Love your Layers

We share DNA with trees. Yes, we do. It’s a marvellous and a wonderful thing. They talk to each other, support and protect each other in their clumps of communities. They have trunks and branches like us, and grow ‘wonky’ like us to adapt to their environment. They need a good daily dose sunlight and water like us. And they have lovely layers, like us. Ours just need to be a tad more flexible, and squishy.

Yes, squishy layers are good. Go on, let it go. As my favourite Katy Bowman says, ‘There is no physiological benefit to a flat abdomen. There is a cultural one’. We want a trunk made of layers that can MOVE, expand and retract. So we can move, breathe and relax. What we can do through our regular Pilates work is learn about our layers, learn how to feel our layers, from pelvic floor to diaphragm, transverses abdominus to rectus abdominus and tone our core muscles. And tone doesn’t mean taut and tight, it means flexible, re-active and strong. We must love every one of our layers.

So, here we are in joyous January. And possibly a little plumper from leaning back and enjoying this wonderful wintering season of rejuvenating-ness. I am. Definitely an extra layer in all the usual places. I know that Pilates alone will not make that layer of fat melt away, but it can help build those better layers of connective tissue beneath.