Understanding the 5 Spine Shapes in Pilates
What are the five spine shapes in Pilates, and do you need to know about all of them? Do you need to be able to do all of them to do Pilates? Well, today we’re going to talk about what those five spine shapes are and how they’re going to help benefit your practice.
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Hi, I’m Lesley Logan, co-founder of onlinepilatesclasses.com. I’ve been teaching Pilates since 2008, I got to start doing Pilates in 2005 and the Pilates spine shapes are something I didn’t actually know existed as a Pilates practitioner. In fact, it wasn’t really even something that I was taught in my first couple of training programs. It was something that I really picked up on when I started studying with Jay Grimes, who studied with Joseph Pilates. And when you actually understand what these spine shapes are, you start to realize that they’re more than just Pilates spine shapes. They’re actually the spine shapes we make in life. And the more you can understand them in your body and how they work in your body and how to connect to them in your body, the more you actually get these benefits in your life, because these spine shapes are all things you’re gonna do in your normal life. And remember, we always need Pilates so we could do our life better.
What is Pilates?
Alright, but first we gotta talk about what Pilates is, so we’re all on the same page. Pilates is a strength-based workout. It was designed to balance your imbalances so that you can have mobility and, more importantly, longevity in the life that you live. Pilates is not just something that’s done on one piece of apparatus. However, you can do it solely on the Mat only, or the Reformer only. Ideally, though, we all get to work with the Pilates system and that is what makes it so important and integral to the life you have, it can be added to anything you’re already doing. And if you want to dig in more about what Pilates is, we actually have plenty of videos that go on the benefits of Pilates and how to make sure you’re doing it right. So make sure you check them out on our channel.
Why Spine Shapes Matter
How do the spine shapes work in Pilates? Well, we’ll get more into that in a second, but I want you to think about if every exercise, when you hear the different names of them, sounds a little overwhelming, or you feel like it’s impossible to do. If you look at what the shape of the spine is, it actually can let you know a little bit about if you’re able to do it yet, right? For example, something like the Roll Up where you round forward, that might look like something you do in your normal life, versus something like the Snake on the Reformer might look a little bit scary and impossible, but if you know how to connect to the shape of the spine, then you can actually start to understand which exercises you need to get into your body to be able to perform harder exercises later. So the spine shapes may get more compounded as your practice grows, but every exercise has a spine shape, and we’ll get into that in a moment. And if you’re brand new, I have a great video for you. It’s especially for Pilates for beginners. It really goes into how to make sure you have the right form, and how to make sure you’re doing the right classes for you. Pilates body shapes are key to understanding how to approach different exercises and progress in your practice!
The 5 Spine Shapes in Pilates
Tall Spine: Boost Posture and Core Strength
The five spine shapes are tall, a tall back, round or flexion, extension, or like a back bend, right? Side bending and twisting. So those are your five spine shapes. So let’s dig into the tall back one first. This one is actually either really easy for you or really difficult, and here’s why. I’m a hypermobile body, which means my spine can actually slouch and flex and be tall and extend. It can do all the things, but tall requires me to get so much strength to actually get as much space between my ribs and my pelvis without shoving the ribs forward, because that would be extension, right? So tall back is a really challenging one. A lot of exercises in Pilates will actually start with a tall back. For example, Roll Up on the Mat, starts with your body in a tall back position on the Mat. However, a lot of people extend and that makes the exercise much more difficult. But if you can slay the tall back, you’re going to have a strong reflection. You can find tall back exercises that teach this really well. I really like Footwork on the High Chair for this, if you have access to a High Chair, if you don’t, because the backboard is there, then if you have a Wunda Chair. We actually do have a video on how to make your Wunda Chair, a High Chair, and having your back up against a platform or a wall really helps you feel what that tall back is while you’re pumping your legs, the challenge that you could do going up front on the High Chair, because that requires a tall back, but you don’t have the feedback, right? And I really like to teach a lot of spine shapes with feedback first. So I would do Pumping or Footwork on the High Chair to help you find that. I also really love the wall for finding a tall back. You can actually do your Hundred at the wall. You can do your Single Leg Circles at the wall, places where you can get feedback. On the Mat when you’re lying down, like in Single Leg Circles, that’s going to teach the tall back. It’s not about pushing your lower back down or knitting your ribs together, but it’s about taking the muscles of your center and really helping you find as much space as possible and as long as possible.
