I Finally Get It! Pilates 101

Okay so the last few weeks have been scary for me as far as effortless weightloss goes because I've gone from 135 to 123 and I didn't start really weighing myself until the beginning of this week. I did not have a weightloss goal. I had a fat loss goal and as far as that goes I'm still borderline fat according to my scale.

So what's been going on? Lack of sleep, running on caffeine, and not having time to eat. Disastrous! At first I was like yay 125! And then this morning at a little under 123 pounds I was like...this is bad. But, that's not what I wanted to make this post about anyway.

I was a practitioner of Pilates for 5 or 6 years and then I stopped after I learned about it's partial origins in Yoga. One of my spiritual advisors told me that practicing Pilates was not praying to the Hindu gods because it was not designed with that it mind.

Anyway, I had only been to classes briefly and at the classes the instructor was overweight and made us do the exercises with a large number of repetitions. In the book The Pilates Body by Brooke Siler which I used as a manual, Siler recommended a low number of repetitions and to imagine your body as various objects like a rope and pulley.

Anyway, this morning I was doing a little ab workout. My abs and lower back still need help okay. And it finally clicked for me. It all came together because I was thinking about this group of radical exercise freaks that had been on Oprah. They all did their exercises in a slow methodic manner while concentrating on using the body to create resistance instead of machines.

So I had read in Brooke's book or somewhere else that a workout is not complete without the mind. And this morning I was finally able to bring my imagination into the ab workout (which included a few Pilates moves). I had to close my eyes to imagine my body as some object stronger than it was, but at the end of my workout I was satisfied that I had challenged myself sufficiently without overworking my muscles. Over-training causes muscles to break down! I can remember the days of doing 400 crunches a night. Now I have finally mastered the mind-body connection.