Functional Body Awareness from the Beginning Until Today – Fixing Scoliosis through PBT Exercises.

By: Carolina Celeste Delfino

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From the beginning until today. 

Physical body background issues 

First, allow me to introduce myself; my name is Carolina Celeste Delfino and I was born in 1978 (39yrs, today). I was diagnosed with asthma and severe food allergy at the age of 3 months then, and scoliosis at the age of 4 years including pectus excavatum. Also, I suffered a lot of pain in my knees (maybe because of the flat feet and ankle issues). Because of all of this, I was unable to perform any workout, nor activity including any body movement. 

By the age of 17 years old, my parents started to find out about spine surgery because the doctors suggested that. Luckily, I found a chiropractor that was able to balance my hips and that stopped the spine curve to be more severe. This professional started to work with my spine trying to align it but every time he aligned any vertebra another one slipped to another side. So, it was something about come and forward over and over. Even though I had these symptoms, I was suggested to start Aikido to improve my posture and asthma so, at the age of 19 (with pain in my back and asthma) I started Aikido. That was the beginning of body awareness for me.

I still had scoliosis with the same degrees and because of the corticoids I started to take by the age of 10, I got Cushing syndrome and I gained weight. My clothes didn’t fit me. I gained 10kg in 2 weeks and felt so tired and sad every day. After many attempts and frustrations, I just let it go and keep on my training without any improvement in my scoliosis. 

I kept practising and improving even though my posture was not so good but, I was able to compensate in order to get the movement but at this time I was getting notice of that. I was knowing what my body was doing in a certain spot. I was accepting my body and recognizing how it worked. I was becoming self-conscious of breathing and movement. 

Breaking point 

On 2009, I got a very severe asthma attack and went in a coma for 10 days and spent 22 days in intensive care at the hospital. When I was able to return to my home, all of my muscles were gone as I couldn’t eat during the interment. I was not able to stay up nor walk because my strength was gone. So my scoliosis got worse. And I realized that without muscles to keep my body straight, I was not going anywhere. 

The beginning of research – trial and error testing 

My scoliosis got worse after being in a coma and boarding in intensive care. That was the key point. Why it went worse? And I realized then because the muscle was keeping the spine “stable”. So I started to look for some other types of exercises that would fit into my condition. I needed to have awareness about where my spine was and where should be. I went into many types of exercises for many years and sometimes it was working and sometimes not. I needed to have my bones ok and my muscles strong but flexible to be able to get the spine into the “middle” of my back. 

I needed to start from bottom to the top, so as I was working on my flat feet before the coma, I kept on that. Researching about how the feet work, the skeleton, bones and muscles, and even who in “workout world” has the best arch in the feet? The answer: ballet dancer. So I started to emulate how to train that, find out, etc. and also had some findings into fitness workout but suggested by physiotherapists around the world. After a couple of years, I was able to get an arch in my feet and my shoe size was reduced from 39 to 36. So now the base was settled. Now I was going after the hips, I needed to get them balanced all the time as I used to go to the chiropractor every 2 months and the hips kept going unbalanced from time to time getting my spine into compensation, and so not getting straight. 

Trying to get the hips balanced. I started to research about what makes the hips stable so, continuing with all the anatomy study I was doing I started to train the muscle that keeps the hips stable and open, so glutes and hips rotators were the main core of it. After a while, I was able to get the hips stable no matter what and then continued with the core itself and because of that, the pain in the lumbar spine stopped. 

Anyway, that was not enough, I needed to be able to lengthen my spine but using the muscles so the quest for any other type of workouts started. During 2012 - 2013, I tried any kind of workout I could find. I was attending regular classes dictated by instructors like yoga, stretching, Pilates, etc. But even though I was attending those classes, something was not working yet, they were not paying attention to my condition so I was just doing the same exercises as the rest of the participants. I was still unbalanced and with tight muscles and soreness in some cases. 

On 2014, I started my very own journey without attending any class but studying types of workouts (functional ones) assist to seminars, courses, online training, etc. and tested on me by myself as I kept doing it from 2009. 

The workouts that worked 

On 2016, I bumped into Progressing Ballet Technique by Instagram, that changed my way of seeing posture, again, ballet dancers have the best posture and balanced body even though there were no many muscles to support the skeleton the dancers were able to perform many jumps and softly movements without tightness nor knots on their bodies. So I started to perform some of the exercises the PBT website was sharing. And the posture started to change. 

Changes 

• Hips Opened. In order to get the hips more opened and balanced, I started with the rotator workouts. So practising almost every day my hips started to lose and move freely. My lumbar spine started to move towards the centre of my body and using other exercises that lengthen the spine now, the vertebras had spaces to get aligned. The port de bras exercises were useful to accomplish that. The way that the posture was taught, helped me to understand how to place my scapular – shoulder joint. Because of this, I was able to get into a course for personal trainer and weightlifting, using the PBT technique. 
• The thoracic spine has changed enormously and because of the exercises focused on scapular posture I was able to perform the bridge posture the first time in my life and also start to work on handstand balancing. 
• Some of the exercises I have learnt and tried on me are now part of the way I teach my students about the right posture avoiding the compensation and having a strong core. 

I would be fair to say that I adapt the exercises to my body and condition as well to my student (all of them with posture and pain issues) but the main focus of the workout remains the same. I would say that PBT was the start point for the major change and now the change is continuing. My spine is almost straight and every workout It helped me accomplish my goal: Fix completely my (ex) scoliosis!

Conclusions 

To summarize, I can say that I have been studying the way to improve my spine since I was 17 years old. This took a lot of ups and downs, trials and errors and a lot of dedication also frustration. But, now I can say that I learnt the path that helped me to my goal and I am seeing the results and part of that was absolutely the Progressing Ballet Technique (PBT) method.