The Movement We've Forgotten: Why Your Spine Needs to Twist

"You are only as young as your spine is flexible." - Joseph Pilates

Class just ended. I’m packing up and watching a woman attempt to look over her shoulder to back out of a parking space. Her entire torso is rotating as one rigid unit. Her neck is straining, her shoulders are hiking up to her ears, and she’s basically turning her whole body instead of just rotating her spine.

“Does your back hurt when you do that?” I yell out.

“All the time,” she admits. She throws her hand up in defeat, “…this is 40!”

It’s not. This conversation is happening more frequently in my studio, and it’s revealing something alarming about how we’re moving—or rather, how we’re not moving—in modern life.

We’ve lost rotation.

The Forgotten Movement Pattern

Think about your typical day. You sit facing forward at your desk. You look straight ahead while driving. You walk in a straight line. You sleep in relatively the same position all night. Even most exercises we do—planks, squats, bicep curls—happen in one plane of movement.

Your spine is designed to move in three dimensions: flexion and extension (forward and back), lateral flexion (side bending), and rotation (twisting). But in our increasingly frontal, screen-focused world, we’ve essentially eliminated one-third of our spine’s movement vocabulary.

The consequences are showing up everywhere: chronic back pain, neck tension, shoulder issues, hip problems, even digestive complaints. When we lose rotational capacity, we don’t just lose range of motion, we lose resilience.

The Rotation-Resilience Connection

Resilience isn’t just an emotional quality, it’s physical. A resilient body is one that can move in multiple directions, adapt to unexpected demands, and recover from stress without breaking down.

Rotation is perhaps the most important movement pattern for physical resilience because it:

• Maintains spinal health and disc nutrition

• Prevents compensatory patterns that lead to injury

• Improves breathing capacity through ribcage mobility

• Enhances core strength in functional, multi-dimensional ways

• Supports healthy digestion through abdominal massage

• Reduces chronic tension patterns

When your spine can rotate freely, your entire body has more options. More options mean more adaptability. More adaptability means more resilience.

The Modern Rotation Crisis

The fitness industry has actually contributed to our rotation deficit. Popular exercises like crunches, planks, and even many Pilates modifications focus on anti-rotation—training the core to resist twisting rather than perform it skillfully.

There’s a place for anti-rotation work, especially for athletes in contact sports. But for the general population (particularly women over 35) we’ve overcorrected. We’ve become so focused on “stabilizing the spine” that we’ve created spines that can’t move.

I see this constantly: women who can hold a plank for three minutes but can’t comfortably reach behind themselves to fasten a bra. Who can deadlift impressive weight but struggle to pick up a bag of groceries from the back seat of their car. Who have “strong cores” but experience back pain doing everyday twisting movements.

This isn’t strength—it’s rigidity. And rigidity is the opposite of resilience.

The GLP-1 Weight Loss Conversation Nobody’s Having

Here’s something that’s been bothering me lately: the explosion of GLP-1 medications (Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro) for weight loss, particularly among perimenopausal women.