“Believe in yourself and all that you are. Know that there is something inside you that is greater than any obstacle.”
- Christian D. Larson
Physical Fitness is a state of health and well-being, more specifically one’s ability to execute daily activities with optimal performance and endurance. There are four essential elements of physical fitness: cardiorespiratory endurance, muscular strength, muscular endurance, and flexibility. Your training should include challenges to your agility, strength, stamina, coordination, balance, as well as ensuring that exercises are performed with the proper form. In order to achieve this, it is recommended you train your body in different modalities to achieve your greatest state of well being.
fitness
Why it is important to include different modalities or types of exericise into your fitness routine:
Studying to become a Personal Trainer taught me the importance of whole body fitness, incorporating equal parts cardio, strength, and flexibility. All three are equally important, if you leave out one your body will most likely develop muscular imbalances which can lead to discomfort and ultimately to injury. I consistently see clients come to me with an injury from overuse or lack of mobility. Many people leave out stretching for lack of time, focusing on cardio or strength training only, eventually leaving them experiencing pain or discomfort. Once we are able to incorporate all three elements into their workout they are able to recover from their injury.
Many people are reluctant to do weight training for fear of developing big muscles, or they are unaware of its importance. Regular strength training isn’t just to develop muscle mass, it’s also essential to protect your joints from injury. As you increase muscle mass you burn more calories, helping with weight management, and most importantly preventing the natural loss of lean muscles mass that comes with aging. You don’t have to go to the gym to lift heavy weights to get your resistance training in, you can do body weight resistance by doing planks or adding small weights to your Pilates routine. Most importantly is allows us to lead our daily lives with greater ease.
It is important to train our bodies in four areas of exercise to achieve a well rounded, fully functional body. That includes endurance, strength, balance, and flexibility. Training in all aspects can reduce the chance of injury and boredom so you are more likely to stick to a regular workout routine.
ENDURANCE: Training to improve your cardiovascular endurance. Aerobic exercise at high intensity keeping your heart healthy and functioning at optimal capacity.
STRENGTH: Resistance training for optimal strength gains. It is important to get some type of strength training, usually through weights or body weight exercises.
BALANCE: Improving your posture control for improved balance ability and fall prevention. Yoga and Pilates are exceptional ways to improve your balance.
FLEXIBILITY: Mobility in our joints for full range of motion. If we train in just one modality we tend to overuse those muscles becoming unbalanced and constricting mobility.
My workouts cover aspects of all of these through my Pilates, Yoga, resistance, and HIIT videos.
Pilates helped me come back after a back injury and return to dancing professionally. Eventually, once I added stretching, cardio and resistance training into my fitness routine, I was performing with greater ease and at a higher level than before my injury.
WEIGHTS: Adding small weights is an efficient way to add a strength aspect into your workout while you are doing a class. It is especially important to include resistance training in our workouts as we age. We lose muscles mass at a quicker rate when we age, so we need to work even harder at maintaining our strength.
PROPS: Bands/straps/blocks/balls/yoga wheel: I may incorporate props into my classes. Props are a great way to target specific areas of the body you are working on. It keeps your workout interesting and fresh by adding new challenges.
Styles
Pilates is the main modality I work in, however I incorporate other modalities into my workouts to address other fitness needs. Here are other styles that I include in my videos or my one on one training.
YOGA: I mix yoga poses into Pilates classes to help improve flexibility of muscles and to add an extra balance challenge.
HIIT: High Intensity Interval Training. Alternating between short rounds of high intensity movements followed by short rest periods. I will add rounds of HIIT within a workout, using the pilates exercise itself to perform the round or using light weights.
STRETCHING: I include stretching into my workouts to make sure we are stretching the muscles we just worked to prevent tightness. I also have some videos where stretching is the main focus.
BARRE: Exercises which are dance based, often performed standing at barre similar to how a ballet class begins. I use a wall for this portion of the workout rather than a ballet barre. Usually they are small movements targeting a specific muscle group.
MYOFASCIAL RELEASE: A type of gentle massage that releases tightness in your myofascial tissue, a network of tissue that spreads throughout your entire body and connects your muscles, joints, and bones. I often use small balls and foam rollers for this.