Is Pilates bad for your back?

Is Pilates bad for your back?

Many years ago, when I was still a beginner Pilates teacher, I came across the work of Dr. Stuart McGill, one of the best-known researchers in spinal biomechanics.

And I was confused.

I had personally rehabilitated from a disc herniation through Pilates. My initial education with Michael King Pilates already emphasized neutral spine positioning, and this approach helped me enormously: first to reduce pain, then to regain full function, and eventually to return to spinal flexion and intermediate and advanced Pilates exercises.

Yet McGill was questioning some of the very things traditionally associated with Pilates — particularly repeated spinal flexion and flattening of the lumbar spine — for certain people with back pain and disc problems.

Instead of deciding that he must be wrong because Pilates had helped me, I bought his Low Back Disorders and started studying.

And this eventually led me to a much more interesting question:

What if Pilates is neither “good” nor “bad” for your back?

The same movement can be completely appropriate for one person and provocative for another. Even for the same person, an exercise that is inappropriate during an acute or sensitive stage may become perfectly possible later in rehabilitation.

Flexion itself is not the enemy.

But neither should we assume that every exercise is appropriate simply because it belongs to the Pilates repertoire.

This is why I am becoming less and less interested in arguments about Classical vs. Contemporary Pilates.

The discussion I find much more important is:

Scientific vs. non-scientific.

Evidence vs. dogma.

A repertoire is not a prescription.

Our responsibility as movement educators is to understand the person in front of us: their history, symptoms, pathology, biomechanics, current capacity and response to load — and then decide what movement is appropriate for this person, at this moment.

That is the Pilates conversation I think we should be having.