Pilates for Fragile Backs

About Pilates and How Pilates can Help

What you can expect from a consistent regimen of Pilates modified for fragile backs:

• Stronger muscles
• More streamlined shape
• Firmer stomach and buttocks
• Graceful posture
• Improved circulation
• Decompressed spine
• Lubricated joints
• Sense of well-being
• Pain reduction

All this, without endangering your vulnerable spine.

Focus of Pilates for Fragile Backs

The pre- and post-surgical chronic pain addressed in this book is the kind that happens when spines are compromised by illness and sometimes the surgery used to treat such illness.

According to government statistics, surgery to relieve pressure on the spinal nerves (including discectomies, microdiscectomies, laminectomies, foraminotomies, and fusions) represent the most commonly performed spinal operations in the United States, with approximately 500,000 taking place each year.

But even for those who undergo even the relatively safe discectomy and microdiscectomy surgeries, as many as 10 percent require second or additional surgical procedures, including fusions, and continued care.

Less-than-completely-successful surgery is most often due to recurrent disc herniation, stenosis, inadequate decompression of a nerve root, nerve damage, scar tissue formation, and spinal instability. Apparently, then, even these relatively simple procedures can create or exacerbate chronic pain.

In fact, of the some 285,000 men and women who annually undergo spinal fusions, up to 40 percent will experience chronic back pain, and as many as 10 percent will actually be worse off than they were prior to surgery in terms of lasting pain.

Why Pilates?

Why is Pilates highly recommended for those who have had or may need spinal disc surgery? Unlike aerobic exercises, Pilates uses no quick or jerky motions that often lead to injury. Slow, elegant movements prevail over speed and wasted energy.

Though it shares some features with yoga, such as stretching and mindful breathing, Pilates confers less strain on muscles and connective tissues than yoga, especially where fusions begin and end, because it requires less twisting of the torso.

Also, Joseph Pilates designed his exercises to be rehabilitative – they’re great for the healthy, but they were engineered specifically for the injured. To that end, Pilates, more than yoga – or any exercise regimen – takes into account each individual’s particular limitations and offers a biomechanically appropriate regimen for strengthening and healing.

How Does Pilates Work?

The foundation of Pilates’ methods rests on strengthening and stabilizing “the core” – that is, the trunk muscles – before progressing to the arms and legs. With injured people, the method begins a healing process as a result of increased circulation to injured areas. Pilates called this improved circulation an “internal shower.” His exercise regimens for all – injured and healthy - strive to develop efficient movement patterns that increase strength, balance, and flexibility while building lean muscles.  

Before you begin any exercise program, you absolutely must obtain consent from the surgeon who performed your spinal fusion. Most people should wait a full year following surgery before undertaking a strenuous exercise program – because it can take up to a year (or more) for fusing bones to completely join together.  

Until then, warm-water pool therapy, walking (but not pounding), basic stretching, the recumbent bicycle, and the elliptical machine pose the least danger to your healing spine.

Because Pilates exercises target each person’s particular needs, we also stress that when you decide to begin this workout program you should find a certified instructor in your community and work closely with that person for a while. In this way, you will be sure to learn correct positioning and the essential foundation techniques that are the basis for all Pilates work.