Hello. Hello everybody. Welcome and welcome back to Pilates Students' Manual, helping you get the most out of your Pilates classes. I'm Olivia. Remember, you get the latest updates about everything I'm working on by joining the community at BuyMeACoffee.com/OliviaPodcasts and on Instagram at @PilatesStudentsManual.

The Book is now available for purchase as both an EPUB and PDF file, as well as on Kindle on Amazon. You can purchase it and other podcast merch at shop.OliviaBioni.com, and you can also convert that EPUB and PDF version of my book into a Kindle friendly file by visiting amazon.com/sendtoKindle. Today's episode is about making sense of some of the anatomical terminology that you might hear in your Pilates classes. Of course, not all Pilates teachers cue the same way, so your teacher may not use all of these words. They're not doing anything wrong. There's lots of ways to ask you to do something. But some instructors do cue using this anatomical terminology, which can be kind of confusing until you learn what those words mean. It can even feel like learning a different language. So I'm here to offer you a bit of a primer or a guide to some common words or phrases that you might hear in your Pilates class. These are all words that relate to the position of the body, often the starting position of an exercise, and those words are prone, supine, seated, side lying, inverted, kneeling, quadruped, and standing. Some of these, words like standing and seated, for example, do exist outside of Pilates, and you might already be familiar with it, but here is a body position glossary for you. Supine means lying on your back. You lie supine on the carriage for footwork and you lie supine on the mat to prepare for the rollup. Prone is lying on your stomach. You lie prone on the long box for pulling straps and you lie prone on the mat when you prepare for swan dive. Seated is any position when you are sitting on your bottom. It seems obvious, but there are some variations like legs extended when you sit tall with your legs long in front of you together, like in spine twist on the mat, or in a V with legs extended long, but separated into a V like you would for saw. You could sit cross-legged or crisscross or crisscross applesauce if you're me, which is both knees bent and ankles crossed in front of you. There's also a 90 90 where you take one of your legs from cross-legged and you flip it, or internally rotate it, so that your foot goes behind you, and then open the bend of the knees to about 90 degrees. You'll see that 90, 90 seated position in barre classes a lot too. If you bend those knees from 90 90, uh, a little bit more so that your front foot is touching your inner thigh of your back foot's leg, that's called a z sit, and we find that seated position in the exercise mermaid in the Pilates repertoire. Side saddle is a position where you take the front leg of your Z sit and bring it next to your back leg, like you were sitting in a low kneeling position and then you sat your butt to one side, but your feet went to the other side. That's called side saddle. And we find that position in Cleopatra on the reformer. Side lying is in the name. You are lying on your side like you do in Sidekick on the mat or side lying foot in strap on the reformer. An inverted position is any position where our hips and heart are higher than our head. Some common inversions are shoulder bridge or corkscrew on the mat or reformer- we can do them in both places- and exercises like short spine massage or semicircle on the reformer. Kneeling is also called high kneeling or standing on the knees. We traditionally find this position in kneeling chest expansion on the reformer or in sidekick kneeling on the mat. There's also low kneeling where you start standing on your knees, but then sit back onto your heels, which offers more stability because we have a lower center of gravity than we would in high kneeling in chest expansion on the reformer. Your teacher may also challenge you with proposal position, which is the kneeling position often associated with proposing marriage, where you're standing on one knee, but the other foot is stepped forward with both knees bent at 90 degrees. Quadruped is also called four point kneeling or hands and knees. In quadruped, you have your hands and knees on the mat, wrists under shoulders, knees under hips. This is the starting position for bird dog on the mat. Standing is of course, anything when you are standing upright on your feet. Those are kind of big body positions. There's also a couple positions that are leg, no, not necessarily leg, but leg ish specific that can show up in Pilates, and those are tabletop 45 and 90. So tabletop is when your knees are bent with your leg or legs lifted with a 90 degree bend at the knee and a 90 degree bend at the hip. When you are supine, your shins look like a shelf when your legs are in tabletop. This could also be called a 90 90, because the angle at the hip and knee is also 90. So some of these positional words are contextual. If you're seated and your instructor asks you to go to a 90 90, it's gonna be more like that slightly more open Z sit position. But if you are lying on your back and your teacher says, take your legs into a 90 90, that would be legs in tabletop, just context cues in some things. The 45 is halfway between the floor and the ceiling, like a 45 degree angle. So your teacher may cue, you know, bring your legs to the 45 in feet in straps, to bring both of your legs long and about halfway down between the floor and the ceiling. Or you might bring your legs to the 45 when you're supine on the mat doing the hundred. You may also be cued to reach to the 45 if you're doing an exercise like salute, either seated or kneeling with hands in straps on the reformer. Or you might hinge back to the 45 in a long spine rock back, or lean backs or however your instructor is describing that exercise in the short box series. The 90 often means straight up to the ceiling. Your teacher may cue legs to 90 to set you up for scissors or lower lift, double straight leg, lower lift on the mat or if you're gonna start leg circles in feet and straps, they might say legs to 90 to tell