Stop Switching It On: Rethinking How We Cue the Abdominals and Pelvic Floor
By Katie Crane, The Pilates Professional
There’s a phrase you’ll hear in almost every Pilates class, gym floor, and physio room: “switch on your abs.” “Engage your core.” “Switch on your pelvic floor.” It’s said so often it barely registers as an instruction anymore — it’s just background noise in how we teach movement.
I don’t usually share these particular articles on the Encore website but this topic is important for both clients and educators to understand, so here it is. And, if you happen to enjoy the educational side of Pilates you can find me on The Pilates Lounge Podcast and on my personal website www.thepilatesprofessional.com.au
I want to make a case for questioning it. And believe me, I am not immune to using poor cueing before I knew better. We cue to the best of our knowledge and our cueing reflects what we understand and potentially what we feel in our own bodies and we try and convey that message to the class the best way we know how. I’m not here to make you feel that your cueing is bad or doing damage or doesn’t stack up. This article is based on my own growth, learning and mistakes in an attempt to give you the tools to cue better than I did for the first few years of my teaching.
The Core Isn’t One Muscle — And “Core” Means Something Different to Everyone
When an instructor says “engage your core,” every person in the room interprets that differently, based on their own body awareness, training history, and whatever cueing language they’ve picked up elsewhere. For some people, that instruction lands exactly where it’s intended — a light, low-level co-contraction of the deep stabilising system. For others, it becomes a full-body brace: rectus abdominis gripping, obliques clamping, and quadratus lumborum (a back extensor, not really a “core” muscle in the way we usually mean it) pulling in to compensate. Either way it can be difficult for us as educators to even know how our cue is landing and it takes years of reading bodies to see the nuances of what good connection might look like (and even then I am constantly questioning my own perception of the body I am looking at)
Over-bracing has a real cost: it can increase intra-abdominal pressure unnecessarily, reduce the fine motor control we’re actually trying to build, and reinforce global gripping patterns in people who are often already over-tense through the trunk. If we over-cue, we can end up teaching the opposite of what we intend — global rigidity instead of graded, task-appropriate control. And when it comes to the core which includes the pelvic floor the question has to arise ‘how can we possibly know what’s going on down there?’ Over bracing of the PVF can contribute to a range of issues including but not limited to pelvic pain, painful intercourse, gripping hips, adductor tightness, poor breathing patterns, jaw clenching, constipation and I’ll explain that a bit more below….
How Muscles Actually Get Recruited
This is worth understanding properly, because it changes how we think about cueing in general, not just for the core.
Input-driven (feedback): when your foot lands on the ground, or you load pressure into a footbar, that mechanical information travels into your nervous system and the appropriate muscles respond — reactively, based on what’s actually happening right now.
Anticipatory (feedforward): based on past experience and thousands of repetitions of similar movement, your brain predicts what’s about to happen and pre-programmes muscle activity before the event occurs — before your foot even lands. This is measurable: research by Hodges and Richardson found that anticipatory postural adjustments in the deep trunk stabilisers occur milliseconds before limb movement, driven by a learned internal model of the body, not by sensory input from the movement itself.
In a healthy, well-functioning nervous system, these two systems are already talking to each other constantly, without any conscious instruction required. That’s the key point: in most bodies, most of the time, the recruitment system isn’t broken. It doesn’t need to be told what to do — it needs the right conditions (load, position, task) to do what it already knows how to do.
What “Switch It On” Actually Assumes
Telling a healthy body to consciously “switch on” a muscle assumes it doesn’t already know how to recruit that muscle — that the automatic system has failed and needs manual override. For most people, that assumption simply isn’t accurate, and the cue can be quietly disempowering: it tells the body, implicitly, that it doesn’t know what it’s doing. In my view, Pilates taught properly should be doing the opposite — educating and empowering clients to take control of their own health through movement. That’s exactly why our words matter so much.
There’s also a substantial body of motor learning research behind this. Dr. Gabriele Wulf’s work, who is a distinguished Sports Professor on attentional focus, replicated extensively across sport, dance, and rehabilitation settings. Her work established that directing a person’s attention externally — onto the intended effect of a movement, like pushing the carriage away from the footbar or reaching the hands to the ceiling — produces better movement efficiency, accuracy, and learning than directing attention internally, onto a specific muscle or body part. So a cue like “Feel the floor push back into your foot” tends to outperform “switch on your quads,” even when the outcome we’re after is identical.
Wulf later extended this work with Dr. Rebecca Lewthwaite who herself is a prominent scholar in the field of motor learning, kinesiology, and physical rehabilitation. into what they call OPTIMAL theory: motor learning is maximised when three things happen together — the learner’s confidence and expectation of success are supported, the learner has some autonomy or choice in their practice, and attention is directed externally, toward the task, rather than inward toward body mechanics.
