Integrated Pilates improves golfer’s game and life

Sheri Gleason stood barefoot on the mat in the airy Diamond Head studio where Cristal Mortensen teaches integrated Pilates, a program of low-impact exercises which focuses on strength, flexibility, balance and the connection between body and mind.

“How are you feeling today?” asked Mortensen, a certified Pilates and fitness instructor who also practices trauma healing, which seeks to free people from symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder and other physical and mental stress. Mortensen provides feedback and builds awareness of how their bodies experience trauma.

“I’m feeling confident and strong,” said Gleason, whose slender body and thick, cropped hair make her a ringer for Peter Pan.

She had felt the opposite when she first came to Mortensen in early 2013, seeking to recover from the trauma of breast cancer surgery and a year of chemotherapy and radiation in 2012.

“The surgery and treatment have a hormonal effect on the body; you go through physical and emotional changes,” Gleason said. “I came to Cristal looking for a way to rebuild myself after having been so sick, tired and weak.”

A competitive golfer before illness struck, she wanted to play again — a daunting prospect after a year of no more activity than a little walking, chipping, putting and riding alongside her husband in a golf cart.

“Cristal asked me what did I want to work on, and one of the things was self-confidence,” Gleason said. “I wanted it to show up in my golf game, and since I’ve worked with her, my golf has gotten better than it was before I had cancer.”

Today, Gleason, 67, is back to winning amateur tournaments and continues to benefit physically, mentally and emotionally from her twice-a-week sessions with Mortensen, she said. Both women are Honolulu natives: Gleason is a retired psychiatric nurse, and Mortensen, 43, is a former city-and-county lifeguard who holds a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of Hawaii at Manoa. She founded her practice, Aware Aligned Awake, 15 years ago.

To Prepare For an advanced routine called hanging pullups, Mortensen talked Gleason through a pelvic curl.

Gleason lay on her back, knees bent, on a padded table framed by gleaming steel poles and overhead bars. Equipped with a trapeze, this Pilates apparatus is known as the Trap or the Cadillac.

Holding an exercise ball between her thighs to “help activate and align core muscles,” Mortensen explained, Gleason reached up and took the trapeze bar in both hands. Starting to curl her spine from her tailbone, she rolled gradually up, articulating each vertebra, until, with her feet still on the table, she had pulled herself up into a diagonal plank position from her knees to the top of her head.

She then pushed the bar up and over her head, arms alongside her ears, to increase the range of motion in her shoulders and lats, and, with the bar still overhead, rolled gradually back down to a neutral spine position on the table.

Next, with Mortensen spotting her, Gleason stood and grasped the 5-foot-high top bars of the Trap, placed her ankles in fuzzy padded straps and hung in a V shape, hands and ankles up, pelvis down.

Following Mortensen’s prompts, Gleason rose into a perfectly horizontal, face-up, plank position and gently arched her upper spine.

Lowering herself back to the table, she rested before repeating the movement. “Envision that sense of strength, and let the movement flow — think of a river that’s taking you through it,” Mortensen suggested.

This time the exercise looked effortless, almost weightless.

“That was awesome. How do you feel?” Mortensen asked when the exercise was done and Gleason stood again on the mat.

“I feel taller,” Gleason said with a triumphant smile. “I feel elegant and graceful that I can do that!”

Pilates was created by German immigrant Joseph Pilates, an athlete and sometime circus performer, in early 20th-century New York. He taught his exercises to everyone from ballet dancers to hospital patients, the latter in beds he rigged with springs, weights and pulleys, and bars.

It’s renowned for strengthening the body’s deep core muscles, including those of the psoas, diaphragm, back, hips and pelvic floor, the muscular base of the abdomen. But engaging one’s core doesn’t mean clenching or contracting the muscles, Mortensen cautioned. Instead, one should “move naturally and let the muscles follow your bones.”

Gleason performed an exercise on a sliding, spring-mounted carriage called the Reformer. Lying on her stomach with her wrists through straps attached to pulleys, Gleason lifted her chest and stretched her arms behind her. As her body glided forward in one fluid motion on the carriage, pulled by the straps, she raised her head and arched her neck and upper back.

After Gleason did the pulling straps a couple of times, Mortensen guided her through inversion exercises to stretch her spine the other way.

The session included simpler exercises, such as rolling, swiveling and flexing the feet on small balls. This opened the knee and hip joints, promoted balance and helped alleviate the neuralgia and numbness Gleason has experienced in her feet as a result of chemotherapy.

After an hour Gleason was spent.

“It’s a lot of work,” she said. “You’re concentrating, really listening, as if you’re in a conversation with your body.”

“The body has a story,” Mortensen agreed. Her goal, Mortensen said, was to help clients “let go of stress and trauma and be mindful of how your body feels and what movements make you feel good.”

“I came for physical reasons but got much more,” Gleason said. “She has helped me heal from the inside out, emotionally and spiritually.”

As the two women said goodbye, you could feel the positive energy in the calm, uncluttered studio with its natural wood surfaces, shoji screens and the sunshine and leafy breezes flowing through.