you to bring both legs up towards the ceiling. Other positional words that your instructor may use could reference the shape of the spine, so your teacher may cue the shape of the spine as flexed, extended, laterally flexed, or rotated. I did some super deep dives into those shapes of the spine. So check out those episodes for more detail about the different shapes our spine makes. If you split your body in two pieces, separating the front of your body and the back of your body, anterior would be referencing the front of the body and posterior would be referencing the back of your body. I always remember posterior as another name for your tush. Um, but you may also hear your teacher talk about the posterior chain or the posterior chain of muscles, and those are just the muscles that are on the back of your body. Flexing or flexion is bending at a joint and a joint is where a bone or bones meet with other bone or bones. So, if I am standing and I bring one leg into tabletop, so in standing tabletop, your hip is at 90 degrees, your knee is at 90 degrees, and your thigh would be the shelf of your tabletop. I have flexed my hip and flexed my knee. Both of those joints, my hip joint, where my leg meets my pelvis and my knee joint, where my lower leg meets my upper leg bones and my kneecap is floating around there, both of those joints are bent to get into that position, so they're flexed. If you're flexing at the shoulder, that's lifting your arm in front of you towards overhead. Flexing the neck is bringing your chin closer to your chest. A chest curl is flexing your neck and your abdominals to lift your head and shoulders off of the ground from supine. I always think of flexion as the angle getting smaller. Going back to that standing leg in tabletop when you are just standing with both feet on the ground, that's 180 degree angle between your thigh and your torso, and then when you lift that leg into tabletop, your thigh gets closer to your chest. It was 180 degrees, but now it's 90 degrees. The angle got smaller, so that's flexion. That may not work for your brain, but that's how my brain conceptualizes it. Extension is the opposite of flexion. It's straightening the limb. The joint angle gets bigger. If I was standing with that one leg in tabletop and I lowered my leg back to the floor, I would be extending the knee and extending the hip back to neutral. They were flexed and the angle was small. Then we increased the angle at the hip and knee when the leg lowered. If the spine is in extension, that's a back bend. If you extend at the shoulder, that's taking your arm behind you. You extend the hip when your leg moves behind you. So in a lunge, the straight leg that's behind you is in hip extension, but the bent leg that's in front of you is in hip flexion. Can you see how the angle at the front of the hip on the front leg is small and the angle at the front of the hip on the back leg is bigger. A lunge is kind of like standing with your leg and tabletop in terms of that 90 degree angle between your torso and your thigh. A couple more words that describe movement. A D duction and A B duction. So I always say the second letter specifically because sometimes it's hard to hear the difference, but it's adduction and abduction. So even when I try to say it together, I'm still spelling it out because they sound very similar. But the word adduction, A D duction means moving towards the midline and abduction or A B duction means moving away from the midline, and the midline is the line that cuts your body in two, separating your left and your right side. That is the midline. So those movement words are contextual. If I was standing up and I lifted my right leg out to the right side, I'm abducting my right leg. You abduct your top leg when you lift it up for sidekick or any of those side leg lift series, because as your leg lifts up, it's lifting away from the midline. When you lower the leg, that's adducting because the leg is moving back towards the midline. When I was standing, I opened my right leg out to the right, I abducted it. When I bring the right leg back towards where it started from, moving to the midline is A D ducting, adducting. Internal rotation means turning the limb towards the midline. So if I'm lying on my back, that's supine, remember and I turn my palms to face down. I am internally rotating my arm. I turned the palm in. In that Z sit position for mermaid, the leg that has the foot bent behind me is internally rotated. I turned it in towards the midline to bring my foot behind me. Conversely, external rotation is rotating your limb away from the midline. A clam or clam shell. When you are side lying with your knees bent and you lift the top knee towards the ceiling without lifting the top foot, you are externally rotating at the hip. Just to think about that in another way, if you're lying in that same position on your side, knees bent, and you lift the top leg and the foot, the feet don't stay connected. The whole leg lifts, that's abduction. You're moving the whole leg away from the midline. When the feet are connected, you're pivoting on that hip socket. You're pivoting. Knee is opening towards the ceiling opening away from the midline. That's external rotation at the hip. When you have your feet in Pilates V and footwork on the reformer, you've externally rotated your legs at your hips. Your toes have turned out. Your heels have turned in. Your knees are bending in opposite directions. Both legs are externally rotated. I am probably missing some terms here, but these are ones that I hear a lot in classes, and I want you to feel confident when you hear those words in your classes. Anatomical terms can feel intimidating, but they're really just being super precise and they aren't anything to be afraid of. You can always check in with your instructor and ask questions If you're unsure of what a cue or what a movement word was. They are gonna be happy to help and so excited to explain it to you. Huge thank you to all my supporters on Buy Me A Coffee. Thank you so much for your continued support. I am looking forward to some coffee chats this month. I hope you all have a great couple of weeks and we'll talk again soon.