The closer our bodies are aligned to our center, the more efficient our movement will be. Pilates has a strong focus on alignment throughout all different body positions and movements. Through the use of specifically designed Pilates equipment, correct alignment is able to be progress from the safer and more…
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Pilates
Principle 3 - Spine Articulation Joseph Pilates is often quoted, but this gem sums up principle 3 wonderfully! "If your spine is inflexible and stiff at 30, you are old; If it is completely flexible at 60, you are young." The spine's capacity to support us through which ever plane…
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Pilates
Principal 2 - Axial Elongation and Core Control This principle is all about 'posture, posture, posture'. Axial elongation places the body in its optimal position to increase available degrees of freedom and increase the efficiency of your movement. It's important to keep in mind your spine has a natural curve…
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Pilates
Principle 1 - Breathing This is arguably the number one most important principle of Pilates, the one that so many people get wrong and more often than not, the major reason why people complain of not feeling an exercise where their instructor is telling them they should! After all when…
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Pilates
Many of you have probably at one point or another in your exercising lifetime trilled a Pilates class whether it was a mat class or studio session. Some of you may have felt you got a lot out of it while for others of you it may have felt all…
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Pilates
The food that we eat is digested inside our bodies and broken down into its simplest form known as 'macronutrients'. These macronutrients are either: Carbohydrates Protein Fats While each of these macronutrients provide energy, the amount of calories that each one supplies differs: Carbohydrates = 4 calories per gram Protein…
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Nutrition
Mindfulness is the current ‘buzz word’ in a wide variety of health sciences! Its influence has spread from eastern meditative practices through to western psychology and the mental health sciences and now into our everyday social lives. We know the evidence behind the benefits of mindfulness on our mental health,…
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Mindfulness
Our nutritionist Shannon spent all weekend at the Australian Fitness and Health Expo gaining knowledge from nutrition, fitness and health speakers from around Australia. Top health experts were on hand to answer questions and reveal their own training and nutrition programs. Shannon was slowly overloaded with samples and information flyers,…
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Total Health
The prevalence of food allergies in children is increasing like an epidemic. The ray of hope lies in possible new methods of treatment which could desensitise allergies in individuals for the rest of their lives. When you suffer from a food allergy, your immune system reacts to that food substance…
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Nutrition
We recently attended the Heart Foundation's 'Nutritional Myths Breakfast', to discuss nutrition myths and unravel the maze of information that is out to confuse everyone! With so much information on nutrition available, many people get confused about what's healthy, what's not and what's just a fad! The myth's we busted…
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Nutrition
In the past few decades, a scientific revolution has occurred in the understanding of the experience of pain. It's an exciting area full of new theories, hypothesis, studies and slowly emerging facts. However, behind all the excitement there still remains some confusion. This weeks blog aims to uncover some of…
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Total Health
This is not a simple question to answer! The term 'core' means different things to different people and is a point of confusion in the movement, training, muscuo-skeletal and orthopedic world! A quick Google search (which returned 1, 150, 000,000 results) gives such definitions as; "Abdominal and back muscles" "Deep…
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Pilates
Caught your self being a little more aware of your 'neutral spine' in this past week? Good! The first step to improving your posture is awareness! Hopefully if you read my previous post 'what is a neutral spine' you now have a clearer understanding on the concept of 'neutral'. However,…
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Pilates
How often have you heard the phrase "while you’re maintaining your neutral spine" ... (insert Pilates move, core exercise, breath pattern ... or any number of other moves here)? If you work and live in the realm of Pilates, or other movement based genera, you’ve probably heard this phrase often.…
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Pilates
While reading and preparing for a physiotherapy course I’m attending in 2013, the word ‘stability’ has pricked my ears more than once. It’s a word that’s recently been used to excess in health science and seems to have a variety of different meanings, depending on the flavour and context of…
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Physiotherapy
Many people have been asking me of late 'what is total health all about?', they all seem to believe it to be a philosophical ideology, or an 'alternative' therapy. I guess some of this is true, but total health exists in our western scientific medical system too, if we choose…
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Total Health
