Can You Use Pilates for Posture Correction?

Pilates offers numerous health benefits, including weight loss, increased strength,  and even lowered blood pressure. But the benefits of Pilates don’t end there, you can also use Pilates for posture correction.

With desk jobs leaving many of us slouching over the course of the day, the group fitness instructors at Chicago Athletic Clubs are often asked, “Can Pilates help correct your posture?” The answer is simple: absolutely.

Through stretches and core strengthening exercises, Pilates can both help improve spinal alignment and reduce the pain associated with slouching.

But how exactly does Pilates help improve posture? Here are the three major ways!

Benefits of Pilates for Posture Correction

1. Pilates Stretches Help Loosen Tight and Underutilized Muscles

Poor posture is often due to tight, unbalanced muscles. For example, tight hamstrings, hip flexors, lower back, shoulders, and neck can all contribute to slouching and slumped shoulders.

Pilates is particularly effective are targeting all those various troublesome muscle groups. Additionally, the slow and sustained stretches that Pilates requires are essential to good muscular health. 

With Pilates, you reduce muscle tightness and put your body back in a good starting position to reestablish good posture habits.

2. Pilates Strengthens Key Core Muscles

There’s a reason our shoulders gradually pull forward over the course of the day. And that reason is fatigue. 

Fighting the daily pull of gravity is precisely that—a fight. Gradually, our bodies tire, causing our backs to bend and chins to dip forward. 

That’s why strength training is critical to incorporate into any effort to improve posture. Improved posture requires greater muscle stamina, and Pilates provides some of the best all-over strength and muscle-stamina training exercises. 

But the strength-training benefits of Pilates go even further. Under the guidance of skilled Pilates trainers, you can strengthen your body in safe and sustainable ways that minimize the risk of injuries that might slow your progress down. Especially for beginners, guided Pilates classes are a great way to establish safe, sustainable exercise practices.

3. Pilates Reinforces Good Posture Alignments

While stretching and strength training are significant physical steps for improved posture, the third and final step is mental. To regularly stand or sit straighter, we need to change our practices for holding our bodies over the course of the day.

Pilates classes are helpful in that they help reinforce good posture alignments. Pilates-based exercise has been shown to promote changes in habitual posture in just six months!

Chicago Athletic Clubs: Hosting Pilates Group Fitness Classes

Are you in Lincoln Park, Wicker Park, Bucktown, Evanston, or other Chicago neighborhoods and are looking for a Pilates club? Chicago Athletic Clubs offers Pilates classes for people of all skill and fitness levels.  Let our skilled and encouraging instructors help you experience the positive changes of a regular Pilates routine and see how you can use Pilates for posture correction.  

What are you waiting for? Take advantage of all the positive benefits of group fitness classes. Reach out to us, and become a member of the Chicago Athletic Club. 

Pilates instructors at our facilities will start you on your journey to improve your fitness, energy levels, and posture today!