SPEAKER_00 0:10

Welcome to Pilates Perspectives. Today we're visited by Cody Jussel, who will be sharing her expertise on biomechanics and injuries. But before we begin, let's check in. Well, keep it short and sweet today with a simple yet satisfying modified lion's breath exercise. So if you're able, find a comfortable seated position and settle in. Sit up nice and tall and just roll your shoulders up and back and down, opening up your chest. Rest your hands comfortably on your knees or thighs or steering wheel if you're driving. And let's start as we usually do with a few deep breaths at your own pace to clear your mind and connect your body. So let's transition now into a box breathing pattern. And this time we'll do it to a count of five. So let's inhale for one, two, three, four, five, and hold four, three, two, one, and exhale for one, two, three, four, five. So again, it's inhale for five.

SPEAKER_01 1:35

Hold. Exhale.

SPEAKER_00 1:43

And repeat a few more times. And as you're breathing, let me prepare you for what's next. We're going to do the lion's breath. It's a yoga breath that is a wonderful release. And it just gives you an opportunity to let it all out. So the way we'll do this is on the next inhale, I'm going to ask you to inhale deeply through the nose, feeling your belly and your chest expand. Now, the sticking out of your tongue is optional, but you know what? It really does feel great. And when you exhale, I want you to exhale with an exaggerated ha. Think of it as a combination of a big sigh after a long day, or like you're trying to fog up your mirror with your breath. So you ready? You're going to inhale. Just dig out your tongue and let out a big ha. Again, it's a big sigh, and you're fogging up the mirror at the same time. And now wherever you are, and I actually hope you're in your car and nobody can hear you. I'm going to ask you to really let it out. Big inhale. And ha. Ooh. Yeah, baby. That kind of feels good. That lion's breath, fantastic, fantastic way to just let it go. Don't worry about being big and scary. Every now and then being big and scary is a good thing. Okay. Now I'm going to compose myself. Okay, thank you for taking that time. Uh I'm excited to introduce Cody Jussel, who has a Master's of Science in Kinesiology and has been teaching Pilates for 20 years, founder of Anatomy of Pilates. She focuses on education in anatomy, biomechanics, and exercise science for Pilates instructors. You can find Cody at AnatomyofPilates.com or on Instagram at Anatomy of Pilates. All right, we are very excited today to have Cody Jussel with us discussing biomechanics and injuries. Cody, welcome to Pilates Perspectives. Thank you. I think we should just simply start by by having you introduce yourself to our listeners.

SPEAKER_03 4:15

Yeah, great. My name is Cody. I uh I've been teaching Pilates. My daughter is, this is how I judge how long I've been teaching Pilates. My daughter is 19.

SPEAKER_00 4:27

Um, and I started teaching. So I totally uh relate to that. My son is, but my son is 31. Okay. So there you go.

SPEAKER_03 4:34

Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_00 4:35

Um I can't believe I just admitted that. Because it then people could do the math. No kidding.

SPEAKER_03 4:39

It's kind of crazy, right? Um, yeah. Uh so my daughter is 19 and I started teaching right after she was born. Um, and as we were discussing before we uh started recording, I started teaching kind of um as like a this is what was available to me. Um the gym that I was teaching dance at had childcare. They had Pilates. Um I was looking for a way to move my body after having a child, which was like a very foreign experience in my body. Um I felt like my body was very foreign and new and not my own. And I was moving differently and feeling different. And um, Pilates really helped bring me back into my body um in a way that I had not felt before, even as like a someone who had moved my whole life. Like I was a gymnast. Um, I did all kinds of different, like I was had been dancing since I was like a teenager. Um and I'd done martial arts and uh movement had always been a part of my life, but this this way of moving that Pilates kind of invited me to do um was different. It was really thoughtful in a way.

SPEAKER_00 6:08

I was just gonna say, what is there a way to quantify what that difference is? I think it's like a secret sauce, and I keep trying to distill the ingredients, you know?

SPEAKER_03 6:17

I mean, I always kind of felt like it was um like Pilates invites you to think about the way that you're moving for the sake of thinking about the way that you're moving. Whereas everything that I'd done previous to Pilates was like it was to do something to either achieve an aesthetic or complete a task, right? And which I I think this is the way that we we engage with most movement, like team sports or um or dance or gymnastics, where it's like, you know, the goal is to make the basket, the goal is to like run as fast as you can, or the goal is to make the shape with your body to look like this, and how we get there is less relevant. Um, and Pilates really invites you to think about how you're getting there, that there are different ways to get there, that you can feel like you can have this interoception, um, this like feeling of the in, like the sense of the inside of your body. And what is that feeling like? Um, it feels to me the way that I like to practice Pilates now for myself, it's like a moving meditation, right? And it it doesn't have to be that way for everybody, it can be all crazy.

SPEAKER_00 7:36

But very mindful and very awareness-based.

SPEAKER_03 7:38

Yeah. Like I like to close my eyes a lot.

SPEAKER_00 7:41

I know. Everybody says, open your eyes. I'm like, but I'm really having a very good internal experience right now.

SPEAKER_01 7:46

It's so nice.

SPEAKER_00 7:48

I totally get that. Um, yeah, it's it's hard to it's hard to touch that, isn't it? Because it's it's it's unique for many people. But the the the phrase um uh that it taps into something in a way that uh uh other methods don't, or it did something for my body um that that I didn't expect, like those, those things come up over and over again. But the the way in which we we get there is so personal to every person, every everybody that I talk to. Right. Um that's great, that's exciting. Uh so we're gonna be talking about biomechanics. So so what brought you down the journey of biomechanics?

SPEAKER_03 8:31

Um, well, I was in my like Pilates journey. Um, and kind of, I don't know, I guess I'm um a naturally inquisitive person and I'm Curiosity.

SPEAKER_00 8:47

I think that's also part of the secret sauce.

SPEAKER_03 8:49

Curiosity, totally. Yeah. And I I had all these questions, even in my initial teacher teacher training, of like, why? Why are we doing this? Why is the order the the way that it is? Um, and I think that my very well-intentioned initial instructors were um just didn't have answers beyond, well, this is the way that my teacher taught me, or this is uh the reason that my teacher gave me, um, which are not bad reasons. Um, I think I was just looking for something that was a little bit more specific. And so I kept like searching for something. And I was like, well, okay, am I gonna like go back to school to study movement a little bit more? And the obvious choice was like, Am I gonna go back to school for physical therapy? And so I yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:37

Do you know? Uh do you know that every year I was in New York at the time? Uh uh annually I would go to the NYU open house for their physical therapy school. Yeah. So often that I would walk in and they'd be like, is this the year, Joy? And I'm like, I don't think so.

SPEAKER_03 9:56

It's so funny. Yeah. I mean, I I like, I think that that's the story of a lot of, you know, people who are in this business or in the do this for a long time for um for a living. Like we make this our career. It's more than just a hobby.

SPEAKER_00 10:13

Um and your clients are coming to you, and as your reputation grows, they're coming to you because they have X. Right. So there's a sense of do we know enough? Do we need to learn something else? And if you're curious, like you are, the why behind the what is important.

SPEAKER_03 10:32

Yeah. And I feel like there are, you know, we do have a lot of resources in the Pilates world. 100%. Yeah. Excellent resources. Totally. We have a lot of really, really um knowledgeable and intelligent people uh kind of like trying to answer these questions for us. Um and I feel like, you know, at least in my experience from my education, we went from like, okay, we're we're spending a lot of time, like a year and a half or two years, learning the repertoire, learning how to be teachers, observing, practice teaching, um, you know, like learning how if you went through a comprehensive training, like learning how all of the pieces of equipment kind of relate to each other. And oh, if someone can't do this over here, maybe and I was trained classically and kind of was uh, I mean, I love, I love the classical repertoire and I love the classical method. And I think that I also really like being creative too. And so maybe the classical repertoire.

