Healthy Living

How To Make Your Pilates Workouts More Challenging

Pilates is a truly unique form of exercise

It has grown significantly in popularity over the last few years. In many ways its in sharp contrast with traditional western workouts that follow a philosophy of “no pain no gain”. Pilates is different in that it uses your body’s own weight to create the resistance to train with. The focus is on low impact training and similar to Yoga is does not try to over exert your muscles through excessive workouts. Joseph Pilates believed that traditional exercises did more harm than good and that it was causing a lot of unneeded stress on the body.

The result is that Pilates is really quite gentle and for this reason its been extremely popular with women – especially women who do not like hard gym training. Unfortunately this has also been one of the main problems with Pilates. Many people argue that the workouts are not challenging enough and although is can provide a good muscular workout it does not give them that “feeling” that they had a good workout. This is one of the reasons why men tend to shy away from Pilates.

So, how can you boost your Pilates workouts and make them more challenging? Here are 3 easy ways to add more grunt to your workouts and to get much more out of the same workouts.

Join a class

There are a lot of Pilates studios around these days and if you can find a good class that caters to more advances students then you will be pleasantly surprised at how challenging these workouts can be. A good instructor is vital and finding a class full of people on your level is crucial.

Reformers

A Pilates reformer is one of the only “machines” that you will find in Pilates which is generally completely free of gadgets and gimmicks. A Reformer is allows you to add a lot more challenging workouts and it also allows you to add a level of resistance that is usually not there.

Duration And Intensity

A simple way to up the pace of your workouts is to simply lift the pace at which you are doing it. With Pilates you can do your posture with more intensity and if you are using things like a magic circle you can use that to exert more intensity. Another great way to get more “oomph” out of it is to simply extend your workouts. Go harder and go longer!

Are you interested in Pilates teacher training? See my blog to read more about Mari Winsor slimming Pilates.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Deon_Du_Plessis

Karla Urwitz
Follow Me

One thought on “How To Make Your Pilates Workouts More Challenging

  1. I would love to try the Reformer! Pilates has my heart, but I haven’t been doing it much recently. I’m gotta get back to it. Thanks for the reminder that Pilates is awesome!

Comments are closed.