Today, I had some serious pent-up energy going on. All day I was wired, from chasing my daycare kids through the park (I never do that. Seriously. It just riles them up), to not being able to sit and relax and enjoy an evening of watching TV (I do that all the time. Seriously. It's my life). I was also giving in to random impulses and one of them, thankfully and healthily enough, was that I wanted to get back into doing Pilates.
I had a brief fling with Pilates back in university, when my roomies and I decided to follow the regimen set out for us on a DVD we got from a cereal box, and we may have gone to a few yoga classes at the uni gym as well, but really, the routine didn't stick for me. For one thing, we didn't have the space for it in our house, really. And after I got out of university, not having the roomies to do it with me was uninspiring. But I now know the basics of ab-work, and I had the idea that I would probably want a mat to do it on, so I decided, since I couldn't sit still anyway, that I would go out and look for a new Pilates DVD to follow.
My brief search at Indigo was fruitless, but I did invest in a mat so as to not bruise my tailbone on my hardwood floors. When I got home, I did a bit of Googling, and decided to hop right into something recognizable. The first thing I found was a quick 8 minute-ish video on YouTube from Erin Huggins with a really basic starter, that really looked like a warm-up to me. Remembering that my abilities in Pilates were probably down the toilet, I decided to give it a try. Videos are a lot more helpful to me than instruction books, I have to see someone doing it before I "get" what they mean.
I went through the moves in the video twice, since once didn't really feel like I had gotten "warm," and then just sort of started winging it by using some of what I remembered, and some tips from this site. I started with some chest lifts, and then did some more of the leg lifts from the video, some side kicks, and then I tried out something I made up: a practice-plank. You know how to do a "girly push-up?" That, but planking. So forearms on the ground in a triangle, and knees down. I held that position for a minute and thought "hey, that wasn't so bad." Silly, silly me. Anyway.
For the next step, I tried to do something a little more regimented, and did 5 sets of 20 chest lifts followed by 10 leg extensions on either side.. I couldn't find any instructions on how to do the leg extensions, so I did it from memory: lay with your back flat and lift your legs into "chair" position (bent 90 degrees, essentially), then extend one out towards the ground, without touching the ground, and pull it back in, then extend the other one out, and etc. So extend right, then left, that's one. Right, left, that's two. Count to ten. Etc. So that set came to a total of 100 chest lifts and 50 leg extensions.
At this point I was feeling like a total rock star, so I decided, what the heck, I'm gonna try a real plank and see how it goes. Apparently what I think of as a "real" plank is a "dolphin arm" plank, a variation from yoga, and some people think it's harder, according to this page. This was what I remembered though, so I went with it. I don't like full push-up position, it makes my arms hurt before my abs give out. I made it to 58 seconds before completely collapsing, and I'm really happy about that. After that, I really didn't think I could do anything more, so I just did some deep breathing as a "cool-down" and then that was it. My muscles were a bit shaky (still are, about an hour later), but that's probably because they really haven't had this kind of use in a while! I feel sure that they'll get accustomed to it.
My sister, who I Skyped with immediately afterward, said that I should write down everything I do in this quest to reclaim Pilates glory, so that she can learn about it and maybe give it a try. If I do end up finding a good DVD, I think that will go a long way to challenging my abilities, but I think I will keep doing at least that mini-workout of chest lifts, leg extensions, and plank. I'll keep poking around YouTube and such for other inspirations and see how it goes. And, if I remember to, post it on here!
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