Exercising at home can be boring! Even if you find a Pilates DVD that you love, after the 10th, or 15th time doing it, the excitement of anticipation to do your favorite Pilates workout wanes. That is normal!! Exercising at home allows you to save time and squeeze exercise into a busy schedule, but it often lacks in the motivation department. It's one thing if you know you're meeting a friend at the gym at 6 or 6:30am for a group class or a great workout routing, or if you know you'll be charged if you cancel last minute on your personal trainer, but who is really going to know if you roll over, hit the snooze button, and leave it at that? (We've all done that, by the way!!) Sometimes, getting started can be the hardest part!
And, believe us, we've done all sorts of at home exercise programs, and some are definitely easier to starts and stick with than others!! We even went through a phase three or four years ago where we would do a different workout every morning: Mondays and Fridays were aerobics (we STILL do the Jane Fonda "Challenger" aerobics!!), Tuesdays and Thursdays were "Power Yoga", and Wednesdays were Pilates Mat Workouts. For the Pilates Mat Workouts, we didn't use a Pilates DVD, we just pulled from our knowledge of the exercises and did our own thing. Overwhelmingly, we found that it was MUCH easier to start the workout on Wednesdays. We LOVED Wednesdays.... but that begged the question of WHY???? Why is it so much easier for us to started? Well, after careful analysis, we have broken it down to the fact that you get to start lying down with Pilates....you don't have to jumpstart your body into extreme energy levels immediately. Because you start on the floor, you can do all sorts of breathing and mobilizing exercises, getting your body warm, so that you don't even realize that you're working hard until your awareness kicks in..... and that's a great thing.
And call us super nerds, but we actually like doing the videos on our own site.... it's nice to be taught for a change, even if I'm the one doing the teaching (we must admit, however, it's SO HARD not to pick ourselves to pieces, so we just pretend that we're watching someone else!) But seriously, there's an element of fun in getting to pore through the workout library and choose what workout to do. Neither of us has a stability ball or Bosu at home, but that still leaves ALOT of workout choices. ...And the great thing about mixing up which workout you do? You won't get bored and neither will your body! You'll be much more likely to see results because you'll be working the muscles in different ways, mobilizing in different planes of movement, and so on and so forth. This creates a perfect medium for maximum effectiveness.
And don't forget, WE WELCOME YOUR FEEDBACK!! So far, only a few of you have taken us up on this offer, but PLEASE!! feel free to email us at feedback@ultimatepilatesworkouts.com and let us know what you'd like to see in our next video. We'd love to know!