Abstract
BackgroundCurrently there are campaigns to raise the awareness of the need to practice physical exercise with several objectives, mainly as a preventive measure. The Pilates method is a form of therapeutic exercise for maintaining and improving health. However, despite being popular, there is still no scientific evidence on the standardization and progression of the method. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to develop a protocol to monitor the progression of daily Pilates loads between the basic, intermediate, and advanced levels, as well as to analyze the effects of the method on psychometric, cardiorespiratory, and autonomic measures.Methods/designIn total, 54 healthy men underwent 36 sessions of Pilates mat work. Before each training session, cardiorespiratory measures, pain (visual analogue scale), and a psychometric questionnaire were collected. Heart rate (HR), subjective perception of effort (SPE), and RR intervals were measured during the sessions and used later in the analysis of the progression of training load by monitoring the internal training load and heart rate variability. At the end of the sessions, cardiorespiratory measures, the visual analogue scale, and the psychometric questionnaire were measured again. After 15 min of rest, the final HR measurement was made and the participants noted the effort on the SPE scale. The psychometric, cardiorespiratory, and autonomic measures were evaluated before and after each of the 36 training sessions.DiscussionThis is a parallel randomized clinical trial of standardized Pilates training, with the aim of estimating training loads and measuring the efficacy of Pilates through clinical, cardiorespiratory, and autonomic outcomes. The protocol can easily be reproduced and could be used to support professionals in prescribing the method.Trial registrationClinicalTrials.gov, NCT03232866. Registered on 28 July 2017.
Highlights
There are campaigns to raise the awareness of the need to practice physical exercise with several objectives, mainly as a preventive measure
Individuals who suffered from a musculoskeletal injury during training, those who attended less than 85% of training sessions, those who failed to progress between the three levels of the Pilates method, those who were unable to respond adequately to subjective scales, and those with errors in the captured RR intervals were excluded from the study
Statistical analysis Descriptive statistics will be used, and the results presented as means, errors, standard deviations, percentages, and absolute numbers
Summary
There are campaigns to raise the awareness of the need to practice physical exercise with several objectives, mainly as a preventive measure. The methodological quality is low, which demonstrates the lack of standardization of the method and the load progression as a form of physical. The Pilates method is becoming more widespread and has shown promising clinical and functional outcomes in rehabilitation [10, 11], quality clinical trials are needed to analyze the intensity of the training. The results of such trials may offer greater support for tools that can assist in the prescription and load progression of Pilates practice, while demonstrating the effects of the method on the cardiovascular system and autonomic control
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