Why Pilates Rehabilitation Works
If you’ve bounced from one clinic or method to another—trying physical therapy, group classes, or trendy workouts—without lasting relief or real progress, you’re not alone. At MVNT Studio, we take a different approach. This post will walk you through reasons why our Pilates-based rehabilitation actually works—especially when it’s personalized, consistent, and rooted in your unique recovery needs.
Your Unique Body
Our approach to movement is based on you and your previous routines and current goals and aspirations. There is a commonality with the movement we have done in the past decades of life and how it could be affecting you currently. If you were in gymnastics from ages 5 to 18 then you are more likely to have joint hypermobility and tendonitis or joint instability, specifically due to the movement patterns you trained to do several hours a week during these formative years of growth. As an adult where you do a lot less movement routines throughout the day then it can likely lead to back pain, side hip pain and worse case scenario disc degeneration more so than the average in your age group. Taking this approach to creating your personalized pilates rehabilitation means that we consider these areas of your past routines into your daily life so that we can provide the stability where it needs it most and guide your body to specific areas that need balancing. Creating the ability for you to finally deal with overuse patterns and realign you to where you need it most. Our clients feel this approach as unique and personalized while also challenging and education focused.
Supportive Strength Training
Pilates is a form of supportive strength training, different from what we typically consider in the strength training gym bro way. With the right spring settings and props pilates can focus on a low impact, eccentric movements that focus on joint alignment and consistent patterns to reinforce these alignments. Not only does it support your back as we commonly do exercises laying down it can also provide tactical feedback to clients who do not know where their bodies are in space (proprioception). This is great for postop back surgery, knee or hip replacement and osteoporosis/osteopenia clients who have a stronger fear in heavy lifting exercise.
Eccentric Exercise
This refers to the controlled lengthening phase of a muscle contraction for example when you're slowly lowering into a squat, or resisting as you straighten your arm during a bicep curl. Eccentric loading plays a crucial role in both rehabilitation and muscle development.
Controlled pilates focused exercises help stimulate the repair and rebuilding of injured muscles, tendons, and connective tissues. This slow, controlled nature of the movement allows for, the ability to increase collagen creation (especially helpful in tendon rehab), provide reduced stiffness and reduce the risk of re-injury.
These eccentric focused pilates exercises can produce more force than concentric (lifting) movements, thus leading to overall greater mechanical tension on muscle fibers, increased motor unit recruitment and providing new neural adaptations that improve overall muscle control and stability. Thus allowing muscles to stimulate deeply, it can promote muscle hypertrophy (growth) without needing to lift heavy weights.
Overall, injuries create movement patterns that often leave clients with compensation patterns and imbalances. Controlled eccentric pilates exercises helps rebuild control and coordination by slowing things down, which retrains the brain-muscle connection and encourages proper form.
How Our Studio Differs from PT and Pilates
Combining pilates, holistic health, corrective exercise and physical therapy aware procedures we create a plan and routine for you to do that helps your injury, your compensation patterns, and muscular imbalances that may be a cause of tension in other parts of your body. This combined, focused and developed work not only helps you reduce pain but allows you to reduce re-injury, prevent future set backs and plan to be healthier than you’ve ever been before!
Our MVNT Approach
A deep dive on our approach is in my previous post here. Our MVNT method in summary focuses on all your past history, your lifestyle that may increase inflammation, and your goals and movement needs day to day.
These factors in mind develop into our full MVNT practice. Involved with in person or virtual pilates based training, following client education with an at home practice to continue daily. These become the stepping stones so that once each is met in ways that pain is reduced we continue to return your body to the abilities of it’s fullest potential while preventing further pain and discomfort that may involve more corrective exercises for imbalances in your musculature. Once each step is achieved we slowly progress to the movements the spine is able to do and challenge your areas of issue so that we provide the guidance and skills so that those movements no longer become an issue!
Our goal is to get you back to moving as your best self while preventing future set backs. So if this was informative to you and may interest you in becoming a client with me. Find our studio and see us for a consultation any day.