Boost Your Confidence with Pilates by Marisa Oldefest

​“Why do you walk around with your shoulders up into your ears?”

That question rang out in my head after my first experience with a Pilates instructor.
​ I’d recently been in a car accident and I had severe whiplash. I was in my early 20s and I’d been through doctor after doctor to no avail. I couldn’t work. I was in pain all the time. I’d been a ballet dancer and I couldn’t dance anymore. I decided to try Pilates to see if it would help because it was worth a shot.
That piercing and oh-so-accurate question kept coming back to me after the first class.
Why did I walk around with my shoulders up into my ears? And how was that impacting my body, my health and my life? It was an aha moment for me that made me jump into the Pilates method head first and never look back.
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Like so many people who have suffered injuries, I wasn’t feeling confident and my body showed that lack of confidence. The pain made me hunch down, and that hunch created more pain and the cycle continued. And as I walked around the world with incorrect posture, I felt smaller and smaller, which diminished my confidence even more.
I typically see two causes of bad posture: 1) someone has been injured or been through some
kind of trauma, and their posture suffers because of that; and 2) someone is hunching down to
make themselves smaller. Both of these impact our confidence level. When we stand taller, we
look and feel more confident. You’ll be amazed at how much more confident you can feel just by properly aligning your body.

Here’s an easy way to make sure your posture is correct:
● Stand up. Take a minute to feel how you’re holding your body. Take notice of your
shoulders, your ears, your back. Notice how you feel from head to toe.
● Start by aligning your foot and ankle. Evenly distribute weight on the big toe joint, the
little toe joint and the center of your heel.
● Pretend you have magnets between your two ankles, your knees and your inner thighs
to help bring your midline into alignment.
● Level your pelvis.
● Make sure your ribcage is aligned over your pelvis.
● Now align your shoulders over your ribcage.
● Align your ears over your shoulders.
● Finally, take a few deep breaths to oxygenate your body. Open your chest and relax your
shoulders.

The next time you feel yourself hunching over, take note of your body and start aligning from
your toes up to your ears. You can align and stack until you’re standing tall and are projecting a
bigger sense of confidence both to the world and to yourself. Poor posture is something that, unfortunately, tends to affect females more than males. And it’s not surprising to me. If you think about adolescence, the girls shoot up and grow before the boys do, then they try to make themselves look smaller so they don’t tower over the boys.
Posture is also learned as a child, so if your parents had rounded shoulders and a forward head
posture, you’re likely to have that, too, because kids look at their parents to see how to stand.

To complicate our posture even more, we now have an epidemic of forward head posture
because of all the devices we’re using all day everyday. When you look at your phone or you
text or you look at a computer all day, your posture suffers.
The biggest thing you can do to restore your posture and your confidence is to check in with
your body regularly, many times a day. Of course, an ongoing Pilates practice will also help.
Joseph Pilates, the founder of the Pilates Method, said:
“In 10 sessions, you will feel the difference. In 20 sessions, you will see the difference. In 30 sessions, you will have a whole new body.”

Ask yourself are you walking around with your shoulders up into your ears? And if, like me, you
are, it’s time to fix that to restore your body and your confidence level.

Check out my website and follow Peace of Mind Pilates on Instagram and Facebook. I’m
excited to meet