Nowadays to see someone photoshopping their legs to look smaller can be seen as an achievement of a perfect body, however if you don’t have a strong adductors muscles it can result in a poor knee and hip stabilization. So, let’s forget about how skinny your legs can be and train them to be strong and efficient when you running, and even walking.
The hip adductors are a massive group of muscles that includes the adductor longus, adductor brevis, adductor magnus, gracilis, and pectineus. All of these, except the pectineus, are considered prime movers for hip adduction.
On the Reformer Pilates you can exercises your inner legs with Kneeling sequence with no or light spring on. After you make sure you don’t fall in the middle of the machine or pull a muscle—you use your inner thighs and core to draw the carriage back into the platform in a slow and controlled movement. I never knew my adductors were capable of such things until Pilates.
This popular exercise tones the inner thighs and helps counter the jiggle that can occur during walking when these muscles are out of shape.
This use of the adductors to keep the legs together as the legs touch each other is a key element in achieving the long and connected line of the legs that is vital to the Pilates aesthetic. The purpose is to improve muscle strength or tone in the hip adductors while maintaining trunk stability in these challenging reformer sequence.
Focusing on what’s happening inside and holding strong in your middle is what allows you to control the movements.
“What I like to always say is that we move from the inside out,” says Jordan of the Pilates technique both on and off the machine. “We get deeper than the muscles. We move from the bones outward focusing on bone alignment and how they rotate around the joint.” This type of functional exercise takes what you learn in class and applies it to how to move outside. All that core work has helped me stay strong and upright even when I’m sitting at a desk for eight hours a day. Plus, those deep core muscles (P.S. Your core is both your abdominals and back—think of it as a band that wraps around your middle) are responsible for flat abs.
Remember you can find the best shape of your legs the way you want if you make them strong enough to avoid injuries and pain as you do your catwalk during the day!
