This is an open letter to my service industry compatriots. I bet your body hurts, mine does too. We spend a lot of our time beating our bodies up taking care of the needs of others – literally serving our fellow man. Our career depends on our physical well being completely. Very few places offer the type of benefits that pay for a sick day or PTO. If you are sick or injured and you can’t work you are not paid. Simple as that. You are wholly dependent on your body as a service industry professional. You must be on your feet for many hours at a time. You must be able to use your voice and fingers and hands and face – what I’m saying is it’s physically taxing on everything.

All that twisting, bending, schleping things up and down – you get bruises on you and have no idea how they got there! It’s because we are always in the middle of twelve things ESPECIALLY during food service. We don’t have time to think about proper movement and muscle engagement and careful foot placement. So this is where regular exercise comes in and of course I am partial to Pilates exercise so I am going to highlight that.

However I am a BIG proponent of any type of exercise where you: a. get your heart beating without further exhausting your tired body (with great form) b. strengthen your body without further exhausting it (with great form) and c. stretch your body in a gentle, sustainable, non-exhausting way (don’t worry about form as long as you’re getting a comfortable sustainable stretch). That being said – if you are tired and your body needs to rest by all MEANS give it a rest!

So allow me to begin with your head and shoulders and arms and hands. We are all forward facing beings so we use our arms and hands a lot. We curl our shoulders forward and up toward our ears. This is compounded by the work we do carrying lots of things to and fro, again without much thought to our bodies. We also tend to wrench our shoulders closer to our ears when we are stressed and hold our breath. In fact are you doing that right now? Are you holding your breath? Are your shoulders up near your ears?

We over use our shoulders, biceps, wrists, hands, fingers and chest so we need to retrain our supporting muscle groups to balance ourselves out and avoid over use injuries. Of course the best way to do this? Pilates! In Pilates we train you to continue breathing even if you are performing a stressful movement. Even if you are concentrating really, really hard. This will of course translate over to your every day life so that when you are in the weeds during the stress of service (or, you know, stress from pretty much anything else) you will automatically breathe.

We also focus on abdominal engagement while continuing to breathe <more on this at the lateral breathing blog https://wordpress.com/block-editor/post/alignrochester.wordpress.com?jetpack-copy=187>. Pilates is performed laying down so you start out in an unstressed position able to concentrate on your own body. In Pilates we focus on strengthening our triceps and using the back of our arms and shoulders as opposed to the top. This in turn strengthens the back and triceps and also provides a stretch in the chest which is usually slightly caved-in due to our default posture. It also gets stress out of the neck. If you pull your shoulders up to your ears your neck is inevitably involved in the process (again, are you doing that right now?!). We also use our WHOLE arm in our Pilates practice, this takes stress out of our fingers, wrists and hands.

The other area we tend to stress a lot is our lower back. I’ve had a lot of clients who automatically engage the lower back no matter what. This is usually an unconscious action which sometimes stems from a previous injury. However because our gleutus maximus is a large muscle we tend to over use it. In fact are you squeezing your butt right now? In Pilates you learn how to engage your lower abdominals which will support your lower back. You also learn how to increase mobility in the lower back while it’s fully supported by your abdominals. Finding and using these lower abdominal muscles in turn fire the rest of your abdominal layers and provide strong internal support for your entire back. In addition to that in Pilates we stretch the hips – which also lend themselves to back pain when tight. We then work to strengthen the auxiliary gleutal muscles, the medius and minimus, to stop over stressing the already over stressed maximus.

In Pilates we are obsessed with posture. This makes sense since we want to perform movements that build muscle in correct alignment. This in turn will help make maintaining good posture not only easier but automatic. You train yourself to recognize what good posture FEELS like so that when you’re not in front of someone who can correct it you’ll still be maintaining it. This in turn puts less stress on your joints and requires less energy to move. The less energy you waste the longer you can continue to work on your feet without fatigue. The better your posture, the longer you can work on your feet without pain or injury. The more you can engage your abdominals the less stress you put on your joints and you will have less pain in them.

So service industry friends take care of yourselves. If you need help let me know – I would love to help you take care of you.