So many New Year’s resolutions center on losing weight and getting fit either through dieting or exercise, or both. The two facets of health and fitness are inextricably linked. Exercise will help increase weight loss. If you expend more calories than you take in, the simple math says you’ll shed pounds.
But there is an underlying problem that dieters face. For many people, injuries, spinal misalignment, muscle tightness and ailments such as arthritis, cause pain when exercising. Needless to say, an exercise program that causes or increases pain is not going to last! The answer? Try, Pilates!
Pilates
Contrary to popular belief, Joseph Pilates was not a gay ballet dancer, but a nurse and medic in World War I who developed his popular exercise program to rehabilitate wounded soldiers. Pilates is not a bunch of exercises and stretches you do in the gym, but rather a way that you move in life, in all things you do such as standing in line at the grocery store, working on your laptop, doing cardio on the treadmill or walking, running or biking. The Pilates techniques are applied when you do all sports such as swimming, tennis or even golf.
Pilates techniques help your back and joints by:
• Building a strong inner “girdle muscle” or core
• Developing pelvic stability
• Creating long, lean muscles that are strong, yet at the same time, flexible
• Increasing range of motion in the joints
• Elongating the spine and separating the vertebrae
If you have pain, best is to work one-on-one with a Pilates instructor rather than taking a class. However, even a class or a home DVD should bring relief very quickly.
Joint Health Package
To give your body even more of an edge when exercising add the WIN Joint Health Package to your daily regime. Get more details here on Sure2Endure, Flexiblity and WINOmeg3complex in this special WIN Joint Health Package.
Success Story
Latin-American World Champion Dancer, Els, has been dancing since she was only nine years old. Her career has been an exciting thrill ride, traveling around the world, winning championship after championship, realizing true success as an accomplished dancer. “As professional dancers, we became fourth in the world, but soon after that my body began to suffer. We were practicing so much and were constantly dancing — my body got so wrecked that I could no longer dance,” Els recalls, remembering how her knees especially suffered. She was devastated when she had to stop dancing but soon opened a dancing school with her husband, Jan, also a world champion dancer. There they teach approximately 700 students and train 30 competitive dancing couples. Because of how she felt, Els was limited in her teaching and was mainly handling the administrative side of the business.
Through their school, she met distributor Carlos, a former dancer. After hearing her story, Carlos asked Els if she ever tried fish oil. “I was already taking some at the time, but Carlos said, ‘Here try mine.’ He gave me the WINOmeg3complex™,” Els recalls. After a couple days, she was amazed at the results. “It’s as if my body has been oiled from the inside out and is back in top form!” says Els excitedly. “Before when I was teaching, I sometimes had to crawl up the stairs, now I don’t — sometimes I even dance up the stairs!” Els was also pleasantly surprised when after adding WIN’s other products, including BioLean®, BioLean Free®, Accelerator™ and LipoTrim™, she lost the 22 pounds she gained when she stopped dancing and had a child.
For more information and product details go to www.boomerangwellness.com
BWellNow 
Sure, core stability is very important in regards to rehabilitation. But what do you do when someone has an acute facet syndrome, piriformis syndrome, spasms, and/or migraine headaches? Pilates may be a viable option with someone suffering from chronic, mild pain, but it will only aggravate someone with a severe spinal problem. I see people who come in and need help to get in and out of a chair. I’d love to see the look on their face if I told them to get on the floor and do some Pilates. I’m not trying to be trite, but most people in severe pain need a little more advice than “You need to exercise more.” You’ve gotta crawl before you run, afterall. And exactly how does exercise permanently “separate” vertebrae? I’ve always wondered that. If you wanted to acutely separate vertebrae, you need only to hang from a pull up bar, but I digress.
Thank you for your comment.
For issues as serious as you describe, we do not suggest a group class in a gym-like setting. Instead one-on-one lessons with a Pilates certified instructor are the better choice.
Our Pilates instructor rehabilitated her own body after being hit by a car going 40 mph as a pedestrian. She had broken bones [femur/pelvis/hip/etc], torn ACL and SI and facet joint disfunction. Before Pilates she limped and now moves perfectly, without pain.
We have seen this Pilates studio work with 1,000s of people who had been in pain, whose doctors were shocked by their progress. This included professional athletes from the NFL, NBA, MLB and PGA Tour.
The blog post was not suggesting exercise MORE, but to choose an exercise program that you have a chance of sticking to. So many people stop exercising because of neck/back/joint pain during or after exercise. Pilates is a better choice as it can help these issues and ensure compliance.
Pilates is not a bunch of exercises but a series of techniques for moving in all things we do in life.
“Separate” the vertebrae is not a technically accurate term but used for lay people.
Pilates de-compresses the spine through specific work. Actually engaging the TA, psoas and other muscles when moving in all activity will de-compress the spine.
Pilates is too complex a discipline for complete discussion here, but I suggest you research it further.
It would be a great complement to your practice!
Look at http://www.painandbeyond.com and http://www.pilates.com