A Beginners Guide To Pilates

a beginners guide to pilates

🎀 what is pilates?

pilates is a form of strength training exercise that focuses on low to medium impact movements to improve muscle tone, stability, endurance, and mobility. pilates also focuses more on the smaller muscles of the body compared to traditional strength or weight training.

🎀 benefits of pilates

including the benefits that exercise generally brings, pilates:

improves mind-body connection and body control

improves active flexibility and mobility

works the core, improving stability

improves coordination and balance

reduces mental and physical stress

works muscles that can be neglected in our daily lives

treats and prevents body pain, including menstrual pain

teaches you how to pair your breath with your body

keeps the joints healthy without putting pressure on them

🎀 where to start

while you can absolutely start with studio or reformer classes, you can also do pilates routines on youtube! i recommend move with nicole and dansique fitness. if you want to get your cardio in as well, i absolutely recommend eleni fit. her workouts are some of the best i’ve ever tried!

🎀 personal tips

keep your core in mind. core strength is a major benefit of pilates because each movement requires at least a mild amount of core work to keep your body stable, so do your best to keep the engagement throughout.

start slow. pilates movements can take a while to fully understand and it can take a while to build the mind-body connection, so don’t push yourself too far in the beginning. your coordination will improve over time!

don’t underestimate it! while the movements are generally slower than other types of exercise, you will work your muscles just as much and in a way they may not have been worked before. sometimes i even find pilates more difficult than hiit or weights!

Isolation is Not Healthy for You

The Western world is going through an isolation crisis, and our generation is the one most affected by it. Let's talk about it.

It seems like people nowadays have relegated the importance of community and belonging to the back burner. We no longer place the value social interactions have historically had to them because we no longer view them as needed but as optional. This couldn't be further from the truth. Lack of socialization has been linked with higher risks of disease than smoking. It increases the risk of developing Alzheimer's in old age. It causes people to become depressed and hopelessness and detaches us from the correct way to interact and become functioning members of society around others.

Socializing is crucial to one's well-being, regardless if our personalities are intro or extroverted. Introversion should never be used as a synonym for isolation. When you look at many people across the Global South, despite the issues they have to face, they usually seem much happier than those in the West because they have a sense of belonging and community.

Online interactions through social media can never replace real, face-to-face interactions. In fact, being chronically online will only make you more detached from reality.

I've personally made it a goal of mine for 2024 to become as social as possible. If I can't find people on the same wavelength as me in my city or country, I will travel abroad. I refuse to let my youth be wasted by keeping myself from experiences that only other people can provide me with. This time that I have right now nobody will be able to get back to me, and I refuse to live it alone. As I always say, it is better to be alone than surrounded by the wrong company, but it is better to have good company around you than to be alone. To find those people you must be proactive and committed to searching for them.

When I first started to really work on improving myself I thought, “at x weight, x income, once I travel here, once I graduate, once I get married, once I have kids, once I buy this item/get this nice car, THEN I’ll be happy” but it really doesn’t work like that. If you have any amount of ambition, once you reach that level you’ll already be thinking about what’s next. That’s why you have to work on being happy with where you are now in this present moment and acknowledge and celebrate what you have already done and then keep it moving.

Sylvia Plath, from The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

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