Pilates For Beginners
Most people have heard of Pilates these days, but it’s still an activity that many people haven’t tried and that many people are unsure about. Many people have perceptions of Pilates that are not necessarily correct and without sampling it themselves they are unlikely to right these misconceptions any time soon.
So what is Pilates? Is it essentially just yoga but in a different format? Is it just ‘for women’? The answer to both these questions is a resounding ‘no’ – and Pilates is its own thing that can benefit anyone who cares to give it a go. Here we will look at precisely how it can do this and what it involves.
If you ever witness a Pilates lesson then granted it will in all likelihood look a lot like yoga or Tai Chi. These are slow movements that a class carries out at the instruction of a teacher and that are designed to improve your fitness, strength and health. We’ll look at how that works.
First of all, there are a few objectives with Pilates. One is to help improve posture and the other is to create more ‘body awareness’. This latter point means that you are more consciously moving each part of your body including all the small muscle groups and joints and even your breathing. Most people will move in a very natural way without consideration for what their body is doing as a whole at the time. This then means that they will not be moving in quite as elegant unison as they could be and they will be more likely to cause an injury.
In Pilates you are taught to control all of these finer movements, and particularly around your ‘core’ stability muscles. This means for instance that when you do a sit up you aren’t just doing a sit up – instead you focus on squeezing the core muscles at the time to increase the workout, you focus on breathing in concordance with the movement, and you think about how your spinal column is gradually opening and closing and essentially massaging itself against the mat. What this achieves is not only to greatly increase your core strength (by causing you to use it more), but also to avoid your chances of hurting your back via trapped nerve for instance, and improve your breathing. All of this then helps to improve your general strength and stability, but at the same time it means that you are more aware of your body in every movement that you make – being sure that you have good posture, that your spine is aligned and that you are moving in unison. All of this then means that you are less likely to injure yourself.
Of course Pilates is also great exercise and the slow nature of the movements means that you will build your muscle even more through dynamic tension and static contraction. This is a great way to get those ‘legs, bums and tums’ and because the movement is slow and low impact it’s healthy for anyone – even the elderly or the pregnant.
There is a wide variety of exercise and levels when it comes to pilates. I learned a lot about it when I attended this Melbourne pilates studio after an injury when I crashed my bike.
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