These six specific movements stay in my week, every week and they also are ideal for travel prep. The point is that on day two of the trip I'm not wincing about my hips, or compensating for a sore back from a long flight, or skipping a hike because my calves are cramping. These exercises protect the investment you’ve made in your travel, so you can freely enjoy all your planned holiday has to offer.

Pilates has a complete breathing system that most students and many teachers never fully learn .Each has a distinct purpose.

These four stretches target four of the areas that take the most abuse from prolonged sitting: the thoracic spine, the shoulder girdle, the spinal rotators, and the piriformis.

Before you go anywhere — a two-week adventure abroad or a Saturday hike along the Patapsco — your body is already packed. It’s the one piece of luggage you can’t leave behind. Is it prepared?.

Your gluteus maximus has a smaller, lesser-known neighbor — your gluteus medius — and it plays a critical role in how you move, balance, and stabilize through almost everything you do in a day.

On March 17th, the American College of Sports Medicine published its first major update to resistance training guidelines since 2009. Seventeen years. That’s a long time in exercise science — roughly the same span that separated the first smartphone from the one in your pocket right now.

Here’s my little summary.

Every week, someone in class asks me some version of this question: “Should my lower back be flat on the mat or not?”

It’s a great question — and the answer isn’t as simple as most Pilates instructors make it sound. Because the real answer is: it depends on what we’re trying to accomplish and where you are in your practice.

During World War I, a German-born fitness trainer named Joseph Pilates found himself interned in a camp on the Isle of Man. His fellow internees were bedridden, deconditioned, and losing hope. He didn’t have a studio full of gleaming equipment. He had hospital beds.

So he took the beds apart.

Fifteen years into my dance career, I was sitting in an orthopedic surgeon’s office listening to him tell me—with the casual certainty doctors sometimes have—that he’d see me back for surgery after I tried physical therapy. My back injury had stopped me cold, and according to him, the knife was pretty much inevitable.