Round Spine: Stretch Your Back, Strengthen Your Core
Next we’ll do the round spine, or flexion. So flexion is going to be your Roll Up on the Mat. Obviously we talked about that in the tall back. But the actual exercise, and the work of the exercise, is the longest round shape you can make. You will also find the round spine in Stomach Massage Round on the Reformer. You can find it, I mean, it’s in a lot of things. And what you’ll also notice about Joe Pilates orders on the Mat and Reformer, you’ll see a lot of tall and flexion or round spine shapes happening at the beginning of the order. So for example, on the Reformer, you have Footwork, and lots of feedback for your tall back. You have the Hundred, flexion. You have Overhead, flexion. You have Coordination, flexion. You have Rowing One, flexion. You have Rowing Two, tall back and flexion. You have Rowing Three and Four, tall back and flexion. Rowing Five and Six, tall backs, right? Why are we doing that? Because you gotta do all of that tall back and flexion to get to the next spine shape, which will be extension. So I love to use the Pilates Spine Corrector or the C-Shaper to help provide feedback on the round spine. Because, again, like I said, with the tall back, I love for us to use equipment to find that feedback, because it’s so easy. The round spine, to me, is one of the easiest cheats, because you can pull your shoulders forward and make you feel like you’re rounding. For example, Pull Up on the Wunda Chair, a great round spine exercise, really easy to pull your shoulders and your ears and think you’re round, but your spine didn’t round at all, just your shoulders did, right? So you want to think crow the head to the tailbone. Your neck is part of your spine. Did you know that? And so is your sacrum. So how long can those get from each other while they round? Slouching is also a round spine shape. It’s not the longest one. So we always want to find the longest one. So using a C-Shaper for your Hundred or your Ab Series is a great place to find this using the spine corrector, if you don’t have a C-Shaper, they’re going to create that’s going to really help you get that feedback of that longest round spine. Sometimes I’ll also use a squishy ball to help people do the Hundred or their Ab series to help them find the right curl up, but still getting their center, pulling in towards the Mat. So give those a try to find your longest round shape.
Extension (Arched Spine): Build Strength and Boost Mobility
Extension is the third spine shape I want to talk about. As you heard me talk about in the round spine, you have a lot of tall and rounds on the Mat and Reformer before you get extension. So on the Mat, we do, you know, your Hundred, your Roll Up, your Ab Series, your Single Leg Circles, your Rolling Like a Ball, Spine Stretch Forward, and then finally, no! Then your Saw, all these different things, before you get to do extension. Why? Because facing against gravity and doing back bends is one of the hardest things you’re going to do, because it’s so easy for us to use our lower back to do our extensions. Why? Because our lower back is like “That’s what I do. I do extensions”. And Pilates asks us for the longest extension, the longest spine shape, and that means getting that extension to crawl up the upper back. If you’re working the Pilates Swan Prep on the Mat, there’s two different ones. I really like, the one with the hands underneath the forehead. The more you play with that, and not shoving your lower back into the Mat, the more you’re going to find the longest extension. And therefore you’re going to get the most out of big Swan on the Reformer or your Up Stretch Combo, right? So we’ve got to learn the longest extension first. And the great places to practice those are going to be your Swan Prep on the Mat. You also can use the Wunda Chair to do a Swan that really helps you connect your arms to your back and find that Swan. Again, if we’re talking about how do we use equipment to teach us our extensions or spine shapes, then I want you to look at the Small Barrel or the Spine Corrector Pilates Arm series. It is a supported back bend using your Ladder Barrel to do your Short Box Series, a short box round that starts around and goes into extension.
The barrel is actually teaching your spine the longest extension. And so I really love doing things like that there before I go and have you do Swan on the Reformer, without any feedback about if your spine is extending correctly, or Thigh Stretch with a back bend. Yes, that’s probably easier to do than some of these other ones, but there’s not any feedback, so it’s really easy for you to shove into your lower back. And that wouldn’t be giving us the longest spine shape, even though it’d be giving us an extension. We always want to go for that longest one. I’m going to say it over and over again, because without our long bounds, talls, extensions and the other two spine shapes, it becomes compressive and more about doing choreography versus connection. The longer you get in your spine, the more connections you’re gonna get.
