Pilates has been a craze in the fitness industry for quite sometime. However, you will find that it is usually the media and the instructors themselves that are creating most of the hype, dropping celebrity names all over their promotional materials. “The exercise that built Madonna’s body!” (Never mind the fact that Madonna was previously married to a personal trainer, has her own chef and has been performing 3 hour long dance rehearsals everyday for the last 20 years)
In all my years in the industry, I have yet to have one person who was not associated with the Pilates business tell me that “Pilates changed my body.” Not one person!
Is there a reason for this? Are there any independent studies to show its effectiveness so that we may have something else to read about it besides the marketing hype of your local Pilates studio or Globo-Gyms?
Curious, I looked to see what I could find. I wanted to find a study that wasn’t paid for by someone with an interest in the Pilates business.
BINGO! Apparently a team of scientists at the University of Wisconsin decided to look into Pilates. Here is what they found.
Professor John Pocari took a team of exercise scientists at the University of Wisconsin to analyze the effects of 50-minute beginner and advanced-level Pilates sessions and found their intensity to be too low improve cardiovascular fitness. Here is what they found:
The Beginner Classes
• The maximum heart rate (MHR) of the healthy and moderately fit female subjects was only 54 per cent! This is too low to even be in the so called “fat burning range” which I still consider to be too low for achieving greater fitness.
• They burned 175 calories. Someone would be better off vacuuming your house! Vacuuming for an hour will burn 238 calories an hour plus, you will have a nice clean floor to wear your new spandex gear you bought to do your Pilates in!
The Advanced Classes
• Even the advanced class failed to raise heart rates above an average 62 percent.
• Burned 254 calories, which offers benefits equivalent walking at a slow pace. Good or Bad? Well, walk into any Globo-WOW and take a look at the physiques of the “slow walkers” on the treadmill. We are human beings designed to move our bodies with some intensity. I have told my clients for years that a slow walk on a flat surface is not proper exercise for most people. It’s LOCOMOTION not exercise! If you are too unfit to walk at a slow pace, something 99.9% of every able human being that as ever lived on this Earth can do, you probably shouldn’t be tying yourself up on a Pilates contraption!
I am hoping that this blog will save someone from wasting their time and money on the false pretenses that Pilates famously markets itself on.
The lesson:
If you truly want to lose body fat and get into the best shape of your life, stay out of the Pilates studio and don’t allow yourself to be fooled by the fitness marketing of the Globo-Gyms.
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That's a little bit unfair.
ReplyDeleteI have done a few Pilates class and they are hard! I sweat like crazy trying to keep up and definitely feel like I've done a work-out. Just because my heart rate did not sky rocket does not mean it was not good for me. I swear it contributed to my increase in cardio fitness due to it improving my core. Its a different way of toning and is good to integrate one class a week to a weights/cardio training program. Maybe its not for everyone but you should not try to discourage everyone from at least giving it a go because there are many alternative health benefits to Pilates.
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