Sarah Petrich, DPT:
I love Pilates and especially equipment Pilates because it provides a lot of feedback for somebody to know where their body is in space. So there's a lot of people who love to work out, and I think part of it is that, that it gives them some sense of the floor and just some feedback into their nervous system about where they are in space. And so we can get that through a Pilates Reformer with a little less compression and less heavy duty work and still get that feedback. So I love that aspect of Pilates. But the one thing about Pilates is that it kind of assumes that you're symmetrical, and that's a very dangerous assumption because most of us are a little bit crooked. And that's okay to an extent, but the more balanced we can be, the better. So I take my postural restoration skills, I'm trying to balance out symmetry, and I can apply that to my Pilates exercise or repertoire and we can tweak little things here and there, and I can get more of a left oblique on someone versus a right oblique which is going to help and impact their right back and lengthen that out, if that's their problem. So I can add those pieces to my Pilates repertoire and combine them to get the best thing for my patients and my clients.