Side Bend: Strengthen and Stretch Your Sides
Side bending is one of the things that makes Pilates unique to other fitness modalities. In fact, all of the side body strength work that we do is kind of the way that Pilates stands out amongst other fitness modalities. And so it’s really cool. For me, the place to learn side bend is going to be even doing a Side Over on your Ladder Barrel. Side Sit Ups on your Ladder Barrel, especially the prep one, where you’re standing tall with your legs, because you get that barrel to tell you if you’re getting long or not. I like that before you would do, for example, Mermaid on the Mat, or Side Bend on the Mat, because those two spine shapes don’t have the feedback of any particular piece of equipment, and so while they do, they absolutely are the side bend that we’re looking for. It is easy to cheat and make it about your shoulder, or make it about your ribs going to either side. So truly using the barrels to help you find that side bend.
Also on the Tower or Cadillac doing your Side Sit Ups with the straight legs can be a great way to feel like “oh, that’s where I’m bending from. Oh, that’s stacked”, right? Sides up from the Wunda Chair. Also a great place to limit the movement so you could be coming from the right place. But don’t avoid the other big side bend exercises, because that’s what’s going to help you. Always, always, always, though, ribs are not trying to touch hips. They’re actually trying to get longer, and so my favorite things to do is Side to Side on the Reformer. Not my favorite. But let’s be honest, it’s quite difficult. But when you do Side to Side on the Reformer, if you can keep both of your sides long and reach to a side, you are truly finding a true side bend. Most people take their arms overhead and then just slouch, but if you can keep wrinkle free on the bottom side that you’re bending towards while you reach you’re going to feel like, “oh, that’s what I’m going for. That’s the side bend that I want”.
Twist: Enhance Spinal Mobility and Movement
Twisting, our final spine shape is going to be the most challenging of the spine shapes. It’s also the spine movement that we lose as we get older. We start to turn versus twist. So, start to notice people at the grocery store, they’ve got their carts, and watch, do they turn to face and grab something, or can they hold onto their cart and twist, right? Because most people can’t do that. They lose that, that flexibility, that mobility and the longevity. And so the thing about twisting spine shapes is it is actually very difficult to get the feedback that I’ve been talking about with the other four. So the tall, and the round, and the extension, and the side bending, we can use different pieces of Pilates equipment to help us feel out if we’re gapping or slouching, but the twist that doesn’t how it works. So, we actually have to use our own body to help us with that. So, for example, on the Saw on the Mat, when you twist your upper body, your hips don’t get to go with you. And so what I want you to do is maybe sit with someone to their back to yours, and you guys both twist. And if you lost your hips off of them, or you pushed your hip into them, that lets you know you’re actually turning from your pelvis as opposed to twisting from your spine. If you’re doing Corkscrew on the Mat, if your shoulders come up as your legs go over, that’s how you know you’re rolling over versus twisting. So you always want to look at a twisting exercise and see which part of the body, upper or lower is still an anchor, and what can I use to feel if it stayed that way? If you can do that in your Corkscrew, your Saw, your Spine Twist, then you’re going to get the most amazing twist, which is going to make harder exercises like Tic Toc on the Reformer, or Snake and Twist on the Reformer, or the Chiropractor (aka Big Twist) on the Cadillac, more possible, because you will know for a fact that you’re twisting from your spine and not turning from some joints.
How These Shapes Work Together
Now that we’ve talked about these five spine shapes, let’s talk about how they can work together. So, as you can see and or have seen from these different exercises, some of them are at least two spine shapes, like we talked about in the Roll Up. It’s tall, to a round, to a tall, to a round, right? Honestly, the more spine shapes you see in an exercise, the more advanced an exercise is. Then, if it flips upside down and it has different spine shapes, now you’re talking it’s even more advanced, like the Roll Over. It starts tall, but it goes upside down. So, to be more advanced, you’d have to have a much stronger flexion before you can do that, right?
So how do I like to think about these spine shapes for you? If you’re brand new, definitely be focusing on your tall, your flexion and your extension. Get those in, then add in the side, bend and twist. If you are struggling with the tall spine shape, it is truly the gatekeeper to a lot of these, especially the twisting one. It’s really hard for you to gain length in a spine shape if you cannot be tall in the spine shape. And so understanding your tall back is going to be the most essential thing that you can practice. It will benefit your flexion, it will benefit your extension, and it’s going to make Side Bend and Twisting more possible. I want you to look at exercises and go as long as there’s one spine shape and it’s not upside down, you’re good to go as a beginner. If there are two spine shapes and you’re not upside down yet, then I would look and make sure, are we doing flexion and tall back or flexion tall back and extension, right? If you’re sticking with those, probably still a beginner exercise. Once you add a third spine shape, like a twist, or you put yourself upside down, that’s when you’re want to go, “okay, this is gonna be more complicated.”
