Enhance your midsection with a 10-exercise Pilates routine, tailored for novice exercisers concentrating on your abdominal muscles and hips.
In the world of fitness, there's a growing interest in exercises that can help manage arthritis and maintain joint health. One such routine, designed by Mira Hassan, a renowned fitness instructor, focuses on strengthening and toning abs and hips. You can find this routine on her popular YouTube channel, Flow with Mira.
Mira encourages her followers to focus on their breath during the exercises, making the routine not just physically beneficial but also a mindful practice. The best part? This routine uses only bodyweight, making it accessible to everyone.
Strengthening your core and hips can offer significant benefits for joint health. A strong core and hips help reduce arthritic pain, improve joint stability, and prevent further joint damage. This is achieved by enhancing muscle support around affected joints, promoting better movement efficiency, and distributing mechanical forces more evenly, thereby reducing strain.
Specifically, strengthening core muscles like the transverse abdominis and multifidus, and hip muscles, decreases pain in osteoarthritis patients by improving trunk, pelvic, and hip stability. This reduces excessive load on the knees and hips, key sites for arthritis, leading to less joint discomfort.
Moreover, strong core and hip muscles stabilise the kinetic chain, which includes the trunk, pelvis, hips, and knees. This increased stability improves coordination and helps maintain proper joint alignment during movement, reducing joint stress that can worsen arthritis.
By acting as shock absorbers, the strengthened periarticular (around-joint) muscles better support the joints. This unloads the stress placed directly on joint surfaces, potentially slowing arthritis progression and protecting cartilage from deterioration.
Exercises targeting the core and hips, such as squats, step-ups, and core activation exercises, improve muscle strength and joint function with relatively low joint loading. This is vital for individuals with osteoarthritis. Mobility exercises for hips also reduce stiffness and enhance joint range of motion, contributing to improved overall function and less risk of injury.
In summary, a strong core and hips are essential parts of managing arthritis and joint health by reducing pain, enhancing joint stability, and preventing further joint damage through improved muscle support and biomechanics. This 15-minute circuit by Mira Hassan consists of 10 floor-based moves, each described with attention to good form and the muscles worked.
Training the core and hips can also improve balance, posture, and build stability and flexibility. A weak core can cause the hip flexors or glutes to compensate, leading to an anterior tilt of the pelvis, lower back arch, and pelvic imbalance. An anterior tilt of the pelvis can result in back, knee, and hip pain or injury.
Maintaining strength and flexibility in the core and hips is essential for preventing and managing hip osteoporosis, a common condition as we age. This routine is suitable for anyone wanting a slower, gentler Pilates workout.
Pilates, with its focus on core training, is an excellent choice for those seeking to strengthen their core and hips. If you're looking for a well-structured and accessible Pilates routine, be sure to check out Flow with Mira. It's one of the best Pilates YouTube channels out there.
- Mira Hassan's routine, which can be found on her YouTube channel Flow with Mira, focuses on both fitness and mindfulness by emphasizing breath control during exercises.
- Strengthening core muscles like the transverse abdominis and multifidus, and hip muscles, is crucial for individuals with osteoarthritis as it decreases pain by improving trunk, pelvic, and hip stability.
- A strong core and hips, as advocated by Mira and backed by science, play a vital role in maintaining joint health, reducing arthritic pain, and preventing further joint damage.
- Pilates, particularly the routine offered by Mira on her YouTube channel Flow with Mira, is an excellent choice for anyone seeking to strengthen their core and hips, thereby improving balance, posture, and building stability and flexibility.
