Welcome official SPRING! And thanks to my Pilates guru, Melanie Nasser of centerAlign Pilates, I’ve got new SPRINGs to put on my reformer.

I love the way SPRINGs give us both elasticity in the stretching out phase & restoration in the recoil phase. And I’m using that in my thinking as I move from exercising lying down to getting up and moving around.

Here’s what I’m exploring, on this first day of SPRING, while I walk…

1.    Noticing my length, both in the front & back of my body.

2.    Letting my head lead. And avoiding going down instead of forward. Which means avoiding looking, leaning or pulling down, down, down.

3.    Finding my support from the ground up through my feet & on up through my kinetic chain.

4.    Leading next with my knees.

5.    Speeding up by adding a bit of swing to my arms while letting my hands “lead” the arms.

If you’re up for walking, as you go faster, you may actually feel less tired, since you can gain energy for your whole system. And walking is a whole system activity. When your foot reacts to the concrete the Ground Reaction Force from that hard surface gives back energy. And relates back, partly, to Hooke’s Law, which explains how the SPRING in a system is correlated proportionally to the load placed on it*.

Julie Pauls 4 ATLAS Posture®

*Earls, James. Born to Walk: Myofascial Efficiency and the Body in Movement. 2014.