SPEAKER_00 11:32

I think those things can coexist.

SPEAKER_03 11:33

I think they can too. Um, I've had some really, as just an aside, I had some really great conversations with Karen Frischman about Karen Frischman. We love Karen Frischman. She's like, I just she's the best. Um we've had some great conversations about we we presented together in Australia at the PAA.

SPEAKER_00 11:54

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_03 11:54

And so we we got to chat a little bit about just like this like classical and contemporary uh conversation and just like how we're you know, how nice would it be to just find some like bridges and commonalities because we're all kind of doing the same thing, right? That's right. That's right. Um but anyway, I can't remember exactly where we're gonna be. So we were talking about biomechanics. Yeah, yeah. So then where did that pop up on your radio? I was, I think, just constantly like asking questions. And so I did end up going back to school, not in physical therapy, because um honestly, like the the cost of school and oh my god, you and I lived in parallel universes 11 or 12 years apart.

SPEAKER_00 12:36

Yeah, that's it. I was totally with you. I was like, uh, do I want to spend this amount of money, but I want to know more? So I went and got my master's degree. And yours is in biomechanics? Mine is in kinesiology.

SPEAKER_03 12:46

In kinesiology. Yeah, with a focus in orthopedic rehab and my program and adaptive sports. So I I studied like um like the Paralympics, basically, and like how to kind of like bring adaptive athletes um through the like kind of uh leading up to what you would need to do to, but we studied get to the Paralympics or a competitive level of um adaptive competition. But we ended up studying a lot of like um what it takes to put on like an adaptive competition. And so I ended up doing a lot of that when CrossFit, who I worked for for a while, and I also trained or coached CrossFit, um, helped them develop their uh competitive adaptive programs for the CrossFit games, um, which was a very, very cool experience and ended up uh not going where I would have loved it to go. Uh so I went and got my master's in kinesiology, um, focused in orthopedic rehab. My program called it corrective exercise, which I really like shy away from calling what I do with anyone corrective exercise. Um, because I think it gives the idea that there is like a right and a wrong way. And I don't really feel after, like, honestly, after kind of zooming out and stepping back from my program out of that learning phase of being in school, um, and was able to again step back into the studio and like really be working with real bodies and that's right, you know, like, because there's there is the textbook, like this is what happens in uh a perfect world, or this is what happens in like, and we can see this in biomechanics, like it's in the name, right? Mechanics and biology, uh where it's like a lot of what we end up learning or doing in biomechanics is based on mechanics as they apply to rigid systems that are not biological and not adaptable. And there's a certain amount of unpredictability that happens in the biological part of that um that is makes biomechanics like and anything that we study with the human body, like not so cut and dry, right? So it's not a like corrective exercise, like we're correcting something. We can, I think, step back and see that a little bit differently in that um maybe we're helping someone create different strategies rather than correcting a faulty and different strategies for themselves. Right, right. Different strategies for themselves, exactly. Yeah. So that's kind of I how I got into, you know, studying kinesiology in a uh more specific way than maybe Pilates offered. Um and kind of started to focus a little bit more on biomechanics because I felt like that's what instructors were lacking and a really basic understanding of. So um, you know, I'm not my my mentor, the people that I try to learn from, they're they are the ones who are um doing biomechanics in the lab and like working with math and modeling. And like, you know, when I have my sessions with my mentor, like we talk about why um it is really difficult to model scapular mechanics and why there are so many questions still about like um shoulder pain and how they relate to scapular mechanics, because she's in the lab putting markers on people. She's the one who, you know, and I'm I am not that person.

SPEAKER_00 16:42

No, you're seeing it in in action in in the individual person and the uh yeah, uh it's when you put the bio in front of mechanics, it becomes very unpredictable, doesn't it? In many ways. Yeah, yeah. That's that's very cool. Although uh what I loved about school the most was it it gave me the ability to look at research, yeah. Um with both uh a level of critical reasoning and um curiosity. Yeah. And then and then make some choices in the training space based on those those those two factors. Um does that resonate with you at all?

SPEAKER_03 17:27

Oh yeah, totally. I feel like the biggest thing that I got from going back to school um was that it taught me how to look at research. And it taught me honestly that I really don't know that much.

SPEAKER_00 17:43

Well, yeah, that the that the more we know, the more it's the more questions you have. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_03 17:50

And I feel like I am, you know, and I I think that, and I I try to convey that to a lot of students that um, you know, come to my workshops or like go through a mentorship with me, that um I have questions that I mean, and and like I think that it's really important to remember that people who uh are engaged in um research every day around biomechanics, they have questions and they're like it's really interesting to see what comes out. And it's evolving. And it's evolving.

SPEAKER_00 18:21

Because the bio part is is the part that you know is so dynamic that we may answer one question, but then it brings up another. Yes, exactly. That's uh I think that's really cool. Um, so let's let's talk about kinesiology, just to clarify for for our listeners. Uh what is kinesiology? What is the study of kinesiology?

SPEAKER_03 18:45

It is the study of human movement. Um, so when we talk about kinesiology, um like kinetics is the study of how forces act on the human body. And that's kind of uh what we would consider like biomechanics. How does force create movement?

SPEAKER_02 19:06

Right.

SPEAKER_03 19:07

That's really what we're saying when we say biomechanics.

SPEAKER_00 19:10

Um so for biomechanics, it's how does the force create the movement? So that we're talking about lever arms and joints and right, exactly.

SPEAKER_03 19:17

Yeah, we're talking about like pivot points and fulcrums and moment arms and load, and where is the force coming from and what is the load? And these are the things I think that we like, these are really super foundational things, right? And they don't have to necessarily be complex. I think we can talk about these things in ways. I hope that we can talk, I hope I can talk about these things in ways that um are simple and they don't feel it as intimidating to people. Um yeah, but you know, we're talking about levers. And I know that I think hearing like levers and torque and force and like that already creates maybe a little bit of like anxiety. Anxiety people, like I don't know what those things are, and it's it's okay. Like, I don't think I think this is like anatomy, right? We learn anatomy, kind of this clinical insertion origin action anatomy in our teacher training. Um, and like, yeah, we learn it, but it doesn't necessarily stick the first time, right? We come back like five years later and we're like, oh what I I don't remember that. I have to look that stuff up. Or, you know, it's it, I really encourage people to look at biomechanics, kinesiology, human movement, anatomy as something that you're gonna come back to over and over again. That's right. You're gonna I look stuff up all the time. I look up insertions and origins. All the time. All the time. All the time. Like I look up-and I see different things all the time. Oh, yeah, totally. Right? Right. And that's really interesting. Yeah. Yeah. And it's confusing too, right? I think there's a certain amount of um, like again, going back to being in school and like what it teaches you is that we don't have like consensus among people who study this stuff like a lot for their job, right? That's all they do is study the stuff. Like, there's not consensus among these folks about even like basic terminology, which can make learning really difficult and confusing for people.

SPEAKER_00 21:29

Well, and and and and again, you know, uh studying the the live dynamic human in movement is so complex.

