More than normal, aim adventure!

What I want you to understand during my Pilates sessions

In a group or private session, with or without Pilates apparatus, when I teach movement with this method, there are unspoken messages and direct ones about how crucial is variability in your physical practice and why you should aim more than the baseline.

Baseline= Normal

Since I read David Attenborough's book " A life in our planet" there is a term that is stuck in my head:

-Shifting baseline syndrome- It's the tendency for the concept of what is "normal" or "natural" to change over time due to the experience of subsequent generations. In his book, it is a term used to describe our own capacity for forget, over generations, how biodiverse a natural environment should be. Applying this term to what is now considered normal movement for humans: sit most of the day, experience more through screens than interacting with the environment, exercise with less space to move in cramped rooms instead of outside or in nature. Use machines to move as the fastest way to engage in a physical activity. For these and many more reasons, I invite you to aim more than normal, let's aim more real adventures.

I want to share a hard truth that helped me to open my options for aiming resilient health: If you are JUST doing Pilates, you are getting good at precisely just that. Don't get me wrong, this method has a fair amount of benefits and reasons why is a great promoter of health. It also needs time to leave a footprint in the person who practices it. But the important question is: Are you actually learning to integrate what you've embodied to other physical activities or to isolate your practice as studio time only? In more simple words... Where/when are you challenging your Pilates practice? Are you lifting heavy with your foot grounding awareness? Are you sequentially coordinated and powerful if you attempt to rotate your torso with speed? Can you catch yourself rolling out of bed? Are you hanging from trees? Or are you just doing these actions with Pilates machines or props?

If you practice for a long while, the Pilates method (learned from any school/teacher that is based on Joseph's Pilates repertoire) you get good at:

• Controlling movement in controlled spaces

• Learning what is correct and incorrect with your teacher's perspective

• Following commands and adapting to what the teacher wants from you

• Slow down and appreciate the details in movement

• Understanding the concept of opposition of mechanical forces

• Embodying exercises and relate them with language in memory

• Focus on your individual experience while moving

• Disliking being wrong, very little room for failure

• Simple movement patterns that involve 2 planes of motion

• Resilient mind to continue because of changes in movement and intensity

But you are not getting good at:

• Controlling your movement in unpredictable scenarios or environments

• Learning how to reframe what is correct and incorrect through your perspective

• Receive guidance that requires responsibility on your side to resolve the outcome

• Pace up a slow movement to actually know if control indeed exists

• Applying the concept of opposition of mechanical forces to different movement capacities

• Merge what has been embodied with other physical human actions, remove the language

• Focus in collective experience while moving

• Liking being wrong as part of a learning process

• Complex movement patterns that involve 3 planes of motion

• Resilient mind to continue even when movement and intensity doesn't change

So how can you be better at the second list? Move outside the expected and move outdoors.

If you are a Pilates lover, then you also know that J.Pilates philosophy is rooted on being outdoors and take movement as a free pass for interacting with the world. As he recommends in his book Return to Life through Controllogy "By all means never fail to get all the sunshine and fresh air that you can. Do not fear the cold of winter" . He was actually boxing, lifting weights, practicing jiujitsu, acrobatics and skiing. So there is nothing new here is more like a reminder of how this is crucial but we forget. Again, this is not to discourage you to keep up with your progress in Pilates apparatus, is more a reframing what matters the most. Which is increase mental and physical confidence to engage in activities that require effort but the human body is made for and benefits from them. There are little micro adventures to take and all the lists points covered here are considered during any of my sessions. Let's shift the baseline syndrome towards daring to live more experiences outside the screens or indoor spaces again. Do you think is worth it? Share with me which adventurous activity is in your mind.