Being a group fitness instructor and personal trainer means that a big part of my job is getting people to activate and feel the different muscles of their body. I teach people how to contract, cause tension, to a muscle and how to release or lengthen muscles. However, I have run into so many cases where my participants or clients don’t actually know how to isolate a contraction, or they don’t know what a particular area of the body feels like outside of external touch. The most prevalent of cases I’ve run into have been while teaching mind-body classes, yoga and Pilates. The simplest of examples comes from teaching Pilates; many times I warm up my class while lying on our backs performing several repetitions of centering the spine. If you are unfamiliar with this gentle exercise, you lie on your back with both feet flat on the floor and hip distance apart, knees are bent, and hands lying on the floor next to the hips. You start first by noticing the gap between the lower back and floor, which is caused by the natural curvature of the lumbar spine. This is called neutral spine. The movement consists of pressing the lower back into the floor which causes a chain of events to occur, the key is being aware of the chain. First we feel the lower back touching the floor, creating a flat back. Then we notice a feeling of the tailbone slightly pointing up as the pelvis curves upwards, but the most important feeling is of the lower and middle portion of the abdominal muscles contracting. This is creating body awareness while warming up the core muscles with an isolated movement.
On paper that sounds so brilliantly easy, yet I keep encountering the participant who does not feel that. This is when I start to emphasize breathing with this particular exercise. Since Pilates breathing is inhaling through the nose and exhaling from the mouth, with lips pursed close together to create force, we are able to, hopefully, get another isolated contraction in the abs. My analogy for this is laughing. When you laugh hard and for a period of time, don’t you find that your abdominal muscles start to get sore? We can then apply that analogy to engaging the abdominal muscles, creating better body awareness…at least in the abs.
But there are so many more muscles in the body, and breathing techniques that help engage the core muscles don’t translate well to other areas of the body. One exercise that I have consistently heard of having the most difficulty performing correctly is the lunge. One leg is stepped out in front of the body with a flat foot while the other leg is stepped back behind the body, preferably hip-width apart, and the back heel lifted. There is much balancing going on with this exercise because the front leg is performing the primary work, as the back leg is providing balance and stability. With this in mind, I sell the lunge as a single-leg squat. That usually gets the wheels turning in my participants brain. I still hear my exercise-goers say that their back leg is doing most of the work, however, and some even complain of muscles of the back leg cramping. What I learned, while working with personal training clients, is to have the client perform the exercise in a safe but incorrect way; these are performed with body weight only and while placing a hand on the wall for support. I have my client first lean forward while lunging, emphasizing weight transference to the front leg, then I ask them to lunge down slightly leaning back so the back leg is mostly weight-bearing. After this I ask my client to stand up tall again with feet still in the lunge position. Then I have my client lift the back leg, bringing that bent knee in front of the body, and ask them to partially squat. I am creating the awareness that while performing a lunge, the front leg is doing the majority of the work; the resistance coming down and the push of coming up. A single-leg squat! After my client has created the correct feeling of work in the front leg and balance in the back leg, I ask them to lunge correctly while being mindful of that awareness.
So much of creating body awareness depends on our language and searching out different visualizations or analogies. A great example of a visualization cue I picked up during a yoga training involves Warrior II pose. To get into Warrior II we first start by standing with feet hip distance apart. Let’s say we take a big step back with our right leg and we turn that foot until it is flat and the toes are slightly turned in towards the midline of the body. It is important to maintain a flat foot here, we want to keep the foot from rolling to one side. The front knee is bent about 90 degrees, the knee is in line with the ankle, and the black leg is straight. Many times people stand there not being active enough to feel work in the legs or core muscles. They are only active enough to not fall over. I tell my class that their front foot is on a boat, the back foot is on a separate boat, and these boats are sailing away from each other, meaning you are going to fall into the water. I ask my class to press both feet down, into the imaginary boats, and use their inner thigh muscles to draw the boats together. Then we create awareness of the inner thighs squeezing together, glutes contracting, and the quadriceps of the front leg contracting while feeling grounded in both feet. The back leg is being stretched while the front leg is holding the work.
These are just a few ideas for helping to create body awareness but my go to standard is by simply having my participants focus on breathing, mainly in yoga class. During the warm-up for yoga I have my participants move but guided by their breath. I tell them that when they need to inhale is when they move in one direction, when they need to exhale they move in the other direction. When we listen to the movement of the breath we are able to better align ourselves with the voice of the body. Why do we need to create body awareness? Because we can take better care of our bodies when we listen to it. The body always tells us when to stop and when to go, when to move or rest or fuel up or that we’ve had enough. This then creates balance in our life, which allows us to live in better harmony with all things.
