Behind the Pilates Moves: Swan
Behind the Moves is our series of expert Pilates insights explaining the Pilates movements. Lauren Hilton shares her Pilates expertise on how each core Pilates movement benefits our bodies and minds, how to improve the movement in your own Pilates practice with pro tips on how it should feel, building your knowledge and understanding of the Joseph Pilates movement principles, and feeling the benefit of your improved Pilates practice.
When we attend a class each week, sometimes we're unaware of the benefits of the movements we are offering our bodies and what those mean for our day-to-day movement and wellbeing. In each edition, we'll give you the why behind some of the Pilates movements you'll be most familiar with in class.
This time we’re taking a deep dive into Swan…
Seeing that animals move instinctively and freely Joseph Pilates used animals' names for many of his exercises. Did you know in Pilates there are also exercises called Monkey and Elephant? (that's another post!)
The most important thing with Swan is to be patient and to move slowly. Many of the 120+ Pilates at Home classes in our membership include extensions into Swan.
Swan is an exercise that you may know from your mat class and it also features in all of the apparatus too. Swan is a back-bend, known in movement language and anatomy as an extension.
Extension exercises can often be our least favourite. This is often because they feel alien to us when the majority of our lives we're looking down or forward due to our computer and phone-led lives. They're also one of those movements that clients can say 'hurt their back'.
So how do you go about doing a swan so it feels good and why do we do them?
Well like I said, we'll spend the majority of our lives held in a rounded forward spine posture due to the nature of our jobs and lifestyles, as we get older the more this happens the weaker the muscles in the back of our body become. Swans and spine extensions help to keep the muscles in the back of our body strong and balanced which will improve not only our posture but also our ability to breathe better.
Swans and spine extensions help to keep the muscles in the back of our body strong and balanced.
Your swan might look different to your class neighbour, no big deal, we're not in class to copy a shape but rather to explore by feeling and listening.
For a Swan to feel good you'll want your spine to be warm, it's why it'll never feature as the first exercise in any class. The idea is that all vertebrae move and that nothing feels compressed along the way, this is why you'll hear cues such as notice the top of your head, feel your hip bones lifting up the front of your body, press the hands into the ground - all cues to make you think about lifting against up and gravity and not collapsing into it.
The most important thing is to be patient and to move slowly, muscles take time to adapt and strengthen and you might stay with a mini-extension rather than a full swan but your body will still reap all of the benefits of these extension movements :-)
Muscles take time to adapt and strengthen and you might stay with a mini-extension before moving towards full swan.
Photo credit: Florence Fox Photography
