Customer Reviews

Pilates for Lower Back Pain

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This is more of an instructional video that you might watch in a high school PE class once before you go out and try it than a pilates routine designed for lower back pain. It gives a few minutes of explanation for each move along with "recaps" on previous moves, but never establishes a fluid routine. This painful process goes on for an hour! DVD is a complete waste of money, try MTV pilates if you are trying to strengthen your back and stomach!

I checked this out from my library, thinking it might be appropriate for me, someone who sometimes has occasional low back pain and neck/shoulder pain.

The instructor is very knowledgeable. He goes into a good explanation of posture and theory of Pilates and completely explains all of the moves with two subjects who demonstrate, and they also demonstrate variations on most of the movements for people who are even tighter or have more severe back issues.

But this was much too gentle and detailed for me. I can pretty much do a full range of movements, whereas the people whom this video is intended for probably cannot.

Also, as noted by another reviewer, there is no "workout". The explanations are interwoven through the demonstration video, so there is much pausing between each exercise and therefore no "flow". I do prefer the workout videos for pilates that have an explanation section first and then a solid workout afterward, without pauses.

That said, I did sit down and go through the entire video one time and do all the exercises along with the video, as gentle and slow as it was. The stretches for the back are very good and my back felt great afterwards, but I certainly didn't feel like I'd done a workout.

I found this video incredibly helpful. I first used it when I desperately needed to find a way to reduce back pain which was only temporarily relieved by chiropractice interventions and severely increased with any attempt at regular exercise and activity. It helped me identify and isolate what muscles were tight and stretch them without further injurying myself. I found with this video that a lot of my back pain had more to do with tight hips and hamstrings. I had significant relief and reduction of the use of pain meds the first day. It is a beginning tape and meant for beginners. It is not a "work-out" video but demonstrates the various stretching exercises that can immediately decrease some pain and start the beginnings of learning how to strengthen abdominal muscles to take the work off the back. If you can't walk around the block without increasing back pain and feeling tight, this may be the video for you. The price of the video is cheaper than one or two co-pays with physical therapy and for me personally it was more helpful.

I won't waste your time reiterating what previous reviewers have already said about how the exercises don't flow, it's not really a workout, and the exercises are too gentle for people who are in shape but just suffer from occasional back pain. I would like to add, however, that there are aspects of this video that are really unintentionally funny. The instructor's lackeys (a guy and a girl) are particularly amusing. (What do you call the people who demonstrate the exercises anyway? Exercisers? Models?) The male lackey seems to have a room-temperature IQ, as demonstrated by the following exchange:

Instructor: "Now grab your right ankle with your left hand..."

[Lackey reaches for his left ankle with his right hand.]

Instructor: "No, your right ankle..."

The fact that they didn't do another take after teaching this guy his left from his right tells you all you need to know about how little effort went into this video.

In most exercise videos (not that I'm an expert, but we've all seen a few minutes of it while channel surfing at 4 am), the lackeys/models/whatchamacallits have a slight smile, or at the very least a neutral expression on their faces. These two have these blank, perpetually confused looks on their faces, and their eyes dart around like they're trying to understand the inner workings of the Theory of Relativity whenever the instructor speaks.

This is the only Pilates video I've ever seen, so I don't really have a basis for comparison. But if the popularity of Pilates is any indication of the quality of the program, then I'd have to think that there's better stuff than this available on DVD.

Too much talk and too little Pilates. I couldn't stand to watch this more than once.