How to get the most out of your KIC Pilates workouts
Mari’s hot tips on how to get the most out of your Pilates workouts. It’s easy enough to just go through the motions when you are doing a workout, so here are a few extra tips that might help you squeeze that little bit more benefit out of your training.
- Listen to the cues – I give loads of juicy tips while Laura and Steph are doing their workouts. I talk lots about things like alignment, and give core activation tips, as well as cues around where we should ideally be feeling an exercise. We always do our best to offer modifications around how to make an exercise easier or harder too! So listen in if you can, and take advantage of all of the things we talk about along the way, and hopefully it will help you get the absolute best benefit out of each session.
- Press pause if you need – if you are unsure how to execute the exercise, always remember you can just watch through the first few repetitions, press pause or rewind, and then jump in once you have seen the exercise first and feel confident with what it looks like and what the goals are.
- Use feedback – some people are more tactile learners – putting their hands on their bodies to feel what is going on (for example when working on the glutes in a side lying clam series, feeling that the hips are staying stable, or that the glutes are activating) can really help them gain awareness of the area they are working. Other people are more visual learners and so doing the same side lying clam series in front of a mirror so that they can see that their hips are staying well controlled, might be more helpful for them. If you know you are a certain type of learner, use that to your advantage.
- Work at your own pace: It’s you against you and no one else – so work at your own pace and pick whatever modification feels best for your body, at whatever level you feel you are at. Remember some of the exercises are working to build up endurance, and we will not all be at the same stage. So rest, reset and then jump back in if you feel ready. Remember the story about the tortoise and the hare? Slow and steady wins the race – it is much better to build up slowly with the best possible form and control.
- Check in with the ABC’s: Alignment, breathing and core control. Check in with one of my more recent blogs around the Pilates Key Elements and it will give you much more information around these principles, but overall, when doing our Pilates workouts, we want to make sure we are in the most optimal alignment possible to get the most out of each exercise, we need to make sure we aren’t holding our breath (the breathing pattern may vary depending on the exercise), and we want to make sure that our core is supporting us throughout our training.
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