Master Pilates Spine Shapes for Progress
And so what I want you to do is look at the spine shapes. Watch the videos here on this channel, they’re all free, and go, “okay, Snake and Twist, right. It starts round in a twist, and then it goes out to extension, and then it comes back into flexion. So how are my twists? How is my flexion? How is my extension? What other exercises do I do those on their own, on my hands or on my feet?” Like, think about that. Look at those. That’s why our flashcards are so great, because you can kind of turn them around, go “Oh, that looks like this. That looks like this exercise.” When you can do that, it starts to help you understand what foundational exercises you need in your practice to help you unlock the ability to do these more advanced. Control Balance off the Reformer, for example, that exercise is really more possible than most people think. You just have to have really awesome tall back, really great flexion, and then the ability to stand on one leg. Like, that’s what it is. Most people have a hard time with it, though, because their tall back isn’t great. And so when they’re in their flexion, they’re kind of weighed down on their body, and so they can’t roll off to one leg because they’re rolling off to the side. And so when you look at these exercises that look a little scary, look a little advanced, we just gotta break down the spine shapes. Go back to your practice and where you struggle the most with a certain spine shape, and build you up so that we can add those other ones in.
Enhance Spinal Alignment with Pilates Support
Practicing these spine shapes with the equipment and props is going to be the best thing that you could do for yourself. And here’s the other thing, if you’re an Online Pilates member, you can actually send a video of you doing an exercise and get my feedback on your spine shape, get my personal feedback on what exercises you should be doing to strengthen the spine shape that you are struggling with. So make sure you take advantage of that. I would love to help you with your spine shapes. But if you don’t have access to the equipment, the Mat work is where it’s at. It’s what Joe Pilates want us all to do. What I highly recommend is, if Pilates is something that you are loving, please invest in a Contrology Mat. The handles and strap are going to help you with the feedback of your spine shapes, 100%. If you can’t invest in that yet, then a magic circle is truly amazing for helping you find your arm-back connection to find that tall back you’re looking for. Using your Mat or a wall to give you the feedback and actually notice “are my ribs off the Mat or on the Mat.” We talk about this a lot in our Online Pilates Classes, we literally say, “Do you feel this part of your body on the Mat?” That’s feedback on your spine shape.
Tips for Practicing Spinal Movements Using Equipment
Okay, so using props and tools to give you that feedback is really great. If you have access to the equipment, here’s the thing, the Reformer, Tower and Cadillac, the Spine Corrector, these are going to be really, really great things, using the handles, using the rollback bar to help you find these spine shapes. What I want you to look at is, if you’re doing Roll Back on the Cadillac, for example, if your feet come off the poles, you are not giving me the longest round shape. No, you are not. Because if you were, your legs would stay attached to those poles. Because they came off, it tells us that you slouched and your hip flexors are lowering you down. So use your equipment to give you feedback. If your feet were somewhere and they’re supposed to stay there and they’re not, you lost your spine shape. If your wrists are supposed to be straight and now you feel all the weight is in them, you probably lost your spine shape, and now you’re holding yourself up by your joints, so feedback from the equipment can be really essential. If you are wanting to dig into my favorite Pilates tools, pieces of equipment, things I would buy myself, because that’s the best person to buy gifts for, is yourself. Please check out our video on best gifts for Pilates lovers.
Improve Your Pilates Practice with Spine Positions
Thank you so much for watching this video, I hope this helped you understand the spine shapes that are in Pilates. Helped you nerd out a little bit, whether you’re a teacher or Pilates enthusiast, so you can apply them into your own personal practice, and therefore apply them to your life. Start to notice the things that you’re doing around your house and go, “Oh, I’m flexing my spine. Oh, I am sitting in my side. Oh, I just twisted.” And did you feel length and space when you did it, or did you feel kind of crunchy and gross? We want to know. Put in the comments below. If you have any questions about any of these spine shapes or exercises we talked about, drop them below. We go live on Sundays at 9am Pacific Time. And I really do mean it. If you’re an OPC member, I give you feedback on your form, which means I am talking to you about these spine shapes that’s personalized to you, because all of our body types are different, and so while I can answer a ton of Pilates questions here, I can give you something that will actually change your Pilates practice if you’re an OPC member. So go to OPC YouTube to join our amazing community. Get feedback on your form and accountability in your practice. Thank you so much. Have an amazing day.