You can pick which part of the workout you want to do . . . .
Disadvantages:
. . . which may encourage you not to do the whole thing !
Recommend to potential buyers:
yes
Full review
I asked Santa for a pilates DVD this Christmas, and he decided that this one was the best for me. Pilates works on building up your core muscles, and improves flexibility and core stability. Whilst doing the workout's, you can feel it working but you don't get sweaty and out of breath, so it gives the impression that you're not really doing 'proper' exercise, but trust me you will feel it the next day!
I am a busy person with little time (or motivation!) to exercise, and I also get bored of running on a tredmill at the gym, doing sit-up's on an exercise ball, or anything else just as monotonous, so I thought I would probably enjoy pilates because its fairly varied, and you don't generally feel absolutely knackered at the end of it!
If any of these complaints sound familiar to you, then this is the DVD for you. It is made up of 5 10 minute work-outs, which are all individual, targeting different body parts, without being too repetitive. It's great if you don't have enough time to do an hour's exercise a day, because you can select which exercise you want to do, or if you've got a particular part of your body you want to tone up, you can just focus on that part. OR you can combine every session to make up a full 50 minute work out - ouch!
***Stomach*** This session is a mixture of sit-up's and various leg movements to strengthen your upper and lower stomach. It starts with 'the hundred', a standard Pilates warm-up, and continues with crunches, something called the 'frogs legs', and various others.
*** Legs and buns *** All of these exercises involve laying down, which is great becuase it really doesn't feel like you're exercising!! It starts with leg lifts on each side, then a variety of exercises, like 'the mermaid', and hip lifts. You can really feel it working in your thighs and bum!!
*** Sculpting Pilates *** This section revolves around using dumbells to strengthen your arms, chest, and shoulders through various arm movements. She recommends you keep the weights fairly light, only about 2kg, as the aim is to sculpt and shape your upper body, rather than to gain muscle.
*** Pilates Burn *** I must say, I didn't exactly break into a sweat during this section, she makes a few comments about how your heart rate should be raising and you should be sweating a bit, but maybe I wasn't doing it right! The movements are still all fairly slow, and she combines press-up's, leg lifts, balancing, and 'swimming' which burn more calories than the other Pilates exercises.
*** Pilates for flexibility *** I tend to be tired out and aching by this stage, so it's lucky it's fairly gentle! It invloves a lot of stretching and slow movements to improve your flexibility, as well as stretching out all the muscles you've used during the work-out.
The lady who presentst his DVD is called Lara Hudson. She's very good at explaining how to do each exercise, tells you exactly how to breathe (apparantly inhaling and exhaling at the right times helps to strengthen your muscles even more), and also gives you adaptations and modifications to a lot of exercises if you are finding it too easy or too hard. She has an american accent, which does get slightly annoying by the end, but it's not patronising, and is strangely encouraging - she seems to say 'that's really nice" a lot! You will need a mat to lay on, and also dumbells for the sculpting session (or something equivalent, such as tins of beans!!) The one thing I think they could have improved on is the music in the background. It's very quiet, and is quite a boring instrumental beat.
I would definately recommend this DVD, particularly if you're a beginner. It does work if you stick at it!!
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Ordinary
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