Do not Confuse Your Pregnancy Pilates with Pilates
Pilates is always a good idea, but Pilates while pregnant will be different from Pilates in general.
Was your very first encounter with Pilates during the time when you were pregnant, or just after you had given birth? I hear many women who start practicing Pilates during or after pregnancy. But, the Pilates you do during and right after pregnancy, is not to be confused with Pilates in general.
Pilates is a great form of workout in the sense that you pay much attention to your core and inner muscles that help you gain a better posture and body control. It is also a very good form of workout, as it pays attention to your limitation of movement. Hence, almost everyone can do Pilates. You enhance the weight and progress into more advanced exercises that requires more body control, strength and flexibility, by time. You build up the exercises according to your range of movement.
That is why doing Pilates is also popular when you are pregnant and is recovering from having given birth. But, it is important to understand that, if the first time you do Pilates, is when you are pregnant, it looks a lot different in intensity and form of exercises, compared to when you are not pregnant, or recovering from having given birth.
I met with the Pilates instructor, Jaime White, to understand her view on Pilates. You can read more about her in this article where she talks about the female body, Pilates and fashion.
Pilates is an unbelievable exercise method that helps bodies become more in balanced. Pilates can be tailored for any body, injured or very athletic. It is a full body workout that uniformly develops and reinforces inherent movement patterns that help us decrease degeneration and increase our ability to move more efficiently.
– Jaime White, aslo seen on the picture below, pregnant with her baby twins.
Pilates performed when you are pregnant, will limit the kind of exercises that you would otherwise be able to do in Pilates. In Pilates there are many exercises when you hold a plank position in various forms, as well as laying flat on your back and also the kind of exercises where you round up the upper body, or lift the legs over your head, like the roll over. For various reasons such positions are not always to be recommended when pregnant.
Therefore, Pilates performed when pregnant is usually focusing more on side lying exercises, sitting and standing exercises. And here you can do a lot of awesome exercises to strengthen your posture, core, pelvic floor, and shoulders while pregnant. You can work on both the mat or the Pilates machines. The Chair is an amazing Pilates equipment to work on during pregnancy, and so is the Cadillac and Reformer.
If you start with Pilates during pregnancy it is really to recommend to also keep going long after you have given birth, in order to understand all variations and what an amazing workout it is. In Pilates you are never fully learned, you can always dig into more advanced and challenging movements both in terms of flexibility, endurance but also strength.
