Pilates Exercise Videos Tips

Choosing a Pilates Video

Try to get reviews and recommendations from other people and web sites. Obviously one of the best is Amazon.com. It provides tons of good user feedback and reviews. Also, if you work with or know a Pilates instructor ask him/her for a good recommendation.

How to Start Using Your Pilates Video

First, watch the entire video at least once or twice in order to get a 'feel' for the instructor's style and rhythm. Make sure you have a comfortable workout area with a thick rug or a Pilates/Yoga mat (you can find nice ones at MegaFitness.com).

General Tips

- Try to learn the exercise quickly so you don't have to keep looking up at the television. It's much better to be able to just listen to the instructor's voice and follow along by memory.

- Having a friend follow the Pilates video with you makes the experience much more enjoyable. You can also help each other by correcting form and technique mistakes when you see them.

- If you can, find a certified Pilates instructor who can help you perfect your form and technique. It may cost a little bit of money but it will be well worth it if their help prevents you from making easily-correctable mistakes over and over again!

What are the Best Pilates Videos

The videos getting the most attention lately are the Winsor Pilates videos marketed on television and in fitness magazines. Many people are quite happy with the results they've gotten using this system.

Another good one is the Pilates Workout for Dummies video. This is one of the highest rated Pilates videos at Amazon.com.

Pilates: Your Ticket to a Longer, Leaner Look

Here's a great Pilates article from Discovery Health:

Pilates, an old exercise regimen made fashionable in recent years by athletes and movie stars, builds strength and flexibility without adding bulk.

Unlike conventional weight training, which emphasizes repetition on one muscle group at a time, Pilates focuses on a series of precise, controlled movements that work muscles in several positions. The result: a longer, leaner look such as that seen on such Pilates converts as Madonna and Julia Roberts.

The low-impact exercises concentrate on strengthening the abdomen, lower back and buttocks. They are done on floor mats or by using several pieces of equipment that look like medieval torture devices but are actually gentle on the body.

A Brief History of Pilates
The basic tools of the system brought to the U.S. in the 1920s by its German immigrant creator, Joseph H. Pilates, use springs and pulleys to vary resistance. The most common, called a Reformer, consists of stirrups for either hands or feet and a bed-like platform that slides along a track. The Cadillac, or trapeze table, is surrounded by a metal frame and includes a push-through bar, a trapeze bar and leg straps.

Pilates had a lifelong interest in body conditioning. As a frail child determined to get stronger, he worked to become an accomplished skier, diver, gymnast and boxer. He developed the exercise method while he was detained in an English internment camp for German citizens at the onset of World War I.

Pilates opened a studio in New York City in 1926. Because many of the exercises focused on posture and body alignment, Pilates' approach quickly drew the notice of dancers, who also enjoyed being able to develop strength and flexibility without adding bulk.

In recent years Pilates has become the rage at health clubs. In addition to professional performers, housewives, grandparents—even pregnant women—are benefiting from the technique.

Read more...

Pilates: Devotees call exercise method ‘the new aerobics’

(Mail Tribune) - At 51, P.J. O’Keefe had a bad back, "no abs at all" and 30 pounds of extra weight. Two years later, she said, "I feel fabulous, look like a goddess and have abs that make my 20-year-old son weep."

She credits Pilates.

Although the exercise method, pronounced, "puh-lah-teez," has been around for decades, its popularity has soared in the past couple of years. Today, followers pack classes at area fitness centers, including one at the Ashland YMCA, which began teaching the exercises this spring.

"It’s the new aerobics," said Laurie Evans, the Ashland Y’s health enhancement director. "You have to get here 15 minutes early to get a spot where you can see the instructor."

The regimen, brought to this country in 1926 by German-born Joseph Pilates, is a series of easy-enough movements that blend calisthenics, aerobics and yoga to work "core" muscles of the torso, especially back and abdominals, to improve strength and flexibility.

It does not provide an aerobic or cardiovascular workout, said Y instructor Lin van Heuit-Robbins. Pilates should be augmented with aerobic exercise, she said, and a resistance or weight-training workout for arms and legs.

"It strengthens the core, which is where all gracefulness comes from," said Southern Oregon University physical education professor Laura Jones, who takes Heuit-Robbins’ Wednesday morning classes. "You end up with a chest that’s more open, shoulders that are more down and it protects the spine by keeping the belly in."

Pilates students practice gentle sets of leg lifts, arm lifts, slow sit-ups, supine rocking motions, cycling while on your back and spinal twists using an elastic strap under your feet, an approach that may seem almost too easy until you’re done and notice the toned, relaxed, energized feeling and the spring in your step.