SPEAKER_03 21:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 21:40

You know, uh originally anatomists were were were doing dissections. Right. You know, uh so and and dice early, early dissections were done on young prisoners who were executed. And now dissections are mostly not only, but mostly done on older individuals who. Donate they were willing to donate their bodies. So you see different things. Um so anyway, okay, but I digress. Uh so we were talking about discussing bi biomechanics. Uh tell me, like, what does that mean when we talk about Pilates and fitness? Like, how did that the study of biomechanics and the intersection of your actual practice in Pilates and fitness, how do they come together?

SPEAKER_03 22:22

So I think it really just changed the way that I see like the lens or the perspective that I view what I'm doing through. Um, I think that when I first started kind of learning Pilates, it's like you learn the exercises, like, oh, um, this is a core exercise, or this is a um, I don't know, hip range of motion exercise. And I think biomechanics helps us understand that um what we're really looking at is how the body is resisting a force and producing a movement. And so it it I think, especially in relation to like taking a client, like if we're, you know, I think if you do the classical repertoire and you just kind of like stick to the classical repertoire and like you do Pilates as like a series of exercises, build like the purpose of it for you is just getting that person through the classical repertoire. That's fine. That is a fine purpose and a goal, and you will have people that populate your studio who also have that goal by default, right? Um, and I think a lot of us uh we get people who walk through our studio doors who have a variety of different goals, right? Like there is a physical therapist around the corner from our studio in Santa Cruz, and um he refers his patients to me after they complete their physical therapy. He'll send them over to Lisa or I. And similarly, if someone is Lisa Graham.

SPEAKER_00 24:05

Lisa Graham, yep, uh-huh, name drop. Yes, and name drop and another, another friend of both of ours. Yes, yes. And we have mutual love and admiration for.

SPEAKER_03 24:14

Yes, Lisa is fabulous. Um, and similarly, we will refer people to him, right? It's this relationship. But all of that to say is like um we get people who walk through our door with different goals than just to do the repertoire. Um, and so understanding how Pilates exists under an umbrella of just exercise and movement. Like we are all governed. It doesn't matter what modality we do. Um, we're all governed by the same laws of physics and and mechanics and biology. Um and so I think it's really helpful. It was really helpful for me to understand that that's what I was doing with Pilates for me in my own studio. Um and I honestly like I I really try to kind of bridge the the like classical Pilates still lives under that same umbrella of exercise.

SPEAKER_00 25:11

100%. I mean, so you you talk about how the body moves, what did you say, through through forces or or um with force? It's like and now I'm probably gonna get into a lot of trouble for saying this, but the fundamental difference for me between classical and contemporary Pilates is the feedback loop of the forces, meaning on the classical equipment and moving through the exercises in a particular order, you're experiencing the forces differently. Um, and on the classical equipment, there's really more of a sense of pulling the carriage in and contemporary with with you know ball bearings and the uh the upgraded wheels and the elevated risers and the larger carriage, there's more of a sense of controlling the carriage as it moves out and and having to to in many ways create the closing experience. Does that make sense? No, it totally does. So you're you're you're managing the same exercises in a similar environment, but the forces are being controlled and driven differently. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 26:23

And that's which is fascinating. It's super fascinating. And that's like one of the things that I really try to get people to understand. There's a woman, um, Kayleen Canaveri, and I might be saying her last name wrong, um, but she is a mechanical engineer. Yes. And she's a Pilates instructor. Yes. Um, she is fantastic and like is explaining these things in really, really interesting ways with like uh modeling, computer modeling. And um, she's great. If you don't know her, haven't been exposed to her, check her out for sure. Um, but I always like there was a there was a moment on Instagram where I was doing a series on like cues that we can stop using because they don't make biomechanical or an anatomical sense. Um and one of them, and I I still really I'm not a fan of this cue, but um, pull the pull the carriage in with your hamstrings. I'm like, why are we telling people to do that? Like you're not using your hamstrings when you are moving the carriage in and out because of your orientation to load, right? If we understand that we're pushing the carriage out and that is a knee extensor moment, right? That is that we are pushing against resistance and then we're controlling that resistance back in, it's still a knee extensor moment. We're just resisting the springs pulling us back in. And a couple of people piped in and they were like, well, not on classical equipment. On classical equipment, you there is a moment, the last like few inches of the carriage that you do have to pull in with your hamstrings. And I was like, Oh, that's that's super interesting. And I've recently been taking classes at a studio in Santa Cruz with an instructor who's very classical. And she has equipment where like the only way that I can describe the equipment is that it's gritty. Like it's like it like doesn't have that smooth.

SPEAKER_00 28:20

Yeah, yeah. The wheels, the wheels literally we call it sticky. Yeah, yeah. And and so, and so there is a real sense of pulling, like you've got to pull the carriage all from the very beginning. Like, springs aren't gonna do the work for you.

SPEAKER_03 28:32

100%. And I was like, I just had like this light bulb moment very recently of of thinking, like, oh, I wonder if this is like originally where that cue came from.

SPEAKER_00 28:43

Well, I won't say 100%. I don't want to be in anybody else's brain, but that's the sensation, right? You're really you're you are truly focusing. If it's the if you you you use knee extensors on the way out, you are knee flexing. Right. Uh you you are, you know, there's there's a lot happening in the back body. There's there's effort. And there's effort to pull it back in.

SPEAKER_03 29:04

Yeah, totally. And I think, you know, I mean, and and I think I am hopefully um uh there's a um a guy who's not in the Pilates world, he's a physical therapist. His name's Greg Lehman. Um, and he runs a course called Reconciling Uh Biomechanics with Pain Science. Fabulous. That's fantastic. I need to look that up. Yeah. Yeah, he is amazing. He has a um podcast called Movement Optimism, I believe.

SPEAKER_00 29:35

Oh, what a great name.

SPEAKER_03 29:36

Yeah. He's like, I mean, I he is kind of a touch point. I have, I have people that I kind of like check in with. If I have an idea and I'm like, is this like a am I totally off base here or what? I'll check in to see what they're saying about the thing and I'll be like, okay, at least I'm like on the right track, or no, I'm very much not on the right track here. He is a touch point for me. Um, and he always says, uh, don't marry your beliefs, state your beliefs, right? Just be like open to having your mind change. So I hope that I um embody that as much as I can. But that was definitely a moment where realizing that um there are, I think understanding fundamentally what we're doing from a force perspective and a load perspective. Like if we are working on a like all of my equipment is balanced body. I've never really worked on any other equipment besides balanced body. Um, and that isn't a you know, plug. Some plugs.

SPEAKER_00 30:34

We did not pay, we did not pay her for that endorsement. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 30:38

But um just like I I think that it maybe also narrows my view of what different pieces of equipment are like or different brands of equipment are like, and how much friction or how little friction there is in the glide of the carriage. And you know, I've worked on maybe um the balanced body equipment that is more classical. The contrology it was like really early. I don't know. Anyway, four springs, all the same, right? Stronger springs. Like that's that's the only equipment that I've worked on that's like different from the studio reformers. Um and I think it's just really important to understand from a load perspective, like what is happening in the body, right? We in a in on a balanced body piece of equipment where there's very little friction, um, and we are primarily working just with the spring resistance, right? We're pushing the carriage out. That is a knee extensor moment. And we are allowing the carriage to come back in. We are controlling the carriage.

SPEAKER_00 31:40

You're eccentrically controlling. You're eccentrically controlling around the joint, right? Around the joint, exactly.

SPEAKER_03 31:45

So it's still a knee extensor moment. It's like, and you know, people will like uh interject with, oh, but you're bending the knee, and that is a like the hamstrings bend the knee.

