Back At Pilates

Back at work with the pilates instructor, and we're glad that the year begins injury-free for us both. While we're always conscious to work on side bends (lateral flexion) to strengthen the obliques, she decided to revisit back bends in earnest for this quarter. There're so many variations of back bends that can be done on the reformer as each variation is a different movement utilizing different sets of muscles. That's the beauty of pilates- re-visiting movements to nail that perfect form will always be an addiction for me. Hurhurhur.

She's also put me on the Chair loads to train the core. There's a handstand move on the Chair (which is not the usual free-standing handstand in the air) that's simply more of a plank. But when done slow, it's quite a torture. We want to ultimately progress to doing lots of controlled tucks (or flips) on the Cadillac. Tucks are something I can do, but the instructor wants me to up the reps and do it a lot slower with greater control. Now, that is scary. It requires a truckload of upper arm strength, a lot more than doing the inverted split plus walkover on the Cadillac. I'm not sure I'm there yet.

At the end of that first class, I knew I was gonna wake up with aching obliques, lats and rhomboids the next day. The pilates instructor grinned and said, "This is going to be such a fun year!" She's signed up for the MetaSprint Series, and also training for Ironman. Erm, in her jargon and in this context, I think I should be worried! 😂 I've largely ignored her 'encouragement' to do the aquathlon thingies. I might be competitive, but not that into races.