All three point the same direction as the argument I’m making here: the more we hand control and attention back to the client rather than narrating their muscles for them, the better they move — and the more they learn to trust a body that already knows more than we tend to give it credit for.
Where Direct Activation Cueing Is Genuinely Justified
Now, before we throw the reformer out with the magic circle (just ask our clients how much they despise that circle of doom) this isn’t an argument for abandoning activation language altogether. There are real, specific situations where the automatic system genuinely isn’t working properly, and cueing conscious recruitment is the right tool. The common thread in every case below is a measurable, specific disruption — not just “this area feels weak” or “this person has poor posture.”
- Post-injury or post-surgical inhibition (arthrogenic muscle inhibition) — for example, post-ACL reconstruction, where joint receptor signalling actively suppresses muscle firing even though the muscle itself is structurally intact.
- Hypermobility — where proprioceptive feedback is less reliable, and people often can’t feel end-range or load the way a body with typical joint mechanics can. Directed cueing supplies information the person’s own system isn’t reliably providing.
- Chronic pain with cortical “smudging” — research by Moseley and Wand shows that in some chronic pain states, the brain’s map of that body region becomes less distinct. Here, directed attention and touch genuinely help redraw that map — though it’s precise sensory attention doing the work, not forceful conscious contraction.
- Overactivation or compensatory gripping — some people need the opposite of an activation cue: they need to learn to release and quieten an overactive muscle before another one can be recruited properly. “Switch on” is the wrong direction of cue entirely for this group.
If someone falls into one of these categories, directed cueing is a legitimate, evidence-supported tool. If they don’t — if they’re a generally healthy, well-functioning body — the better default is to assume competence, not deficit. Of course, there are nuances, we are working with real bodies with unique histories, expectations and responses so learning one thing doesn’t discount what you may have been doing altogether. This is about recognising the value of knowing the why behind what it is that we are doing and how to best achieve better outcomes.
Breathing and the Core
The diaphragm’s relationship to the trunk is far deeper than a loose functional connection; it is physically woven into the core’s architecture from its very inception. Its muscular fibres anchor anteriorly to the xiphoid process and along the inner ribs, interdigitating directly with the transversus abdominis. Posteriorly, it roots into the L1–L3 vertebrae via the crura, while the arcuate ligaments bridge over the psoas and quadratus lumborum. This fascial sheet continues its journey downward through the transversalis and thoracolumbar layers, tethering the diaphragm all the way to the pubic bone and sacrum. Rather than three separate systems choosing to cooperate, the breath, deep core, and pelvic floor exist as a single, continuous mechanical column—one that is stitched together long before we ever offer a cue.
And before I lose you to the anatomical jargon that sometimes gets in the way of us understanding simply because we are not ready to learn, there’s more…
This shared fascia means the pelvic floor doesn’t just work with the diaphragm; it is an intrinsic part of the breathing mechanism itself. While many instructors acknowledge a link, it’s vital to understand this as a hard-wired anatomical pairing. As the diaphragm descends on an inhale, the pelvic floor mirrors that descent; as both ascend on the exhale, we find the physiological basis for why exhaling supports contraction. Conversely, it’s easy to see how breath-holding or restricted patterns can immediately inhibit this natural rhythm.
There is a subtler dance happening here as well. With every inhale, the spine undergoes a gentle unravelling—a natural opening and lengthening of the trunk—followed by a settling and compression on the exhale. The breath is constantly moving the spine and pelvic floor in concert, quite regardless of whether the mind is paying attention.
This column extends well beyond the pelvis. The pelvic floor is anchored to the bony pelvis—the pubic bone, ischial spines, and sacrum—but its fascial ties to the obturator internus are so intimate they practically share an attachment surface. The piriformis, gluteus maximus, and even the hamstrings join this network via the sacrotuberous ligament. Anteriorly, the adductors and rectus abdominis meet at the pubic symphysis. It’s a literal, continuous line of force and tissue running from the ribcage through the diaphragm, down the deep core, and out through the hips and legs.
Because of this, gravity is perhaps our most underutilised teaching tool and by pairing natural breath mechanics with a client’s orientation—whether they are supine, quadruped, or standing—we can tone the deep system without ever needing to utter the word “core.” Whether a client is moving through a semicircle or standing in a split stance, the position itself is sliding and gliding that fascial line. We are loading the hips and shifting the pelvis against gravity, quietly engaging the pelvic floor without a single explicit instruction about “connection.” I remember when the idea of the very practice of Pilates changing the body’s relationship with gravity, that became the torch that carried my teaching further than any other lesson.