SPEAKER_00 31:56

Right, but you're controlling the movement eccentrically with the extensors. That's that's yeah, but that you know I think there's so many great conversations to have there.

SPEAKER_03 32:07

Right. I think so too. I think that's like a I think, and I think that when we start to get into those conversations, at least with people who have been in my sphere, um, other teachers, I think there is just there's a lot of um really basic misunderstandings around what we are doing from a load perspective.

SPEAKER_00 32:32

Um and and going back to Karen Frischman, one of the things she and I talk about a lot is if you can understand the intention of the original work, and then you take it and you bring it into the environment. Um, and you understand and there are differences, but if you understand the intention, then when you're in the environment and you and you have a sense of biomechanics, now you can make choices. Yeah. Exactly. Right? Yeah. Like that eccentric knee extensor control moment is so fantastic when you're walking downstairs or coming off of a curb. Right. Right? Yeah. Uh and and you you marry that with the ank with ankle and foot movement and controlled, but depending on the foot placement on the foot bar, like there's some magic that's happening there. Yeah. But we also need to work the knee extensors. Right. So that gritty feel of closing the carriage is also important. Right. But you can make choices if you understand what you're looking at. Exactly.

SPEAKER_03 33:31

And it's all about the the freedom and the options to be able to make informed choices.

SPEAKER_00 33:37

This is just so like this is so exciting to me. Because if this becomes sort of this next generation of teaching, think about how wide open the opportunities are.

SPEAKER_03 33:50

Yeah. And I feel like I I feel like in conversations that I'm having with um new instructors and and I mean, maybe not even new instructors, but people who are just out there in the Pilates world right now educating. Um there is a real interest and drive for these kinds of conversations and questions. Um, and I feel, I don't know, I I look around and I feel very like um excited about the future of Pilates education.

SPEAKER_00 34:21

Oh, yeah, I'm totally with you. Um, let's do a little more, a little bit of nerdy stuff. Um so it a biomechanical evaluation. What does that look like? Well, and do you recommend that as, or do you do that as part of your intake?

SPEAKER_03 34:39

So I think that I um, and I can only say like what I do in my own studio. And I don't know that there's like a kind of across the board, like this is a biomechanical evaluation uh and this is the way to do it. I think that um you could talk to five different instructors who might say, like, I view things through a biomechanical lens, and they might all do you know five different types of assessment. But what I look for um in someone's initial sessions, their their assessment, me watching them move, their first session, um how are they moving at like first? What are their goals? Um and they could be, you know, I don't know, anything from picking your grandchild up off the floor to doing 20 pull-ups unbroken. Um what are their goals? Uh what is their are they realistic?

SPEAKER_00 35:42

Because I don't know about 20 pull-ups unbroken.

SPEAKER_03 35:45

Maybe one pull-up, right? Whatever it is. Um I look at, or we kind of like, and this is a continual evaluation or a continual assessment. Um, what is their capacity in relation to their goal or relation to the task? And I think the capacity versus demand um balance is particularly interesting when you're working with someone who has an injury or who has pain or who maybe had a previous injury is working around an injury. Um is their capacity meeting the demands of their everyday task or the task that's giving them, you know, the issue or pain. Um, but kind of just the over that is a piece of an overall assessment is what is their capacity? What are their movement strategies? Um, because there is no, in my view, you know, I'm trying to give people as much variability in their movement as possible rather than fit into a box of this is the way you should do this movement or this is the correct way to do this movement, because I don't feel like that's you don't live in that body. Yeah, right. I don't live in that body. And I always like I try to tell people, especially in their first session or their first class, like you know your body better than me. So, you know, if if something's not working for you, tell me. Um, if something is not feeling good or right for you, or um you're feeling, you know, nervous, or you're feeling discomfort, let me know. Let's talk about it. Um, because you know your body better than me. Uh, you're gonna teach me a lot about how to move with you. And then we can, in collaboration with each other, come up with strategies that work for you and that are consistently moving you towards your goal. Um, and I think there's a lot of like, I think a lot of us are doing that right in our in our practice with our clients, just instinctively and intuitively. Intuitively, yeah. Yeah, where we are, I think that we get into this um career because we want to help people. We want to help people find the joy and movement, right? Like this is like, I mean, because consistent movement over our entire lifespan is like the closest thing to a magic pill that we have as far as like fighting metabolic disease, um being pain as pain-free as a human can possibly be, right?

SPEAKER_00 38:35

Cognitive functioning, cognitive functioning for mental health, physical well-being, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

SPEAKER_03 38:42

It's I mean, it's like, yeah, we want to we we don't need to necessarily like optimize with the like cold plunge and the uh, you know, doing I haven't quite figured out.

SPEAKER_00 38:53

Like, I I keep thinking about it.

SPEAKER_03 38:56

I know. I'm not into it.

SPEAKER_00 38:57

I'm I don't know of the cold. Like, I'll do the heat, but no, thank you for the cold. Thank you to Balanced Body for making this episode possible. A home practice doesn't have to begin with a reformer, but it can. In addition to small, space-friendly reformers like the Metro IQ, Balanced Body makes innovative props, rings, balls, resistance bands, discs, and more, designed to bring Pilates into spaces small and large. Start with one piece and grow your space with your practice. Receive $20 off your equipment order of $100 or more by visiting Pilates.com slash podcast dash discount and follow the prompts.

SPEAKER_03 39:42

I think that um, you know, we we have a lot of evidence to suggest that movement um and moving consistently over the course of our life, whatever that might look like, is the closest thing to like longevity.

SPEAKER_00 40:00

So uh go back to, you know, um when you first started your training and you would go through the 34. Um, there's no way you did them all biomechanically perfectly.

unknown 40:11

No.

SPEAKER_00 40:12

Um, and and when you watch some, you know, someone doing, you know, a rollover and and there's there's that part of you that has that discerning eye, and you have a moment of uh yeah, yeah, that uh that moment. Um how do you know what to let go of and when to like go in?

SPEAKER_03 40:39

Yeah, that's a really good question. Um well, I I try to always go back to like what are that person's goals? Um, and if my correction or my like my inkling of being like, oh, I really want to correct that. Yeah. Um, but should I say something? Is it worth it? Does it even matter? Is if it moves that person in the direction of their goal, then I will say something. Um, and we will like look at it and and work on it. Um, if the person is like, oh my gosh, I am wildly uncomfortable right now, like this is not working for me. Let's figure out a different strategy. I will always say something there. But I mean, honestly, I've I've gotten further and further and further away from making a lot of corrections to someone's movement, especially initially. Um, I always like, certainly like within the first couple repetitions of a movement, I always just like let people move. It's like the first pancake.

SPEAKER_00 41:40

Yeah, sometimes it works itself out totally before you before you even have to jump in.

SPEAKER_03 41:45

Sometimes it works itself out. And, you know, um, yeah, most of the time, most of the time, I am not correcting someone's movement patterns. Um unless, let's say, I don't know, I have a client right now who just had a hip replacement. She went through all her physical therapy. Um, she had a painful hip and certain movements before she went and got a replacement. Um, and then came back from her replacement and still had back pain in the same place, which I think is a common story for a lot of people who uh get the prosthetic and then they come back, or someone who has surgery and then they come back, and you know, we're still seeing maybe that they are they have the same movement strategies, even though they have the new hip, right? Um, and so that is when like we're working on her dissociating her um femoral movement from her hip, right? Because when she does something like abduction, really what she's doing is she's side-bending, right? She's moving her spine. And so she has, you know, burstal pain, or what her physical therapist said was burstal pain. And so when she moves her leg out to the side, she's just kind of like maybe squishing that bursa. I don't know, who knows what is actually happening in there, but um, I can see from a movement perspective that she maybe could use a different strategy in that movement and she could um adopt a, you know, more uh more dissociation of her femur from her hip socket.

