Maybe you Didn’t Fail at the Core Class. Maybe It Failed You.

Apr 10, 2025

A Deeper Look at Treatment Resistant Back Pain

If your back still hurts after yoga, pilates, core classes, weights, chiropractic, or even advanced bodywork—you’re not alone. You’ve probably worked hard, stayed committed, followed expert advice… and still feel stuck. At Studio One Pilates, we specialize in helping people who’ve done everything right—and still haven’t found relief.

What we teach isn’t a tougher workout or a better version of your last core class. It’s something different: we train two critical spinal systems that most programs miss entirely—but that your body depends on for real, lasting stability.

These systems—the deep spinal stabilizers and the muscles of respiration—don’t work like biceps or abs. You can’t “strengthen” them the usual way. They’re more like software, running quietly in the background to coordinate breath, posture, and movement. But when they go offline, your spine can feel fragile, tense, or one wrong twist away from pain. And when they come back online? You feel lighter. More supported. Your breath opens. Your movement flows.

This isn’t about doing more—it’s about doing differently. Most people have never been taught how to access these systems, because most fitness and rehab programs don’t even talk about them. But once you know how to wake them up—through precision, breath, and nervous system training—you’ll finally understand why your back has stayed stuck… and what it feels like to move without fear.

At Studio One, we call this work VASIE® Pilates, and we teach it through our Breathlinking™ method. It’s not a magic bullet—but it does reach the systems that matter most. The ones you’ve probably never trained. And the ones that might just change everything.

My Story: How I Finally Stopped My Back Pain

If you’ve tried everything to fix your back pain—strengthening your core, stretching, yoga, chiropractic, bodywork, even getting MRIs and X-rays—but nothing seems to stick, you’re not alone. I was in the same situation for 20 years. Chronic low back and neck pain held me back from activities, affected my sleep, and left me frustrated. Those were rough years, but I’m happy to say that by learning and applying what I cover in this article—I almost never have back pain now. I can sleep anywhere without waking up with a crick in my neck or pain in my back. That includes airplanes✈️…

Frankly, some of that is luck, some of it genetics, and some of it is consistently applying the right exercise techniques to the right exercises. What changed everything for me—and now for our clients at Studio One—was understanding how to wake up the deep systems of spinal support that most programs skip over.

We built our entire approach around this at Studio One Pilates, and it forms the basis of VASIE® and Breathlinking™—a way of reconnecting movement, breath, and stability through neuromuscular retraining. It’s how we help people move from “trying everything” to finally making progress.

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What You Don’t Know About Back Pain Can Keep You Hurting

You can stretch and strengthen your big muscles all you want, but as long as your deep stabilizers aren’t back online, your spine will always feel like it’s one bad move away from disaster. The real problem isn’t just weak muscles—it’s the silent systems that stop working after injury. The issue is neuromuscular. And most traditional exercise doesn’t fix that.

At Studio One, we specialize reactivating these hidden systems. Many of our clients have already tried personal trainers, physical therapy, and yoga before they walk through our doors. What they haven’t done is retrain their nervous system to reconnect with their deep stabilizers and respiratory core. That’s where the change happens. That’s where pain starts to lift.

An Overview of the Systems of the Spine

To understand why traditional approaches often fall short, it helps to look at the spine not as a single structure, but as a complex, layered system. Pain doesn't just come from weak muscles or stiff joints—it often comes from a breakdown in the coordination between different systems that are meant to support, stabilize, and move your spine in harmony. And while most people only train the visible parts—the bones, joints, and big muscles—real relief often depends on restoring the systems that work behind the scenes.

Your spine isn’t just one structure—it’s a collection of five distinct support systems, each playing a different role in keeping you upright, balanced, and moving well.

Bones – Your vertebrae form the structural framework—the architecture.🦴
Discs & Ligaments – These act like shock absorbers and connective cables, holding everything in place and protecting the joints.🩻
Global Muscles – These are the big movers like the rectus abdominis, obliques, and erector spinae. They create force, power, and visible strength.💪

These first three systems are what most people already train—through strength, flexibility, and endurance work. They respond well to traditional exercise: lifting weights, stretching, yoga, cardio, etc. Most physical therapy and fitness programs focus almost entirely here. Think of these as hardware. These are like the case, and all the electronics of your iphone.

But here’s the problem: you can have strong bones, flexible muscles and ligaments, and lots of endurance—and still feel unstable or in pain.

That’s where the next two systems come in. Think of these systems like software. These systems are a large part of the actual support of your spine. They make your spine naturally long resilient, keep it from shrinking with age, assist with balance, and help it transmit power through your arms and legs. These are the hidden layers of spinal support, and they’re completely different from the first three systems.

Deep Spinal Muscles – Tiny, segmental muscles like the multifidus, rotatores, and interspinales. These muscles are your spine’s fine-tuners. They don’t generate big movements—they control the micro-movements between vertebrae.
Muscles of Respiration & Pelvic Floor – The diaphragm, transversus abdominis (TA), and pelvic floor form your internal pressure system. They stabilize from within, using breath and timing—not tension.

