Pilates for a better body?

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.

Make Task Oriented Goals

Are your fitness goals about losing weight or getting into a certain dress size?

What would happen if you changed your goals into something a bit more task oriented? What would happen if you turned all of your goals into physical performance goals? For example, training yourself to be able to do a chin-up might be a good goal. Once you have achieved that, you can change your goal to 5 chin ups and then 10 chin ups.

Or, you can try to improve your time on a run. How long does it take you now to run a 400 meter sprint? Have you ever thought about improving that time?

How many burpees can you currently do without stopping? 10? 12? Maybe it would be a good idea to start improving your burpee output as well.

Does this not seem as important as your dress size? Well, it is. Let me explain.

If two people were standing in front of me and one was able to perform 10 chin ups and the other could not perform any pull-ups, I would be able to tell you which person could and could not just by looking at the shape of their bodies.

I could probably also tell you which one could run faster. I could tell you which person could do 50 burpees and which one could only do 10.

The physical appearance of a person’s physique is more often than not a direct reflection upon a person’s ability to perform basic physical tasks. This is why it is so important to record your workouts. By recording your workouts, you will know exactly how to improve upon it in your next workout.

So, if you want to improve your body, you should try to gradually improve your physical performances in the gym. As your reach your task based goals, you will also be reaching your goals that are based upon your physical appearance. Give it a try and let us know how it works for you.

Good luck!

Developing Your Will Power

“Baseball is ninety percent mental and the other half is physical.”- Yogi Berra

Someone just asked me “What percentage of getting in shape is nutrition and what percentage is the workout?”

I don’t like percentages. It’s like asking which is more important to a car- the engine or the tires? They both are important.

But, without gasoline, neither the engine nor tires are worth anything at all. I think the mental approach to fitness is like the gasoline. In particular, the will to act and improve! Willpower. It is what fuels the whole process. I have worked with many people who have made amazing progress. The people who were the most successful were the ones who were prepared to approach fitness aggressively.

Everyone knows cookies and pizza are bad for them. They know exercise is the right thing to do. They are not stupid! They haven’t been living in a cave their whole lives.

The problem lies in that they are just unable to act. They are unable to apply what they know and that begins within the mind. For a trainer to tell a member “Don’t eat cookies anymore and do this workout,” is ridiculous. It’s like telling a heroin addict not to buy heroine and take up knitting.

Achieving results is more than nutrition and exercise. It is psychological. If this isn’t dealt with on some level, then the fitness journey will be a short one. To make the permanent change, you gotta dig deeper and start challenging your willpower.

We ALL have will power. We just have to exercise it. Our muscles don’t get stronger overnight from exercise. Well, we must also exercise our willpower on a regular basis in order for it to strengthen.

Each workout you don’t skip is a positive step towards strengthening your mind. Each workout is one step closer to creating a new habit and a new you, mentally and physically.

Every time you find yourself wanting to buy a chocolate bar, turn it into a competition within your mind. It’s not about the chocolate bar. It’s a Willpower Challenge! Your inner self is challenging you. If you put the chocolate bar down before getting in line at the grocery store, your willpower has become that much stronger! The more times you win the challenge, the more powerful your mind will become!
It isn’t easy in the beginning. But lasting change will come from sticking with it. You can do it!

3 Things You Can Do to Make Your Workouts More Efficient and Achieve Better Fitness Results!

1. Exercise with more effort

Take a walk through the gym. What do you see? You see people walking on the treadmill while they are talking on the phone. You see people pedaling on the lifecycle machines as they read their Cosmopolitan magazine. In the weight room you see lots of people doing bicep curls with the little soup can size weights. If your water bottle weighs more than your dumbbell, please put the dumbbell back and lift your water bottle!

Oh, sorry. I should get back to my point.

If you are not getting results in the gym, we can probably make the assumption that you aren’t working with an appropriate intensity. How much effort you put into your workouts is directly proportionate to the level of your results you are getting.

People are always wondering what the best fitness program is. However, they are overlooking a component of fitness that is just as important as the program itself. With enough intensity, one could achieve a decent level of results even with a subpar exercise protocol. On the other hand, if you can have the best exercise program in the world but you will not see any significant results if you aren’t working hard enough to make your body adapt to your program by losing fat, getting stronger and improving its overall health and fitness level.

2. Choose better exercises

Okay, let’s take another walk around the gym. That lady over there is trying to lose 15 kilos of bodyfat. Will someone tell me why that trainer has her doing arm curls on a machine? In terms of losing body fat, you will get better results jumping up and down onto a box 100 times in 10 minutes than you will doing 100 bicep curls on a machine. Every time I see a trainer with a 45 year old woman looking to shape up on a bicep machine, I want to go shake the hair gel out of his hair!

The point is, some movements are much better than others. The more muscles you can get involved into your exercise movement, the more calories you will burn. Furthermore, if you use exercises that recruit lots of muscles and do it with proper intensity, then you increased metabolism will last for long after your workout has already finished.

What exercises should you do and not do? First, stay away from the machines where you have to sit down and stabilize your spine and pelvis. Unless you are a steroid monster bodybuilder, you don’t have much need for those muscle isolation movements. Move your body! Not machines! Machines are great at selling gym memberships, but they are lousy at getting people results.

If you want to see the greatest amount of results quickly, stick to the classic exercise moves. For example: Squats, deadlifts, pushups, rows, and other movements that use the whole body as one systemic unit such as jumping and calisthenics. If you aren’t sure how to do these movements…learn! There are hundreds of books and videos to help you learn how to do these things safely. Or better yet, hire a qualified coach. It is an investment that will be well worth it for the rest of your life.

3. Workout as part of a team

Working out with other people provides us with motivation. Most of us are spending too much time in front of the TV and computer screens. Not only is it affecting our health and fitness levels, but we are increasingly becoming disconnected with those we love.

Working out together is a great way to do something positive together. It’s amazing how effectively it adds a positive spark to our relationships with people around us. Instead of getting together and talking about the usual daily stuff like life problems or our jobs, we can come together to accomplish goals, cheer each other on and share a simultaneous endorphin rush. We can be achievers as part of the same team. Anyone who has participated in team sports can tell you how fulfilling and rewarding being a part of a team can be. Well, pushing through a tough workout with friends will give you an equivalent feeling of gratification. When you are working out with a team of fitness achievers, you will find yourself looking forward to going to the gym from the moment you get up in the morning. When you start looking forward to your workouts, the results are sure to follow.

There you have it- Three quick things you can do to improve your fitness quickly. It goes without saying that the next thing you’ve got to do is to just get in there and start applying the stuff you have read.

Hope to see ya there,

Jeff (Paradise Fitness Camp Head Trainer)