SPEAKER_00 43:31

Right. So then you'll go in and you'll be more specific. Totally.

SPEAKER_03 43:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 43:35

Yeah. It's it's uh it's knowing it's knowing when when to step back and let the client find it for themselves and when to when to come in and be be more specific. Um what are uh so going down the nerdy route a little bit more? Uh what's the difference between kinetics and kinematics?

SPEAKER_03 43:57

So kinematics is A description of movement, like the shapes that we're making or the directions that we're going with the movement. So, like you are going up and down with a squat, you are bending your knee, you're bending your ankle, you are um rotating. If you're rotating, you're moving in a rotational way. It's a description of movement.

SPEAKER_00 44:24

Um kinematics or joint. Exactly.

SPEAKER_03 44:30

Movements, joint directions, the directions, joint directions of the directions. Yep. And I think that it becomes really interesting in in biomechanics when we're talking about movement of joints. Right. Um, and understanding like the architecture of a joint and understanding that the architecture of that joint dictates its movement, right?

SPEAKER_00 44:51

And is and and movement potential.

SPEAKER_03 44:54

Movement potential.

SPEAKER_00 44:55

Yeah. Right, exactly. And then kinetics, how is that different?

SPEAKER_03 44:59

Kinetics is a description of the forces that create the movement. Um, so like internal and external forces. So when we talk about external forces, we're talking about springs, straps, a weight in your hand. Gravity is an external force that I think a lot of um the I certainly did not really understand what gravity does to the body and how our body resists gravity um as like a force vector, right? And a vector is just like a direction of force. So if we can think about like arrows uh coming from a force direction, like if gravity is a vector force, gravity is always going down. So that arrow is always pointing down. Right, right. Same with a weight. We're just like basically enhancing the force of gravity or adding weight to the force of gravity, maybe, right? But that weight is always going to have a downward vector. Um, springs and straps become a little bit more complex, right? Because they don't have that vertical uh vector. They have a horizontal vector or a diagonal vector. Um and then internal forces. So kinetics also describes internal forces, and those relate more to our muscles and how our muscles pull on our bones. And our muscles have a force vector as well, that um we can draw that force vector. So if a force vector for gravity goes straight down, the force vector for a muscle goes along the lines of muscle fiber. Um, and that becomes can become really complex and complicated. And something that I feel like I'm still learning a lot is that muscles don't move in straight lines. Like we can draw the, you know, um, lines of muscle fibers. Right. But I mean, even in the deltoid, um the deltoid's fascinating.

SPEAKER_00 46:59

The deltoid is so interesting. Because right, all the muscle fibers are they're not uniform, they're all different sizes.

SPEAKER_03 47:05

Right. And they're going kind of like we we draw them. And this is like the I think the very interesting thing about like, you know, talking about what we learn in a textbook and then how we actually put that on on a real body or how we see that play out in real life with people. Um in our textbooks, it's like everything in in our anatomy books is like discrete. It's like the the anterior adultoid, the fibers go like this, and the new adultoid, the fibers go like this. And and then um, you know, all these discrete structures in the shoulder. And then you look at a cadaver, and it's like the shoulder looks like, I don't know, like a hot mess. Like it's just like everything's kind of intertwined and like everything is, you know, feeding into this other structure, and the fibers of the deltoid are kind of all like like going in different directions, you know. So it's not um, and that can be different in different people. We can have slightly different attachment points for muscles in different people.

SPEAKER_00 48:08

Um, I think that blows everybody's minds, right? That it could be so so um person-dependent, you know. Be so person dependent. And and and some of it is is you know, the length of your bones and the and the you know, the organization of your bones and the way the muscles are on the bones, but some of it is how you wear your body over the years, too. Yeah, right. Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_03 48:30

Right. What is, you know, what are our repetitive habitual patterns? Um, and so yeah, when I I and people often ask if I do like postural evaluations, and I really like I I try to see someone's posture as like a moment in time for that person, right? It's a it's a reflection of a lot of different things that have to do with like, I don't know, their emotional state, maybe their environment. Um yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 48:59

Posture, posture, moment in time. And uh, but alignment, right? The relationship of the bones to each other, you know, they're not the same thing, are they? They're not the same thing.

SPEAKER_03 49:10

But I think that we can think about, and this is how I have reframed it over time for myself. And I'm sure I will reframe it again for myself over time. I love it. Give license to be open-minded.

unknown 49:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 49:26

Yeah. I mean, I certainly like I think that I feel like I'm in a constant state of like, is this really what I think? Is this really what I believe? I don't know. Like, let's, you know, let's get a little bit more, let's have a little more conversation with people who also have questions about this kind of stuff. Um, because I, you know, I'll talk to the woman who I feel like is my mentor. Her name is Brie Dumpkey. Um, she's a fantastic PhD in biomechanics, also teaches Pilates gyro tonic. Oh, I love that. She's absolutely fantastic. She her um studio is called Movement Design Lab. She also does workshops, she does mentorships for Pilates instructors. Like she is a an amazing resource that I lean on quite a bit. Um but I think the idea of alignment for me, and this happened for me as I stepped outside of Pilates and um got really into CrossFit and coaching CrossFit and just seeing how um exercise or movement looked in a different setting. Um because we focus so much on alignment in Pilates, um, without giving it this context of like alignment, but for what? Right. Um because it's I think it it is not alignment for the sake of alignment's sake, right? It's not alignment because like this is where your ribs should be. It's like what are we doing? What is what is the task that we're after that requires that alignment? And I like to reframe alignment as like task efficiency more than alignment. So many different alignments can achieve many different things. Um and there is a very, very poor correlation between specific alignments or postures and pain and injury, which I feel like is kind of the the foundation of maybe why we focus on specific alignment so much in Pilates Because we think it's gonna minimize pain and injury.

SPEAKER_00 51:52

Because we think it's gonna minimize pain and injury. Well, you know, uh, but that also speaks to performance, right? High performing athletes um don't often have the what we would call the optimal alignment related to that activity. Right. And many times they find their compensations that work for them. And then we go in and we're like, whoa, let's fix this. Yeah. And we may actually throw the game off. Right. You know? Exactly. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 52:19

I mean, you look at like um, you know, power lifters or Olympic weightlifters who are lifting like wildly large loads over their head or up from the ground. And um, you know, we might be really concerned in Pilates with someone's knee valgus, their knees that are going more towards each other. Um, and then you see like 90% of power lifters have this knee valgus moment as they come up from the ground. And we also see that they have thicker, stronger ACLs that they, I mean, and of course, like people who are on the far end of their athletic spectrum. I think we do tend to see more injuries in that population. But that's, you know, I mean, I think that is like the the far end of um when you do something that much for that long, you're gonna probably see some changes in your body. But like they also have and we are concerned with this knee valgus moment because oh, that puts the ACL in um a more prone position to being injured, right? And yet we see that these lifters have like wildly thick and strong ACLs um and that they don't necessarily have a higher instance of injury in the ACL. And so it I think it kind and that's what the the you know reconciling biomechanics with pain science is kind of like getting after is how how do we work with both of those things when they have maybe conflicting pieces of evidence or you know, we how do we frame those things? I think there's still just a lot of questions around there's still more work to be done. There's still a lot of work to be done.

