Shaking isn't the goal

Nice if it happens. It just doesn't mean what they told you it means.

Someone asked me a question in a mat class the other week that I couldn't answer properly on the spot.

She'd been steady through everything. Roll-downs, side-lying work, bridging. Quiet, controlled, lovely to watch.

Then we came into a deep C-curve, that rounded shape you hold through the hundred, and about fifteen seconds in the whole front of her started to go. Legs, ribs, the lot.

She looked up, a bit embarrassed, and asked if that meant it was working.

I said what I always say. It means something. It just doesn't mean that.

But it bugged me. Why that shape? She was fine everywhere else. So I went and read up on it properly, and the answer is more interesting than I expected. I'll get to it.

I'll also tell you why your lower back is sore after mat class, because that turns out to be the same story. And why the person shaking hardest in the room is not who you think.

Where the idea came from

Somewhere in the last few years, mat Pilates stopped being called mat Pilates. Now it's sculpt. Burn. Define. Hot Pilates. Strength Pilates, which is a bit like advertising wet swimming. Pilates on a megaformer with a playlist.

Go and read the websites. The tremble is right there in the sales copy. Shaking means your muscles are firing on all cylinders. Shaking means you're in the tough zone. Lagree, the megaformer format, promises on its home page that it "will make you shake, sweat, and sore."

Which is fine, honestly. That's a workout, and plenty of people love it. It's just that the same website also says, in plain words, "Lagree is not Pilates." Their line, not mine. And yet you'll still find it on plenty of signs as Pilates.

And look, I get why the shake sells. Put anyone, any age, any level, into an unfamiliar position and hold them there for forty seconds. They'll shake. First class, no training required.

It feels like proof. You can't fake your own leg going.

It helps that "Pilates" isn't a trademark and there's no national qualification behind it. You could do a course over a weekend and have it on a sign by Monday. So a hundred-year-old method got renamed after a feeling, and the feeling became the product.

So what is the shake, actually?

Your muscles aren't one switch. They're thousands of little units, each with its own nerve, and your brain brings them in batches. Hold a position and the tiny wobble in your force is that process showing through.

Fatigue makes it worse, because tired units get swapped for fresh ones and they start firing in clumps. So does novelty, because a shape you've never held recruits far more than it needs.

So the shake is your nervous system telling you, live, that it's struggling to organise this.

Useful information. Not a score.

Why the C-curve?

This is the bit I went looking for. Two reasons.

The first is plain mechanics. A deep C-curve has your abdominals already shortened, and a shortened muscle can't produce as much force. Same hold, less available. More units get called in, and more units means more wobble.

The second one surprised me. There's lab work out of the States where people held exactly the same effort, with the same muscle, at three different lengths. The tremor was significantly bigger when the muscle was short. Same person. Same effort. Shorter muscle, more shake.

It was seven people and a calf muscle, not a stomach, so I'm not going to pretend someone ran this on the hundred. But the mechanism is the mechanism.

Add the fact that a C-curve is a hold, not a movement. Shortened, disadvantaged, sustained, and for most people unfamiliar.

Of course you shake there and nowhere else.

The part about your back

There's a study where they wired up trained Pilates women doing the hundred, on the mat and on the Reformer. The muscle working hardest wasn't the abdominals. It was the front of the thigh.

That's your hip flexors taking over. It's what they do when the deep abdominals can't hold the pelvis where it needs to be. And your hip flexors attach onto your lower back.

So the shaking legs and the sore back after class? Same event.

The fix isn't to grit through it. Bend the knees. Take the legs higher. Feet down if you need to. The shake settles and the abdominal work actually gets better, which is the opposite of what most people expect.

Joseph Pilates had a view on this

He put it in writing in 1945.

Be sure NEVER TO REPEAT THE SELECTED EXERCISE(S) MORE THAN THE PRESCRIBED NUMBER OF TIMES since more harm will result than good. Why? Because this infraction creates muscular fatigue, poison. There is really no need for tired muscles.

Poison. His capitals, not mine.

He called the method Contrology. Control. A tremor is, by definition, the absence of it.

I'm not precious about this. Exercise evolves and good teachers change things. My complaint is narrower. When a class is named after what you'll feel rather than what you'll learn, the goal has quietly been changed on you. You deserve to know that before you pay for it.

So what do you do when you shake?

An exercise physiologist at a hospital in New York calls it a yellow traffic light. I think that's exactly right.

A bit of tremble late in a set, shape still good, breath still moving? Fine. Carry on.

Shake building, breath getting short, shape starting to go? Change something now. Smaller range, shorter lever, foot down. Don't wait for the count.

Shaking with cramping, pain, light-headedness, or shaking in your jaw and neck and hands? Stop. That's not your abdominals. That's you bracing against the whole thing.

None of that is going soft. Pilates should be hard. But the hard part is holding the shape precisely, for longer, with the breath still going. Not surviving it.

The person shaking hardest in the room

Here's what nobody selling the shake wants to say out loud. Steadiness is trainable. It improves with practice, and it improves reasonably fast.

So the person shaking hardest isn't getting the best workout. They're just the newest.

That woman in my class the other week? If she keeps turning up, in six weeks that same C-curve will feel quiet. Held longer. Ribs down. Breath moving.

That won't be the exercise getting easier. That'll be her getting better at it. The shake was scaffolding, and she won't need it anymore.

That's what progress in this work looks like. Not a bigger tremble. A quieter body doing a harder thing.

And it only comes one way. Turning up, often enough, in a room where someone is actually watching your ribs. Not thirty people facing a mirror while the playlist does the coaching.

That's why our classes are small. That's why there are no mirrors. It's a lot easier to feel a C-curve than to look at one.

If you shook this week, good. Now come back and let's make it go away.

See you in class,

Mel

P.S. If nobody has ever properly taught you a C-curve, that's what Foundations is for. Free, 45 minutes, and we'll actually watch your ribs. And if you're already a member, book one more class than usual this week. Steadiness comes from reps, and reps come from turning up.