Hello. Hello everybody. Welcome and welcome back to Pilates Students Manual, helping you get the most out of your Pilates classes. I'm your host, Olivia. You get the latest updates about everything I'm working on by joining the community at buymeacoffee.com/OliviaPodcasts. Or you can follow along on Instagram at @PilatesStudentsManual. Pilates Teachers' Manual: The Book is now available for purchase as both an EPUB and PDF and on Kindle. You can purchase the book and other podcast merch at shop.OliviaBioni.com. As I shared in previous episodes, we'll be looking at the shapes that our spine makes in this little mini series on the show. One of the unique things about Pilates is that we do move our spine in all directions. Not that every exercise by itself is gonna do everything but Pilates as a system is gonna have our spine bending forward, bending backwards, side bending, and rotating. Today's episode is all about spinal extension, which is sometimes called the J curve, a back bend, cow stretch, or even the swan shape. And the reason it's a J curve instead of a C curve going the other direction is because our spine does not extend equally across all the different bones in our spine. Our vertebrae or spine bones don't actually all look the same, which means that they also don't articulate or move the same. When we do a back bend, our lower back- or lumbar spine has much more extension in it, like a greater degree of extension than our upper back- or our thoracic spine. Our upper back, if you look at someone doing a backend kind of looks flat when we're doing the backend with the vertical part of the J being like your upper spine, and then the curve of the J being the extension that's happening in the lumbar spine. And the reason that our spine bends like that is because in addition to the bones being different shapes so that they move differently, our spine also has like curves in it, right? So if you were lying on your back on the mat, your neck bones are not touching the floor, right? Our neck curves away from the mat, and that curve away from the mat is called a lordosis, which just means extension in the spine. We also have a lower doses in our lower back. There is a slight curve in between where our ribs attach and the top of our pelvis. In our upper back, we have what's called a kyphosis, which is the opposite of a lordosis. A kyphosis means that our upper spine is statically rounded a little bit, or flexed, and because of those curves, our spine kind of looks like a subtle S shape with a little extension in the neck, a little flexion in the upper back, and a little extension in the lower back. Before you panic, the curves that we have in our spine are normal and also have a very specific function. Those curves help distribute impact and just the load of our bodies under gravity as we're moving, and they're an adaptation that we have because we hold ourselves up vertically. Babies, for example, have straight spines because they don't have to hold up their trunk against gravity. As soon as we get vertical, this is just the shape that our spine makes. The S-curves in our spine are great and we don't have to worry about them. Given the neutral position of our spine having curves in it, this is also why extension looks a lot like a J shape, and also why the back bend isn't going to look evenly spread through all the bones of the spine. Our lumbar spine is doing the most extension, so it's not that we're "dumping into our low back," I've heard that said before. That's just the part of the spine that extends the most. The plane of movement that we're working in when we're doing spinal extension is the sagittal plane, which is the same plane of movement for spinal flexion. Remember that a plane of movement is like if you were cut in half by a pane of glass, and what way could you move with that pane of glass? So for flexion and extension, we're cutting right down the middle, separating our right side and our left side, which staying on that pane of glass, we would be able to curl forward like in a chest lift or a standing forward fold, or the roll up, and also extend backwards like we could curl forwards or extend backwards. That happens in the same plane. They both happen in the sagittal plane. As I shared in the last episode, the sagittal plane is also the easiest plane of movement for me to remember because of the astrological sign Sagittarius. Because Sagittarius is an archer, that action of drawing a bow back is movement in the sagittal plane and something about that, I just always think flexion, extension, sagittal plane, it makes sense to me. So for our arm, that would be the drawing the bow back. That would be the sagittal plane. For our spine, it would be cutting us right down the middle, separating our left side from our right side. Spinal extension shows up in our Pilates repertoire in quite a few places. It's in the one leg kick, double kick, swan dive, swimming rocking, and Joe's version of Shoulder bridge can get us some lumbar extension. Remember that in order to extend the spine into that back bend shape in our bridge, for it to be extension, our hips have to be higher than our knees, which in Joe's version, we are propped up on our forearms with our hands at the back of our pelvis, and the length of our forearm is quite a lot, and that'll get our hips high enough to get us some lumbar extension. In a hinge bridge, by contrast, where we make a diagonal line from our knee to our hip to our shoulders. We aren't extending the spine. We're pretty much in a neutral spine for our lumbar and thoracic spine. However, in both Joe's version of Shoulder Bridge and a Hinge Bridge, our cervical spine, or our neck bones are flexed, almost exactly the same as they are in a chest lift. We're just lifting our torso up instead of lifting our chest up. On the reformer, there's also some great extension work in semicircle, snake and twist, thigh stretch, breast stroke, rocking, swimming, pulling straps, and down stretch. So many great ways to move the spine into that extension shape. The muscles that are primarily responsible for extending the spine are