If you’re someone who likes to keep up with the hot new thing or try everything new once, you may have noticed that the popularity of fitness classes, like fashion or music, tends to pass by in fads. The 80s brought aerobics, jazzercise, and home workout videos. In the 90s, pilates and the thighmaster were two popular additions. The aughts focused in on spinning, Zumba, and dance fitness classes. Lately, you may have seen running tiktok, weight training, and – you guessed it – pilates. Specifically, mat pilates and bodyweight training.
While you might expect constantly switching your fitness routine to be counterproductive, there is an argument to be made that trying the new fad is good for your health. Variety and surprising your body with new challenges can help to push your training goals to the next level. As explained by University Hospitals, variety can both improve performance and decrease risk of injury. With all these benefits, why wouldn’t you want to switch things up? Besides, we love a fitness trend and are always excited to bring the newest options to all of you.
At the same time, always switching your workouts may affect your ability to build strength and work towards your goals. Consistency is fundamental to reaching our fitness goals. Moreover, knowing what we want to work on and what our fitness goals actually are makes it exponentially easier to work in the right direction of our goals. If we’re constantly trying new things, experiencing new workout machines and classes, you might find that you lose a bit of connection with your body and what those goals are. If you’re going through a time period where you’re feeling this, or even if you just think some extra connection could be useful, we want to recommend you take the time to get back to the basics. By basics, we mean workouts laid bare – no extra equipment or thrills, just you, your body, and utilizing your own bodyweight to help strengthen and tone your muscles.
Training with bodyweight has a lot of advantages. As Harvard Health explains, most body-weight exercises work multiple muscles at once, making it what we call functional exercise, “using more muscles and joints at a time, engaging balance, and mimicking everyday activities”. This type of functional exercise means you’re strengthening your body in a way that prepares it for what you’re using it for in your everyday life. You’ll be able to strengthen more muscles in less time and will help ensure you’re not missing any muscles on your strength training journey.
One of the challenges of bodyweight training can be knowing what to do. For example, If you’ve got a tricep dip machine in front of you, all you have to do to strengthen your triceps is follow the instructions on the machine. But if you’re trying to use bodyweight to strengthen your triceps, you’re going to need to know an exercise to do this. This is wear mat pilates comes in.
Mat pilates is a type of pilates that prioritizes bodyweight training. While you may occasionally use tools for additional support, in class, you’ll find repetition and small differences in positioning can make giant strides towards strengthening our muscles. You’ll find learning proper placement or adjusting the way you do exercises can majorly impact what muscles you’re using and how much impact the exercises have on you. Once you learn how to connect with your muscles in these ways, you’ll be able to carry this knowledge through to all other classes with you.
Want to try a mat pilates class? Find out what options are available at your local studio and we’ll look forwards to welcoming you to a class soon.