I often get asked the question: Will Pilates Help Me Lose Weight?
Yes, it will, BUT only if you do other exercise as well and reduce your calorie intake – I don’t mean that you should diet, as diets don’t work other than very short-term.
If you cut down on your food intake drastically, as people do when they go on a diet, you will certainly lose pounds in the first week, but it won’t be pounds of fat.
It will be mainly water and muscle tissue, and muscle tissue is the LAST thing you want to be losing. Added to that your body will declare a state of siege; it will hoard all your fat like a miser hoarding gold and increase your appetite to the point where you will mug the sparrows in your garden to get the stale bread!
I mean cut down on the junk and fatty foods that most of us eat. A good idea is to keep a food diary for a week, and then have a good, hard look at it – often this is all it takes to pinpoint weak spots and bad habits. One lady I knew simply didn’t realise she was eating 21 slices of cake in a week; every time she had a cup of coffee, she had cake. It was more a habit than a mad desire for the cake!
So, eating habits make up part of the weight loss puzzle. Now to add some exercise – namely a Pilates session or two. Pilates is a system of exercises that will tone your deep muscles, straighten your back and make your legs look longer. Any session with a properly qualified instructor will give you an effective, full-body balanced workout, strengthening you from top-to-toe from the inside out.
Doing Pilates works the muscles deep inside your body that lie next to your skeleton, and are bypassed by most other types of exercise. If you focus on workouts exclusively for your superficial muscles, such as your quadriceps and hamstrings, without taking time to work the muscles underneath, then you can become like a tree with strong branches, but a weak trunk.
A tree with a weak trunk will blow over in a high wind, and a person with a weak core will never get good results in toning up and will be prone to injury.
If you do Pilates as part of a regular exercise program and also include cardiovascular exercise like cycling, brisk walking or swimming and also do some sessions with weights, then that is a brilliant combination that will give you fast, effective results and a balanced body.
Ladies, you don’t need to use heavy weights, and you won’t build big, bulky Man-Muscles! Testosterone, the hormone predominately found in men, needs to be present for muscle – growth to that extent.
Adding Pilates to your workout routine is easy as Pilates Exercises are mainly done using bodyweight, so can be done anywhere with very little or no equipment, and you are never too old or too young to add Pilates to your weight-loss plan, whether you are male or female, retired athlete or couch potato.
Carol Bartram
(Pilates Instructor)