Unlike the first three systems, these last two can’t be trained with conventional workouts. You can’t force them into action by lifting more or stretching deeper. In fact, most traditional exercises bypass them entirely. They require a completely different approach—one that focuses on timing, coordination, and breath.

At Studio One Pilates, this is where we begin. We specialize in training these overlooked systems using our VASIE® method and Breathlinking™ techniques—tools designed to gently wake up these internal support networks and get them working again.

So if your back pain hasn’t gone away—even after doing “all the right things”—there’s a good chance these systems are still offline.

In the rest of this article, we’ll focus on these last two systems, why they matter, how they get shut down, and what you can do to get them working again.

Keep in mind that the nervous system is the most important part of your spine. Without all the muscles working together at the right time your spine cannot support you. An iPhone without good software is not a phone - its a paperweight.

Reflex Inhibition: When Your Spine’s Software Shuts Down

When the spine suffers an injury—whether it’s a muscle strain, ligament sprain, or disc problem—the body’s natural response often includes something called reflex inhibition. What this means is that the software that optimizes your breathing, pelvic floor tone, and spinal protector muscles shuts down. This is your nervous system’s way of protecting you: by automatically reducing activation of certain muscles to prevent further damage.

Unfortunately, the muscles that get shut down aren’t the big, obvious ones—they’re the subtle, stabilizing ones. The ones that operate like your body’s internal software.

This includes:

Multifidus – the deep spinal stabilizer that controls each vertebra individually
Rotatores – tiny muscles responsible for segmental rotation and control
Interspinales – small muscles between vertebrae that fine-tune spinal movement
Pelvic Floor – supports the base of the spine and works in tandem with the breath
Transversus Abdominis (TA) – wraps the torso like a corset to stabilize internal pressure
Respiratory Diaphragm – the primary muscle of breath, which also plays a core role in spinal stabilization

Together, these muscles make up the reflexive core system. (of deep core system) —your spine’s built-in support team. These are the muscles designed to activate automatically and anticipate movement and protect your spine and joints. But when reflex inhibition sets in, it’s like your software crashes. These muscles shut down. And the worst part? They don’t always come back online after the pain goes away.

That’s why many people feel unstable or vulnerable long after the original injury heals. If these deep stabilizers and respiratory muscles aren’t reawakened through specific, low-load re-training (think breathing, imprint, table top, arm raises), your body will continue to rely on superficial muscles that were never meant to handle the job.

Reflex inhibition was first studied extensively by Paul Hodges and Carolyn Richardson in the 1990s. They found that after back injury, the deep spinal stabilizers—especially the multifidus and transversus abdominis (TA)—tend to shut down, while bigger, more superficial muscles like the rectus abdominis and erector spinae take over. This shift creates tension and tightness, not stability. When these muscles take over your waist will thicken and your spine will shorten and your spine will feel tight no matter how much you stretch.

One key finding was that people with chronic back pain lose something called feedforward activation. That means the body stops preparing for movement in advance. In healthy spines, the deep core muscles activate before you lift, step, twist, or reach. This anticipatory control is your body’s built-in plan for shock absorption, balance, and protecting the spine from slipping or strain.

When this system goes offline, movement becomes reactive instead of predictive—and that delay leads to a spine that goes out easily, a body with poor balance, and recurring pain.

The solution isn’t to strengthen harder. It’s to retrain the brain. Hodges and Richardson showed that restoring feedforward control requires low-load, precise exercises that help your nervous system reconnect with the deep support muscles. This is exactly what we focus on in the breathing warm-up at Studio One—restarting the muscles that help your spine to move with control, balance, and ease.

At Studio One, our exercises are built around this principle. We use gentle spinal reactivation drills, taught with VASIE®’s progressive cueing system and Breathlinking™ integration, to wake these muscles back up—without over-efforting or over-bracing.

When Your Spine Stops Thinking Ahead

The real genius of your deep spinal muscles and your lies in their ability to anticipate movement. This is called feedforward activation.

Normally, before you lift a leg or reach for something, the transversus abdominis and multifidus muscles (along with all your other deep stabilizers) contract slightly to keep your spine safe. This gives you grace and fluidity but also stability. This is perhaps most easily seen in bringing the second leg to table top. If it is getting wobbly, it is a sign that these muscles are inhibited. They are not firing until it’s too late—after the movement has already begun. That delay is what causes your pelvis to shift.

The groundbreaking work of Paul Hodges and Carolyn Richardson uncovered the mechanics behind this dysfunction. In their research, they found that chronic back pain sufferers don’t activate their transversus abdominis (TA) or multifidus in time to stabilize the spine. Instead of engaging before movement (like in healthy individuals), their stabilizers lag behind, reacting too late to be effective. It’s a bit like putting on the brakes after you hit the pile of snow…

This delay in activation is what sets the stage for recurrent pain and instability.

At Studio One Pilates, this is a foundational concept. We don’t teach core strength for its own sake—we restore the activation of the muscles and we restore their timing. With VASIE® Pilates, we cue you to move from breath, rhythm, and reflex—not force—so your deep spinal system begin to anticipate movement, and subtly contract without conscious effort before you move. This is the opposite of bracing. It's about gentle, precise activation in sync with your nervous system’s natural timing.