinsent and James Cracknell.
The increasing use of Pilates in sport makes perfect sense.
To succeed in sport you need both talent and technique. Talent is what we're born with. It's our potential - and some of us are blessed with more of it than others. Technique is the know-how needed to perform a particular sport. We acquire it through training, coaching and practising specific skills.
There is, however, a third key element in sporting success. It's called kinaesthetic awareness. This is how we use our body and how we relate to people and space around us. It includes balance, co-ordination, breathing, concentration, relaxation, alignment and that feature of great sportspeople that is hard to describe but easy to appreciate: flow.
For the lucky few, a rare combination of natural talent, excellent technique and superior kinaesthetic awareness takes them to the very top of their sport. Think of Haile Gebrselassie or Carl Lewis, Ronaldo or Ian 'Thorpedo' Thorpe: these are sportspeople who make the impossible look easy.
And the rest of us? We don't have any say as to how much talent our genes grant us but poor technique and a lack of kinaesthetic awareness undoubtedly limit our ability to develop it fully. Technical skills can be learned and kinaesthetic awareness can be worked on and improved. They are both within our sphere of influence - and Pilates can play a major role in helping us become 'fit to perform'.
Long-Term Athlete Development (LATD)
All sports now embrace the concept of Long-Term Athlete Development (LTAD). This is about acquiring the ABCs of movement - Agility, Balance, Co-ordination and Speed - at a young age, then gradually moving the approach to training from general to specific, from simple to more complex, as we mature both physically and mentally. It's a system that is designed to produce sportspeople with physiques appropriate to their chosen sport, with the necessary strength, stamina and suppleness to perform at the top level, under stress, for long periods of time with a reduced risk of injury.
For those of us coming to sports as adults, we can still benefit from the philosophy behind LTAD if we approach our chosen activity with intelligence, application and an open mind when tackling new skills. Pilates will inform this learning process, whether we are an elite performer or a complete novice.
Indeed, Pilates harmonises perfectly with the LTAD approach across every sport. As Joseph Pilates himself said, 'The Pilates method of body conditioning is gaining mastery of your mind over the complete control of your body'.
Patterns Of Movement
Every sport has its own distinctive patterns of movement. Some sports use certain muscles repeatedly while virtually ignoring others, creating the risk of an unbalanced physique. Tennis, for example, is very much a one-sided game. Others demand biomechanical efficiency to minimise the potential damage caused by an action, such as fast bowling in cricket. Impact sports like rugby and football require a high level of conditioning plus a good range of movement around certain joints. Common to all is the need to build long, lean muscles without bulk, and to activate the deep abdominal muscles to create a solid core. Pilates addresses these requirements and is an ideal complement to other training methods.
Injuries do, of course, happen. After a spell on the sidelines, gentle, careful Pilates exercises remobilise the body, easing the damaged muscles, tendons and joints back into activity. The rebalancing effects of Pilates can also help to prevent the distortions caused when you try to compensate for the part of the body that has been out of use. How often do you see a runner who has suffered an injury to their right leg unconsciously shift their weight onto the left side of their body? The loading that this causes could easily lead to further damage.
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