This brings us to a compelling question: if we provide well-positioned, breath-led movement, choosing a series of exercises that do change the relationship of the body in space in relation to gravity, aren’t we already strengthening the very things we feel so compelled to cue? I believe we are. It’s not the exercises that need to change, but our depth of understanding. The true power of this practice lies in seeing a body that already knows exactly what to do, provided we give it the right conditions to do it in.
The pelvic floor’s cohesion with the diaphragm is driven by a shared fascial map, making it an inseparable part of how we breathe. While it’s common to teach that the breath and pelvic floor are linked, we must recognise this as a physical reality: a web of tissue literally binds the two together. On the inhale, they descend in unison; on the exhale, they rise together. This is why the exhale is such a powerful tool for contraction, and why any disruption to the breath can so easily disconnect the system.
Pelvic Floor: Slide, Not Squeeze
Frameworks that Pilates instructors often lean on like Carolyne Anthony’s Center Method, the Franklin Method, and Tom Waldron’s teaching all converge on a similar reframe: pelvic floor fascia doesn’t function like a single muscle belly contracting in isolation. It’s part of a layered, dynamic sling that lifts and glides in coordination with the diaphragm and deep abdominal wall, responding to pressure changes through the trunk. Cueing a hard, isolated “squeeze” can encourage exactly the kind of gripping pattern we’re trying to avoid elsewhere in the core. It’s worth being honest that this fascial-glide framing comes from experienced clinical educators and practitioner frameworks rather than randomised controlled trials — it’s a useful, physiologically plausible model, not an established biomechanical fact in the way anticipatory postural adjustments are.
Where the evidence is firmer is on Kegel exercises specifically — and it doesn’t say what’s commonly assumed.
Kegel exercises were originally developed by Dr. Arnold Kegel in the 1940s specifically for stress urinary incontinence, using biofeedback (a perineometer) so patients could confirm they were actually contracting the right muscles. Current research confirms Kegels are not universally appropriate: they help most reliably with stress incontinence, but can worsen symptoms in people with a hypertonic — already tight or overactive — pelvic floor, a group for whom “squeeze harder” is precisely the wrong instruction. Research also shows a meaningful proportion of people cannot correctly contract the pelvic floor from verbal instruction alone (some studies put this around 30%), often substituting glutes, adductors, or breath-holding instead — without feedback, neither the person nor the instructor can be sure the cue has actually landed.
The practical implication: “switch on your pelvic floor” isn’t a cue we can assume is working, and for a subset of people it may be actively counterproductive. Awareness, breath, and load-based cueing are a safer default in any group setting, where there’s no way to verify what’s actually happening internally for each individual.
So What Do We Say Instead?
The goal isn’t to stop talking about the core and pelvic floor — it’s to stop assuming the cue “switch on” is doing the work, and instead give the body information it can use to organise itself.
Describe where they’ll probably feel it, rather than what to do. Instead of: “Switch on your abdominals.” Try: “As you do this, you’ll probably feel it through your abdominals.”
Cue the load, not the muscle. Instead of: “Switch on your hamstrings and glutes.” Try: “Add pressure into the footbar without letting the carriage move — you’ll likely feel your hamstrings and glutes working to hold it still. If you want to feel more, press a little harder into your feet.”
Explore movement. Explore movement. Explore movement patterns. Understand that the pelvis, ribcage, and spine move as one concert — and that movement equally comes from, and returns to, the arms, legs, and head. The entire body is embodied by the pelvic floor, and the pelvic floor responds to the entire body in turn.
Ask, don’t assume. “Where do you feel that when you do it?” “If you’re not feeling it where I described, what do you think you need to change — more pressure through the foot, more resistance from the carriage, or does it help to actively switch it on?”
That last option matters: sometimes, after exploring load and position, a person genuinely does need the explicit “switch it on” instruction to find the muscle — and that’s fine. The point was never that the cue is forbidden. The point is that it shouldn’t be the default, unexamined first move — and that watching and asking will always tell us more than assuming.
The Bigger Principle
If we default to telling healthy bodies to switch muscles on, we’re quietly telling them their body doesn’t already know what it’s doing. Most of the time, it does. Our job is to give it the right information — not override it.
There’s no single correct cue for every body. The work is learning to say the same thing a hundred different ways, watching closely, and letting a person’s own feedback — not our assumption — tell us whether it’s landed. Over-cueing isn’t more thorough teaching. It can, quietly, be a form of underestimating the person in front of you.
That humility starts with getting the anatomy right in the first place. Instead of seeing the core as a separate part of the body, understand it as a cohesive continuum — the bones of the pelvis suspended within a web-like fascia that gives us the very space to move. Perhaps it’s the push-pull forces of the Pilates equipment itself — the body contracting and spreading, over and over — that is core connection. If that’s true, then stillness, not movement, is the real arbiter of poor core health. And to move in every direction is the cure.
Keep learning my friends, it’s never ending