{"id":40,"date":"2015-01-04T21:07:36","date_gmt":"2015-01-05T05:07:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/twoleftfeet.betseypark.com\/tlf\/?p=40"},"modified":"2015-01-04T21:10:24","modified_gmt":"2015-01-05T05:10:24","slug":"am-and-pm-pilates-mat-workouts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/twoleftfeet.betseypark.com\/tlf\/?p=40","title":{"rendered":"AM and PM Pilates Mat Workouts"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>

How do I hate Pilates? Let me count the ways.<\/strong><\/p>\n

There are at least six things about Pilates that make me hate it:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Pilates assumes a level of flexibility and fitness that not everyone has<\/li>\n
  2. Many Pilates DVDs assume prior knowledge of standard Pilates moves<\/li>\n
  3. You invariably spend a lot of the Pilates workout in positions where you can’t see the TV<\/li>\n
  4. Pilates DVDs rarely discuss modifications or show exercisers at different skill levels<\/li>\n
  5. Pilates workouts often require special equipment<\/li>\n
  6. Even though on the surface, Pilates seems like stretching, it just ends up making me feel tense and generally not good enough<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    In case I haven’t mentioned it, I’m not a fan of Pilates. I feel like I should like it, because it seems sort of like yoga, but I just don’t enjoy it. I’m trying to put my preconceived notions about Pilates aside and dive right in to reviewing a new-to-me Pilates DVD: AM and PM Pilates Mat Workouts.<\/p>\n

    Right away my preconceived notions are getting in the way, because AM\/PM workouts always seem kind of presumptuous to me. Do these people really work out twice a day? I think I’ll do the workouts on separate days.<\/p>\n

    The DVD Includes two main workouts (AM with Jillian Hessel, and PM with Ana Cab\u00e1n), each of which runs about 25 minutes. There is also a bonus “Energy Boost” workout of about 12 minutes.<\/p>\n

    The AM workout starts out sitting in a chair and doing a lot of breath work. I’m all in favor of breathing, but I didn’t really understand the goal of the percussive breathing parts where you breathe in and out really quickly. All it did was make me hyperventilate a little.<\/p>\n

    After the breathing section is a longer section on mat work. The first move in this section was to sit gracefully down on the mat from a crossed-leg standing position. Sound like a game of Twister to you? It was. Once\u00a0the instructor\u00a0was nearly to the ground, she announced that you could use your hands if you needed to. I had already fallen down long before I got to the point where my hands could reach the floor.<\/p>\n

    Much of the mat work section was spent lying on the floor where you couldn’t see the TV. Hessel provided detailed descriptions of the moves, but it was still difficult to follow. This is definitely a DVD where you will want to preview (watch it through once without participating, so you know what to expect).<\/p>\n

    Previewing will also let you know that you need a strap for some of the exercises in the mat work section. Don’t have a strap? You can use a towel or a belt (bathrobe belts work especially well).<\/p>\n

    Hessel is the only exerciser in the AM workout, and there is very little discussion of modifications, so I had to make up my own (I modified “The 100”, a standard Pilates move, to my own “The 36”). I also renamed “The Saw” to “The Twister”, because I find the idea of sawing my foot off disturbing even in a metaphorical sense.<\/p>\n

    The AM workout wraps up with a very short “centering” section, which involves more breathing, plus a little bit of stretching and balancing. This was the only section of the AM workout that I really liked; I felt like I was really standing tall\u00a0by the end of\u00a0it.<\/p>\n

    I had high hopes for the PM workout, as those are often more mellow than AM workouts. Also, Hessel (the instructor for the AM workout) is clearly 8 feet tall (she must do a lot of those centering exercises). The PM workout instructor (Ana Cab\u00e1n) is proportioned more like me, so I thought that might give me an edge in the PM workout.<\/p>\n

    The format for the PM workout was much the same as the AM\u00a0one: a short warm-up section with a lot of stretching, a longer mat work section, and a cool down with more stretching at the end.<\/p>\n

    It also suffered from some of the same issues that made the AM workout so difficult: Pilates jargon, inability to see the TV, and lack of modifications for beginners. However, despite the fact that Cab\u00e1n used more Pilates jargon and did less in-depth explaining than Hessel, I still found this workout slightly easier to follow than the AM one. This is not saying much.<\/p>\n

    All I’ll say about the 12-minute bonus Energy Boost workout with Cab\u00e1n is that it involved a lot of jumping up and down in place, something that I am much too uncoordinated to do successfully.<\/p>\n

    In conclusion, Pilates remains fairly inaccessible to me, and this DVD will not stay on my bookshelf. However, I’m not ruling out Pilates completely. I may try out another Ana Cab\u00e1n DVD … I see she has one called Easy Pilates. How hard can it be?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    How do I hate Pilates? Let me count the ways. There are at least six things about Pilates that make me hate it: Pilates assumes a level of flexibility and fitness that not everyone has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":39,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[10,12,11,9],"class_list":["post-40","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-strength","tag-ana-caban","tag-gaiam-dvds","tag-jillian-hessel","tag-pilates"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/twoleftfeet.betseypark.com\/tlf\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/AMandPMPilatesMatWorkouts.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p82LSK-E","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/twoleftfeet.betseypark.com\/tlf\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/twoleftfeet.betseypark.com\/tlf\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/twoleftfeet.betseypark.com\/tlf\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/twoleftfeet.betseypark.com\/tlf\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/twoleftfeet.betseypark.com\/tlf\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=40"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/twoleftfeet.betseypark.com\/tlf\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41,"href":"https:\/\/twoleftfeet.betseypark.com\/tlf\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40\/revisions\/41"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/twoleftfeet.betseypark.com\/tlf\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/39"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/twoleftfeet.betseypark.com\/tlf\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=40"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/twoleftfeet.betseypark.com\/tlf\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=40"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/twoleftfeet.betseypark.com\/tlf\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=40"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}