what are called our spinal extensors. Their name is their job. They extend the spine. They are our erector spinae, they are our semispinalis, and other deep posterior spinal muscles. And all of these muscles run along our spine, up and down, parallel with it. When they get shorter, they pull our head, our shoulders, our upper back towards our hips, towards our butt, and that is the shape of extension. We can visualize that if we were lying on our stomach and we wanted to lift our head, shoulders, and upper back off of the floor, which is extending the spine from a prone position. Those muscles in our back body would get short against the load of gravity and our body weight and lift us into that shape. It's extension. When we arch our back or extend the spine, we're shortening all of those muscles in the back body. They're contracting and that's what's making us move. But we are lengthening all of the muscles in the front of our body because the muscles in our back body, in order to get shorter the muscles in the front of our body have to get longer to balance that. The same thing happens when we curl forward. When you do the roll up, the muscles in the front of the body are getting shorter contracting against load, but the muscles on your back body have to stretch. They have to get longer to accommodate that change in position. Extrapolating from there, if you really strongly engaged your abdominals and other spinal flexor muscles in the front of your body, you would not be able to do a back bend. If you engage your abs so much that they prevent you from moving because they're so braced, you can't do a back bend. And you can't do a forward fold if you're tensing and tightening all of the muscles in your upper back. Like sometimes if you are not a super flexible person, when you do a seated forward fold or a standing forward fold, you may have been told, oh, this is a big stretch for the back of your legs, but you might be like, actually, I feel a stretch in my upper back. You know, like it's all of that back line that has to get longer because the front body is shortening. So that is a very simple explanation of extension, but that's the general idea of what's going on when we're doing a backend. Our spinal extensors are the muscles that pull us into our backend, and they also take us out of spinal flexion. Okay, buckle up. What do I mean by that? Let's think of the example from last episode about doing a standing roll down. We're starting standing vertically, neutral spine, and we're rolling down and reaching for our toes. Our spine is flexed. We're working with the load of gravity and our body weight, and gravity is always pulling our body weight straight down. When we're standing up and rolling down, our body weight is going the same direction as gravity. Even though we're making the round shape with our spine, the muscles that are resisting gravity and stopping us from collapsing in a puddle on the floor, are our back muscles, our spinal extensors. But why? What muscles are working and what we're doing is always relative to the position that we're in. So in a standing forward fold, when our spines are all the way flexed, rolling back up to standing is going from a flexed spinal shape to a neutral spinal shape, and the action of moving out of flexion, from flexion to neutral is extension. Stay with me. Let's talk about the converse because that is also true. If we were standing up in a neutral spine and we did a standing back bend, like we're pushing our hips forward, we're looking up at the ceiling, even trying to look behind us, and we're making that standing swan shape. Going into the back bend is extending the spine because that's making that shape, but the muscles that are holding us up against gravity, because just like folding forward, there's a point in a back bend where your body weight and gravity are going the same direction. So the muscles that are holding us up are actually our flexors. When we're in a backend, what's stopping us from collapsing is our flexors. And moving from that extended spine shape, the standing back bend and then pulling yourself up against gravity to come to neutral- from extension to neutral- is spinal flexion. The muscles on the front of our body are pulling us out of that back bend into the neutral position. Now I also want you to keep in mind that it's not like a hundred percent, one muscle group is doing one thing and then they like all turn off and then it's a hundred percent the other muscle group, like there's some coordination so that the front and back sides of our body are working together, and as the front of our body is getting longer in that back bend, the back of our body is resisting that at a matching rate. If the extensors totally let go when the flexor muscles were pulling us back up, we would get whiplash because we would just be flung forward. Our muscle groups have to work together as a team, and the better we get at having our muscle groups work together, that's how we make movements smoother, and we're more coordinated and we're more graceful because there's like an elegance and an ease, or however you wanna describe it, but it's really just excellent muscle control and they're working together. The best way to strengthen the muscles that perform spinal extension is to find a way to work them against load, which is often why we're lying on our stomach when we work our spinal extensors in Pilates. When we're lying on our bellies in that prone position, it puts us in a great spot to try to lift ourselves off of the ground, which is using our extensor muscles. Get excited 'cause there's one more episode in this Shapes of the Spine series. Stay tuned to learn more about spinal rotation next, and I hope you're loving this series, learning more about how the spine moves as much as I am, because I am really enjoying talking about it. Huge thank you to all my supporters on Buy Me a Coffee. It is June. Holy moly. So there's another newsletter on the way with that option to have a coffee chat with me. I'm really looking forward to that. I hope you have a great couple weeks and we'll talk again soon.