It can't help if you don't do it...

I forget how powerful Pilates can be.  Many of the exercises are so simple that it seems amazing that they can be as transformative as they are.

Clients come in stressed and bent and leave calmer and straighter.  We work diligently on the small stuff and the big stuff works out.

I let myself fall out of the habit of doing Pilates for myself for a while there.  The space allowed me to see how much better things work when I do it.  Like most people, I have lots of parts that don’t work quite right; they work better after Pilates.

Try it out!

Consistent...

Life is full of little paradoxes.  (Probably big ones, too, but those are beyond the scope of my practice…)  Yesterday I wrote about shaking things up.  Today I’m thinking about consistency.  The good thing about paradoxes is that both parts are true.  We need both to shake things up and to be consistent.

Consistency is about showing up, every time we plan to show up, and doing the work.

When we first jump in to working out, we have grand plans.  We will work out All The Time!  We will be So Awesome!  Probably by tomorrow!

Then we get sore and we think that maybe we can be awesome later, like maybe next week when we can stop swearing every time we have to go up and down stairs.

(To be clear:  I do not recommend working out through the kind of pain that means we are injuring ourselves.  Sometimes workouts are uncomfortable.  Sometimes our hamstrings or quads or some other muscles complain at us the whole time.  Know the difference between discomfort and scary pain, like we know the difference between our kids whining and real distress.)

Planning when we are calm is useful.  Folks just starting out might want to do moderate cardio five days a week.  When that becomes a habit, it’s good to add a weight training session.  Then another one.  Planning on rest days helps make everything better:  I know I can do this if I know that I don’t have to do anything on Saturday…

We can do this.

More Mixing...

Workouts can get boring.  We find ourselves doing the same things over and over.  It’s easier, but any time we find ourselves settling for what is easy, we might be in trouble.  Our bodies make progress when they are challenged, and challenge comes from change.  Some ideas to mix things up:

• Change venue.  If we usually work out in the gym, we can take it outside and vice versa.  We can run a new route, or even the same loop the other way around.  We can add hills to our bike workout, or maybe a few sets of bleacher stairs when we’re at the track.

• Take a class.  No, not that one we go to every week.  Some other class.  Even if it’s still yoga, the teacher will have a different perspective.  Or maybe we could try the one we’ve never heard of before.

• Make it heavy.  A lot of us like the variety of doing a bunch of different exercises in a workout.  If we plan the occasional heavy workout, we might not get through more than one or two different exercises if we keep going to our single rep maximum.

• Go with a buddy.  See what she or he does regularly.  It’s probably different than our usual.