In the Ashland Y’s class, Heuit-Robbins offers verbal cues for different levels of difficulty with each exercise and guides students through breathing.

Pregnant women, the handicapped or those recovering from injuries are specifically guided on the easier levels of each exercise — for instance, expectant moms will do the "swimming" exercise in a standing rather than supine position and with less range of motion.

New mothers Tara Rice and Mia Morrish are doing the workouts to get their bodies back after childbirth, especially the abdominals.

"I get the full stretch and know I’m working each part of the body," said Morrish. "It’s the perfect ab workout."

"You get your muscles back," said Rice, who delivered twins, "and significant increase in back and stomach muscles. You feel relaxed. I think of it as a cross between yoga and weight training."

Nikki Cotton enrolled in the class at her back doctor’s suggestion.

"They said it would help," she said. "It does. I’m stronger. It concentrates directly on the muscles I need to work with — and it’s better than yoga. In yoga, you have to hold the position longer, so it’s not as fun. With Pilates, you move right through each one."

The Y’s Evans said much of the demand for the class comes from baby boomers, the oldest of whom are entering their 60s.

"It’s something they can comfortably do, without any impact on their joints, and really keep in shape as they get older," she said. "They understand they have to use it or lose it."

To meet the demand, the Y is looking at adding another class as soon as it can find more certified instructors, trained by the Physical Mind Institute, a pilates school, the American Council of Exercise and the Aerobics and Fitness Association of America.

Pilates classes are offered in many gyms and dance studios. Some have Pilates workout machines that focus on select muscle groups.

The machines can "load muscles" when you extend as well as contract muscles, said Ashland chiropractor Ilena Rubenstein, who has a Pilates workout studio adjacent to her Balancing Act dance room.

With the machines "you can get in positions you can’t get into on the mat," said Rubenstein. "They force tension into your body gradually and in just the right amounts and make you stay conscious and focused, which increases the effect on your body."

Still Swinging: A Pilates devotee who has been at it for six decades

(Time Health) - Romana Kryzanowska weaves her way through Drago's Gym in midtown Manhattan like a mother hen, tending to her clients, teachers and apprentice instructors. The setting could be just about any well-appointed Pilates studio. What's unique is Kryzanowska, a pint-size dynamo who has taught Pilates for the past six decades — and who has just re-leased a four-volume DVD called Romana's Pilates. "I'm old, but I don't feel old," says Kryzanowska, who turned 81 on June 30.

Kryzanowska, who was born in Detroit the only child of artist parents, has always led an active life. She spent her young years living on an orange plantation in Florida. "I was wild," she says. "I climbed trees and swung on grapevines, hanging upside down and going like Tarzan of the Apes from one vine to another."

The family moved to New York City in the mid-1930s, and as a teenager Kryzanowska started classes at the School of American Ballet. Legendary choreographer George Balanchine co-founded the school in 1934, shortly after his arrival in the U.S., to train students for what eventually became the New York City Ballet. Several years later, Kryzanowska developed a painful bone chip in her ankle, and to help her avoid surgery, Balanchine took her to Joseph Pilates. A German immigrant, Pilates, assisted by his wife Clara, had developed a method of body conditioning that was garnering quite a following among the cognoscenti of ballet, dance and music.

Kryzanowska recalls the fateful meeting with Pilates: "He said, 'Well, stay with me five lessons, and if it doesn't get better or well, I'll give you your money back.' It was only $5 in those days. By the third lesson, it felt wonderful. I thought, This is pretty marvelous stuff." Seeing the value of the hundreds of movements Pilates had conceived, Kryzanowska kept going to his studio. "I was there all the time," she says. "And the next thing you knew, he was making me teach everybody."

That was in 1941, and ever since she has been teaching the method, just as she learned it from the master. Today she continues to pass along the legacy through Romana's Pilates, the Pilates teaching business she runs with her daughter Sari Mejia Santo and her granddaughter Daria Pace. Kryzanowska is a firm believer that Pilates, when taught correctly, is for everyone — especially those who are getting on in years. "When they have their first lesson, it's more for the teacher to see what their body's like, what it's willing to do and what exercises you would not do," says Kryzanowska, whose students include people with hip replacements, bad knees and a large variety of bad-back maladies. The technique is about developing "the powerhouse"--the muscles in the abdomen, buttocks and lower back that are the collective point of origin for all Pilates exercises. "I give people homework," she says, "like exercises to do in bed before you even put your feet on the floor in the morning. We don't pop 'em into a class and command them to do a hundred sit-ups!"

For Kryzanowska, her adolescent obsession has turned into a fountain of youth — something she gives to others. "I just do Pilates," she says. "I don't do anything else."