Spine Stretch Forward

This exercise used to confuse me until I learned to do it correctly and now it’s one of my favorites because of the stretch I get on my back and hamstrings. The key to getting the stretch is lengthening the spine up and then rolling it inward instead of flexing at the hip. It’s easy to say “lengthen the spine” but to actually execute the command is quite challenging. I like to rely on images to get the feeling here. Imagine you have a spring in your belly that connects the ribcage to the pelvis. Pull the spring open with your belly and you will feel your ribcage actually lift up which decompresses your spine. Take that feeling all the way up through the top of your head. Notice how your sitz bones root down in opposition. Start to curl the spine from the head down without loosing the open spring feeling in your belly. If your belly button starts to travel toward the floor right away you’ve lost the exercise and won’t tone your abs or stretch your spine. Your hands can slide forward at shoulder height or you can place them behind your head. If your belly starts to push out you’ve lost the open spring feeling and are now closing it, open it back up! The more you lift, the greater it feels. Use your inhale to lengthen up, exhale to soften the ribcage and curl, inhale to restack starting from the ground up.

Spine stretch forward has a lot of things that can go wrong with it. If your hamstrings are tight you may sit into your low back instead on lengthening out of it. Bend your knees or sit on a folded up towel, yoga block, or a book if that’s the case to avoid injuring your spinal disks or ligaments. Your shoulders can get out of control here and take over. Shrugging your shoulders to your ears isn’t lengthening, it’s just overworking your traps which doesn’t feel that great. They need to soften down and be held in place by the muscles in the mid back to go along for the ride. Flex your feet, firm up your legs by pressing the backs of the legs down, pushing the floor away. This will root the lower half of your body down to help lift the upper half in opposition.

What is this exercise good for? It tones the abdominals, lengthens the hamstrings, decompresses the spine, and lengthens the back muscles next to your spine. This is a great exercise to learn if you have any disc herniations, bulging discs or sciatica. Gravity is a force that we need to work against to maintain our spinal health. Remember, any forward bending exercises should be avoided if you have osteoporosis.

Push Through

Push Through is very similar to Spine Stretch Forward with an element of Roll Down. The Push Through Bar allows us to connect into our abdominals via the connection of our hands to the wooden bar and our feet on the metal poles. If we think about the Pilates Method, how Joe created the mat work first which led him to design the equipment to get people “in” their bodies, we can begin to understand the purpose of the Push Through Bar. Holding our arms up by our ears or reaching forward as in Spine Stretch Forward, often causes the upper traps to fire, muscles that are large and often already overworked. Our hand connection to the bar allows us to rest this large muscle group and bring the work into the shoulder girdle. This connection also allows us to roll the pelvis back away from the grounded feet without sinking into the back. If we do the exercise correctly, we open the spring not with movement from the arms, but movement from the spine via the abdominals.

The connection of the feet to the poles helps us “stand” in our feet with the help of the mat allowing the overworked quads and hip flexors to relax so we can move from the psoas. This exercise looks pretty simple but in reality is quite complicated. It takes a strong pelvic floor connection to find an internal lift instead of hunkering down to move the bar. The spine should lengthen up over the bar as it’s curling which feels amazing! Pilates is designed to help us breath better and you can imagine how your inhale is very important in this exercise.