How are your New Year fitness resolutions going? Here are some tips from our Pilates teachers on how to stay motivated and achieve your goals in 2018:
Mandy Parr’s suggestions:
To help ensure you are not overwhelmed by New Year’s resolutions, try to do small bits every day.
Incorporating Pilates into your daily routine ensures you won’t give up on your New Year’s fitness regime, so it becomes a way of life and not just for the weekly class.
Posture
While waiting for the kettle to boil, practise standing tall, engage your core and glutes, and place your weight evenly on both feet.
While brushing your teeth, challenge your posture by balancing on one foot for 1 minute each side.
While walking to the bus, walking the dog, or taking a comfort break at work, walk tall, engaging your postural muscles, and roll through your feet, keeping your eyes on the horizon.
While sitting at your desk, at least every hour, check your sitting posture, engage your glutes, sit up against the back of your chair, with both feet evenly on the floor. Move your head and eyes from side to side, raise arms above your head, and point and flex your feet. (All exercises you do in class.)
Breathing
Throughout the day, take time to focus on your breathing. Breath in through your nose, wide and full to the bottom of your lungs and open your rib-cage, and breath out through nose/mouth. This intake of oxygen will refresh you, improve your posture and give you time to think.
Rosalind Hoyes’ suggestions:
Our Pilates and Mindfulness teacher, Rosalind Hoyes suggests:
Re-balance with meditation and movement
At this time of year there is a necessary and natural instinct to shake off the effects of Christmas and the long nights with resolutions to strengthen and reinvigorate the body with exercise. As our minds are profoundly linked to our bodies, my advice as a Pilates and Mindfulness teacher is to combine the powerful benefits of movement with that of Mindfulness meditation – giving yourself a chance to re-balance both. So, in amongst the goal-orientated lifestyles that we tend to lead, remembering the phrase: ‘Don’t just Do Something, Sit there!’ can reap huge rewards.
Janine Quirk’s suggestions:
The important thing is to establish a routine with your fitness goals. Here are a few examples of how to do this:
Choose easy exercises
Choose a couple of easy exercises which you can easily fit into your current daily routine. Use little pockets of time, like when you’re brushing your teeth, or washing the dishes, or getting up out of a chair for example. It’s easy to incorporate a few squats, or a few stretches into these daily jobs.
Do more than once a week
Pilates is always most effective when done more than once a week – the more you can do in a week, the better your results will be. For example, a weekly routine of two Pilates sessions and one cardio session a week will bring brilliant results that you will begin to see and feel.
Join a fitness class
Join a class where you can get committed and connected into a group of like-minded people. Find a well-qualified Body Control teacher to guide you, and who will teach you good technique whilst also helping to keep your motivation up. It’s really easy to find a well qualified teacher near you by a simple internet search, so there’s no excuse not to get stuck in!
The perfect way to learn more about Pilates, while enjoying the relaxing and tranquillity of the exercises, is to come along to one of our Pilates retreats to Italy or Spain!
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