SPEAKER_00 54:10

For sure. Yeah. Well, in that instance, that you know, in Pilates we talk an awful lot about stability, right? Uh lumbopelvic stability in this case, it would have been uh, you know, knee stability. Sure. Um let's let's talk about stability. Like, where does that live in your world now? And let let's let's let's talk about lumbopelvic stability since that's so big in in the Pilates industry. Um is that still a thing?

SPEAKER_03 54:42

I mean, I so it's so funny that this question comes up because I teach a weekly class that um I call a movement lab. And it's like not necessarily a movement class, but it's trying to consistently every week invite instructors to think about how biomechanics um influences what they're doing in the studio. And we talk about like lines of pull and where the force is coming from, and really just trying to like revisit these concepts over and over again. Um and I always at the beginning of class ask instructors like what's you know, what do you have questions about? And we kind of go along these themes, like this month is gonna be all about the pelvis. Um, and we talk about different parts of the pelvis and biomechanics of the SI or um biomechanics of the S tabulum. And uh one instructor a couple weeks ago was like, What about pelvic stability? I was like, What about pelvic stability? What about it? Let's talk about it. Tell me what you mean by pelvic stability. And that's what I always am, and I probably am super annoying sometimes in that I'm like, okay, but why? Okay, but why? Um, what do you really mean by pelvic stability? What are we really looking for with pelvic stability? Um and I think she like we got to this moment where we were peeling back the onion and and what she was really asking for from her client was just the simple ability to control movement when they wanted to control movement at the pelvis. And I was like, that is a really valuable thing to teach someone, right? Um, but I think that it, you know, understanding why we're asking for something like pelvic stability um is really important. So I think most of the time what we're asking someone to do is to keep their pelvis still. Right. When we say stabilize your pelvis, I think what we really mean is like, don't move your pelvis. Right. And then we can start to ask, well, why don't move your pelvis?

SPEAKER_00 56:52

And then you have to, or I would hope or why in this instance don't move your pelvis. Right. Or when what how much should you move your pelvis for against that movement and resistance or the lever of the leg, right? Exactly.

SPEAKER_03 57:07

And it's like uh, you know, a uh in in physics, like in biomechanics, stability just means the ability of a structure to return to equilibrium after it's been disturbed. So it doesn't say anything about being still, in fact.

SPEAKER_00 57:23

That's really interesting. You know, our languaging um in our curriculum is moving toward uh lumbopelvic control.

SPEAKER_03 57:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 57:30

Yeah. And and when do you want the pelvis to be still versus when are you moving in relationship to the lumbar spine and the femur? Exactly. Um uh but I did not realize that actually stability the definition by by its very definition is not about being you know completely still. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 57:52

Yeah. It's just about returning the ability to return to equilibrium. So it I think that when we when we kind of embody that definition, it invites movement and it asks us to like, ooh, how how much can you control this movement and then bring it back? Or, you know, it do you have the I think another word for it might be coordination. Right. Coordination. And that it's task-dependent. Yep, right. It's not like uh, oh, this is how it just should be in its natural state. Because when we all of a sudden, you know, take it into a different context like gate, we start to understand that pelvis has to move with the spine and you know, with the like our bodies were built for movement. And sometimes we also ask them to be still and to not move. Like if we are going to efficiently push 300 pounds of weight over our head, if we had um if our lumbar spine moved around a lot, we would be kind of like dispersing that um force before it could get all the way up over.

SPEAKER_00 59:05

Now I think you're getting to the heart of the biomechanics and the injury and injury prevention. It's less about posture and necessarily alignment, right? But more about in that movement against the forces depending on the task, how how are uh uh the mechanics of the body are responding and relating? Yeah. Is that getting close to that idea of like when we think about all right, disc pathologies, right? And if you are a weightlifter and you want to either avoid a disc pathology or manage through one, um the timing of the movement of the lumbar spine relative to the the weights or whatever the movement is. Is that does that sound closer to how you apply biomechanics to injury prevention? Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:00

Yeah. I think it's it's getting into that conversation, yeah. Which is, I think, also one of those like really kind of like there's a lot of questions in how much, how much one we can prevent injury with biomechanics. Um and there's a lot of people in the field who are like, we we can't really prevent injuries with biomechanics. We can prepare the system to meet the demands of the task as best we can. Meaning, like but that right there is applying biomechanics. Right. Yes, totally. Yeah, and that's a good point. Right. That like when we um and it I think that the distinction there is maybe that it doesn't say anything about a particular way to move. Like let's say um it's not prescriptive. It's not prescriptive, right? And and and that there's, you know, only a certain amount that we know about how a body is moving under load. Um, like let's say picking something really heavy up off the floor, like a power lifter picking up a really heavy weight off the floor, that in that maximal effort, um it's difficult for us to see how much the spine is flexing. And we can we can see that the spine is likely flexing. And yet we have a lot of maybe rules about that you shouldn't flex the spine if you're picking something heavy up off the off the ground. And I think there's a lot of questions about whether that is uh accurate, how much we can prevent it from even happening if we tried. I think so there's um yeah, there are a good amount of questions uh uh around like how much biomechanics can mitigate injury because there is this idea also about that, so that's all of like the mechanical aspects. That's the mechanical aspects, but then where mechanics meets tissue. Right. Because we know that putting stress into our system is how our body adapts, right? So, like with osteoporosis, um hot topic right now is osteoporosis, and you must lift heavy for osteoporosis. Um and who knows if I won't I won't touch on that topic because I'm probably not the best person to touch on that topic. But um the idea behind that is that we have to put enough stress into the system, lifting heavy so that you know your your muscles are contracting with this maximal effort or near maximal effort, and they're pulling on your bones, bending your bones, putting stress into the system to create these to stimulate the growth. To stimulate the growth, right? Um, and so that is true. This is how our body adapts. This is how we get stronger. Right. Nothing changes without tension. Nothing changes without tension, exactly. Um, and so, you know, kind of that idea of um, you know, our body is like a machine or something is like true to an extent if we're gonna put it in these mechanical models. But then we need to remember that we are biological systems and that we adapt and we change. And so those models are not, those mechanical models aren't perfect. Um, and they explain things kind of at this basic level, but you start getting into it and you're like, oh, but wait.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:43

Yeah, like our biomechanics for me was always always had a little bit of dissonance to it. Yeah. Totally. Because because our bodies um have mechanical elements to them, right? They have bony levers. What are what are what like there are different ways, right? There is there's bony levers, and then there's joints, and there's kinematics, and there's blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But then, as you said very very early on, there's the human, there's the biology part. Yeah. We can't ignore that. And we can't ignore that. And the and tissue, now, um, over the last, I'm gonna say 20 years, fascia has really become very, very prominent uh in these discussions around kinesiology. Um uh what is the concept of tensegrity? Because to me, that's the mechanical concept of fascia.

SPEAKER_03 1:04:38

Yeah. I um, as I was saying before we started recording, like I am not a fascia specialist by any means. I think I know very little about it in the grand scheme of things. Um and there are people who are much smarter than me talking about fascia and particularly fascia and biomechanics. Tom Waldron is a really good resource for fascia and biomechanics and the intersection there. He's got really, really amazing workshops that I've taken a few of and a lot of free resources. Um, so he would be a really good touch point for this, but broad strokes. Um, tensegrity, I believe, uh is a like an architectural term that was coined by Buckminster Fuller, maybe. Yeah. And intentional integrity, yeah. Right. Intentional integrity. Yeah, it's the idea that uh rather than um structures like you know, a building or a person being uh a stacked um compressive forces, that we are a combination of compressive and tension forces. And tension is uh pulling apart, right? And compression would be pushing together. So two. Forces there. Which in theory is what animates us. Which in theory is what animates us, right? Yeah. Like, um, and you know, I think that um I don't I don't know how that relates to fascia, honestly. Other than, yeah, I mean fascia is is all over our body. Fascia connects our, like, I mean, fascia is surrounding every single muscle spindle and surrounds all of the tissues in our body. So it's everywhere. Fascia, we it, I think there's I think there's really, really interesting questions that exist in that literature and not a lot of known facts at this moment, right? So it's like we know that fascia can transmit force, but we don't know the magnitude of that transmission. So um, there goes the bio again, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:06:54

Because so much of that is is the the the strength and the development of the tissue and the way the person is moving and which again is why it's impossible to look at somebody and say there's only one way to for that person to move optimally.

SPEAKER_03 1:07:10

Right. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, and it really like leaves space for um the individual, right? Which I I really appreciate. Um it's complex. It's really complex. It's really complex. And I think that like you were, you know, a lot of our our anatomical knowledge is cadaver-based. And and you know, when we take like a couple seconds and step back from that, we can we can be like, oh, okay, how is a cadaver different from a living human? There might be some differences there. And so studying things like fascia, I think just be studying humans, I think is inherently difficult in that way, right? Is that um, and particularly like studying the effects of exercise and movement on a human body and adaptation, like those things are really, really hard to do. And I think that we are still like we're still developing good ways to answer the questions that we have about movement, um, about fascia. Um, you know, we can we can see that fascia probably can be remodeled and does adapt like other tissues in our body. Um, but we don't really know the implications of that, right? We don't know what that means. Right. Um, we can see that it, you know, likely transmits force to other segments of the body, but how far and how much and what are the implications of that? Like what does it mean when I think fascia has like disorganized arrangements of collagen fibers, right? And so if we think kind of along the lines of biomechanics and force transmission, right, if we look at like um a tendon and as it feeds into from the bone, as it feeds into the muscle, that the lines of muscle fibers and the lines of collagen bundles in the tendon uh have a direction, they have a vector, right? Which means that they pull along that vector. When a tendon becomes um, like when we have a tendinopathy, which is just a description of like there's something wrong with the tendon. We don't know what it is, but there's something there. It is not transmitting force um as well or as efficiently as it could, uh, we see a disorganization of the collagen fibers in the tendon. And we can see that, or we can assume that that means that force transmission is not as like efficient. It's not as clean. It's direct or clean direct. Yeah. Um, and so if we, you know, apply that to something like fascia, where the collagen fibers are going in a bunch of different directions, we might just think like, oh, maybe that means that force is dispersed along those fiber directions. And honestly, this is just me like go. This is no, there's no study that I'm citing that is telling me this. But I think these are the questions that we can have as like an outside observer of what uh what does this, you know, new paper say about fascia and what are the claims that it's making? Um and you know, I think this is where the understanding what kind of like the broad conversation is around these concepts is really useful for us as movement professionals who are not necessarily like specialists in fascia and we don't need to be. Um, but understanding kind of like what is broadly known at this moment right now in literature about fascia. And that can help us um understand that the things that people are talking about right now that might, you know, on Instagram seem like fact are maybe just these really interesting questions that we have. And we can view them with a sense of curiosity rather than like um, you know, an absolute. And I think that goes back to tensegrity, right? That um it is a very interesting model to view the human body through. And there is no biomechanical model that we currently have that describes uh our body as a whole. As a whole.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:50

So that's interesting. So in biomechanics, right, we still don't quite have a modeling that that sees the body as a whole. That and that seems to be the intersection for me between biomechanics and fascia.

SPEAKER_03 1:12:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:02

Is is how forces are transferring through and through joints or through uh uh um or are relating muscle structure, uh, muscles across the structure. And then you add that to the complexity of the Pilates environment where you're kneeling against gravity or you're upright or you're and the the line of pull of the spring. Um yeah, you start to see you have a like a rich, like a really rich environment from which to make your choices for that individual.

SPEAKER_03 1:12:36

Right. Yeah, and I mean you can you can absolutely, I mean, um, I think Stephanie Comella, who's a really good friend of mine, she her whole um framework for working with spinal cord injury uh athletes, movers, is through um fascial slings. Right. And and it doesn't necessarily need to be this proven, you know, mechanistic it's it's a way it's like a lens that we can view the body through, is like, oh, that's interesting. But it's also, I think that it's really important for me at least to know that like that's not a a fact that we have been able to prove in any kind of like anatomical, cadaveric uh biomechanical modeling, but it's a neat thing to think about.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:26

Well, there's there's definitely for those who are interested, there's definitely a lot of FASHA research coming out. Um in our world, Elizabeth Larkam is very engaged. Um there's um Carlos Stecko and some of the work coming out of Italy. Uh, but but in terms of biomechanics, they there is an intersection that's that's not yet been been fully integrated, I would say. Could you agree with that? Yeah, absolutely. Um how so if you were to sum up biomechanics for injury or injury prevention, yeah. What does that what does that what does that mean?

SPEAKER_03 1:14:04

I think it means that we understanding load and load progression is uh the most important thing because um injury or or post-rehab, what I call post-rehab, what we do as Pilates instructors because we don't do rehab. Um post-rehab is just training in the presence of injury. Uh and so understanding and and the thing that governs training and progression um is an understanding of load and load progression. Right. And so I think I don't think that changes with injury. Um and I don't think that changes with injury prevention either. I think it's about feeding the system um the stimulus to increase capacity so that we can meet the demands of daily life or our goals or tasks.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:00

Oh, I love that. Uh so so say that again, feeding the stimulus.

SPEAKER_03 1:15:04

Feeding or feeding the load.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:07

Yeah. What did I what did you say?

SPEAKER_03 1:15:09

I might try, I want to write that down. So it is um giving like using load to stimulate our our capacity, our resilience to meet the demands of whatever we're doing, whether that's you know, moving like putting a glass on the shelf without pain, or whether it's doing the, you know, 20 pull-ups.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:36

Unbroken.

SPEAKER_03 1:15:37

Unbroken.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:38

Yeah. That's the part that's where you get me. Oh, that's great. Um, first I want to I want to get to rapid fire questions. Before I do that, in terms of of biomechanics, understanding the the joint movements and the load and the and and you know, for me, understanding joint movements is understanding that capacity piece, what it's able to do. Yeah. Yeah. And then and then how the load transfers. Is there is there anything that that is not optimized by looking at the biomechanics?

SPEAKER_03 1:16:10

Yeah, I think a lot is not optimized, honestly. Um, I think that so there is uh this model called the biopsychosocial model of um exercise and uh pain. I think it's mostly used in in pain research. Um, and it's like these, you know, three circles that overlap um to some extent. But uh we can, you know, rather than thinking of these three circles, the the bio part, which is the biomechanics, our tissue capacity, our previous injury, our training capacity, um, all of that that we think of as biological exists in one circle. Um, and then the psychological part of that is, you know, our beliefs, um, our sleep, our nutrition. I mean, I don't know if nutrition would fit in there, but the the psychological part of it is a lot of like our beliefs around movement, um, and the social part, our environment, right? Our social support network, um, where we live. Um, maybe nutrition would fit in there. I don't know. But these three overlapping circles that all play a part in how we express ourselves as humans in the living world and how we relate to our body. And so I think that the the biological part of it, the biomechanics part, is just like very, you know, it it is one part, but there's two other parts. Yes, yes. Um, you know, I I it is out of my scope of practice really to to say anything to my clients in the psycho or the social part, other than to maybe note like, oh, right, you just had a baby, you're not sleeping very well, and your back pain is flaring right now. Like that makes sense, right? And then I can kind of, you know, use that to help my client be okay with that, hey, this is just like a moment in time for you. Like, look at all these other factors that might be impacting how you are perceiving your back pain right now. It is really common for, you know, pain sensitivity to increase when we're not getting enough sleep, when we're highly stressed. Um, and you know, we can use these other things to help our clients uh move through these moments of biomechanical pain. But I think that, you know, biomechanics plays a part, but I think it often probably plays a smaller part than we would assume as movement professionals. But it's just, you know, we just happen to be in the movement professional part of it. So that's our lane, and that's, you know, what I can help my clients with more than anything else. But yeah, yeah. There's so much that's not optimized by biomechanics.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:09

So it's almost like the the mechanics and and and and all the conversations we have around anatomy and kinesiology and physiology is helps us see. Yeah. And the spaces we create, um, you know, uh, and and the opportunities that people have to move and experience, take care of some of what lives in those other two circles.

SPEAKER_03 1:19:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:36

Absolutely. That's great. Um, okay, rapid fire question number one. What is your definition of Pilates? Oh my gosh, this is I know it's a hard, it's a hard one.

SPEAKER_03 1:19:45

It is so hard. This might be the hardest question. I'm sure you could ask me tomorrow, and I might have a different answer. But um I don't know, honestly, like I, and I'm sure people will fight me on this, but I I really think it's the equipment. I think this is the lasting legacy of um and the through line, which maybe is changing with like this explosion of Pilates and using the reformer and other fitness environments, which I feel like it is being used in now. Um, and so maybe it's, you know, not not just the I think it's all of the equipment. I I really do think that is like the thing. Yeah, that I keep coming back to is like, okay, this is Pilates.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:32

All right. What's your favorite piece of speaking of equipment? What's your favorite? I love the chair.

SPEAKER_03 1:20:38

I love the chair because I like I've I have recently been really fascinated by the physical culture movement that was really prominent when Pilates was created, when Joseph Pilates was like coming up with these ideas. Um, the physical culture movement of which I would very much put him as a part of, was um was all about like, you know, health and wellness and like being outside and like put your feet in the grass and um all these things that were quite prescient, right? Like very like, oh, okay, yeah, like they were on to something. And I think it went in super weird directions, to be quite honest.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:22

But you're talking about the pre-war, pre, it's really um World War II, but even before that, yeah, mostly out of Europe, uh under the under the what is the the turnvine movement and then under the the moniker of gymnastics more broadly.

SPEAKER_03 1:21:37

Yeah, yeah. And I think we can see some really like interesting, like, oh, that's where the hundred shape comes from. It's just a gymnastics hollow body holds. And uh like we do that in CrossFit also. So there's the I think uh the chair is this really amazing piece of equipment because it was like this uh this the thing that you could put in your home to it was uh an early home exercise piece of equipment. And I think that's just historically, it's very interesting. Um, and I also love that it just you know challenges us in ways that are quite challenging.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:13

So the chair, yeah, the the chair. Okay, what's one misunderstanding about either Pilates or we'll say biomechanics that you wish more people understood?

SPEAKER_03 1:22:24

That I, you know, that there is one right way to do things. Um, I think in Pilates, in biomechanics, um that there are we just have to understand the the the questions that we're asking. Um to understand what the what the right way for the person in front of us is. Um so I think that probably encompasses both of those for me.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:54

That's great. I agree with that. I I shouldn't say I agree, but but I think that's a very good observation. All right, what's one habit that you do regularly that complements your Pilates practice?

SPEAKER_03 1:23:08

I strength train like about five or six days a week. Um and that has completely changed my Pilates practice. And it's helped me um, I think, allow Pilates to be what it's really good at being, which is in my view, like this um opportunity that invites introspection and interoception and like how am I moving my body? And Pilates really complements strength training as well.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:41

That's great. Um so you've mentioned a couple of of resources, but do you have any books or podcasts you would recommend to our listeners?

SPEAKER_03 1:23:51

Yeah. Um, so I I would recommend that every Pilates instructor get the um ACSM uh reference book on um resistance exercise just as a resource. Um, because it's a great collection of uh like what we know in literature about specific topics. Um, and I think it can be really useful. And it's not an end all and be all, but it's a really nice resource to be like, okay, what does the ACSM say about working with people who have low back pain? Um and I think it could do a lot to help us not be so afraid of doing the wrong thing. So that would be one resource that I would, I would say people could get. Um there is a book called A Pilates Journey, which was written by Dan Baker, um, who full disclosure is a friend of mine, and I really appreciate him. Um, but he it's it's part, you know, um exercise manual. So he has all of the exercises in there. But he goes a lot into Pilates history, like uh where did like what was the environment that this movement, this Pilates movement came out of? And um he wouldn't call himself a Pilates historian, but I would call him a Pilates historian. And he kind of talks about the physical culture movement and that kind of stuff. So I I think that's really eye-opening just to put Pilates in this broader context of like what was going on? He didn't create this in a vacuum. Like there were a lot of influences doing similar stuff at the at the same time. Um and then a podcast that is not Pilates related at all is a nutrition podcast. Um, it's called the Consistency Project. And it's hosted by a woman named EC Sinkowski. Um and what I really appreciate about her podcast is that she helps us practice scientific thinking. So she'll go through, like, kind of, I don't know, like a popular question that's really more around nutrition, because that's her specialty. And she'll break it down based on like this is the evidence that we have, and how can we think about this? And what are like the big takeaways? And I think that it just like on a weekly basis, it really helps you get into this uh skill of scientific thinking and how we can think about new information, how we can stay curious, you know, how we can really move away from absolutes, what we know, what we don't know. We have so many questions, right? And I think that's very reflective. Like nutrition, science, and exercise science are really, really similar, kind of in the place that they occupy in uh in current literature and science is that, you know, we know, we know some stuff, but we have so many more questions than we know. And I think the more we know, the more questions come up. Right. Exactly. Yeah, it helps us, and I think that podcast, she just really helps us stay in that zone of like, okay, yeah, like we don't know that. So let's like, let's try to check these big boxes of you know, be consistent with your exercise. Doesn't really matter what type of exercise you do, probably. Yeah, it just matters that you're consistently doing it. Yeah. So she's one I'd recommend for sure.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:21

That's great. Um, Cody, thank you so much. Is there anything uh tell it please tell our listeners where they can find you?

SPEAKER_03 1:27:29

Yeah, um, they can find me uh at anatomyofpilates.com. That is my website. Um you can, and I I have like all of I have um evergreen courses that live there if people are interested in kind of more foundational exercise science and anatomy. Um those are like my I try to to promote those as like reference materials. So once you have access to those courses, you have access to them forever. Uh, because I really, you know, I think that again, this is material that you're gonna want to come back to over and over again. Cause I don't expect people to learn anatomy and and you know, all this stuff at one go. So um, and then I have mentorships and classes. Um, I've really been enjoying being on Substack recently. So I write a weekly article on Substack. Um, and you can find me on Substack and at Anatomy of Pilates, and then on Instagram at Anatomy of Pilates. And yeah, that's those are the places that I'm at. And then I'm in Santa Cruz, California.

SPEAKER_00 1:28:41

Fantastic. Cody Jocel, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you so much for joining us today.

SPEAKER_03 1:28:46

You're welcome. Thank you for having me. It was such an honor and a privilege.