[movement] "one Pilates per week"
Oct. 8th, 2021 11:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaberettI mentioned last week that I've been doing "one Pilates per week" for about nine months now; before that, according to my notes I seem to have been managing about once a fortnight, on average, through much of 2020, which I am mildly surprised by!
My introduction to Pilates was actually back in 2017, via the UCLH hypermobility clinic (as previously discussed).
The UCLH classes were, obviously, specifically tailored for people with hypermobility. We were explicitly & emphatically encouraged to go at our own pace -- to move slowly; to do only as many repetitions of each movement as felt comfortable; to modify exercises to make them harder or, more often, easier; and, if anything felt at all uncomfortable, to stop and just focus on our breathing until the class moved on to the next exercise.
For me, the foundation of in-person lessons led by an instructor who was competent to identify when I was hyperextending and show me what "correct" felt like was absolutely necessary for me to feel comfortable coming back around to doing any of this at home. Even so, in 2017 a day with a Pilates class (or a gym session!) was a day when I didn't do any other physiotherapy, & I was significantly put off trying to do any at home, unsupervised, after the week where I decided I was going to count up to ten reps and... promptly infuriated my bad knee to the point that it took several weeks to recover, & had to back a long way off on everything while it sorted itself out.
The UCLH classes varied the repertoire week by week. There were commonalities, but we definitely weren't just doing the same things in the same order all the time. I knew I wasn't going to manage that unguided, and I knew that I was... unlikely... to find audio classes that worked for me, and that I wasn't comfortable going to classes at my gym aimed at healthy people with an instructor who didn't know anything about hypermobility.
So I bought some books! From charity shops!
Specifically, I bought one book that contained a lot of anatomical background (actual labelled diagrams of the musculoskeletal system!) and a bunch of exercises I didn't recognise -- PilateSystem, published by hamlyn in 2001. The other is much less anatomically detailed but included some exercises I recognised from the UCLH classes that weren't included in the hamlyn: Simply Pilates (Instant Master Class). Both books contain photo + text descriptions of exercises, including things to watch out for/avoid & variations and progressions.
As for the actual practice: what I actually "need" to do to cross off "I did Pilates this week" on my glorified sticker chart is: get out the mat; lie down on the mat; and do ten slow breaths paying attention to what I'm doing with my core muscles during them. If I am feeling really enthusiastic I can optionally add some pelvic tilts! But just getting the mat out, and lying down, and concentrating on my breathing for a minute or so? is Enough to count as Did The Thing. See also: Just One Note being sufficient for music practice.
But! I do in fact also structure the Getting Onto The Mat in a way to make it as easy as possible to do more, from there. A & I exercise buddy: we aim to Do An Exercise on Thursday evening, once he's emerged from work. If Thursday doesn't work (because migraine or exhaustion or or or) I have until Sunday to either manage a full sequence or give it up as a bad job and just lie down and breathe. I have my books in reach of the place where I unroll the mat. I alternate which I have on my book chair (e.g.), so as to alternate sequences and vary the movements without actually having to engage executive function. I absolutely have been keeping this all up vastly more reliably since I started bullet journalling and actually made the sticker chart.
On days when I was up to doing more than just breathing, I started out with more-or-less keeping going through the book until either my knee started complaining or the amount of time I was spending lying on the mat staring at the ceiling between exercises exceeded about five minutes. Sometimes, if the issue was a grumbly knee, I'd skip exercises in the sequence that would aggravate it further. I would, at the beginning, start out doing at most the minimum number of reps of the most basic forms the book recommended -- and often much less than that.
And then, very gradually, I increased it, and now I am at the point where I am contemplating acquiring some more books -- preferably still with a strong focus on anatomy -- in the interests of adding more variety. (I keep flapping about what to do with the hamlyn book, in fact, because it's subdivided into a number of sections and there's no clear advice on how to integrate them, so I keep getting to the end of the main sequence, staring at the shit that requires weights, and going Not Today.)
In summary: I'm managing to keep this up through (1) a lot of structure, (2) a glorified sticker chart that Gives Me Dopamine, and (3) a very achievable Designated Acceptable minimum quantity.
It helps that I get endorphins out of it as well! And that I'm enjoying being stronger and getting better at isolating individual muscles and generally feeling a sense of increasing mastery! But I also cannot help but laugh a little that the endorphins Do Not Condescend To Arrive until after I am done with the Pilates and have rolled the mat up to put it away, where they reliably show up 20 minutes more-or-less into using the exercise bike rather than needing me to stop first...
My introduction to Pilates was actually back in 2017, via the UCLH hypermobility clinic (as previously discussed).
The UCLH classes were, obviously, specifically tailored for people with hypermobility. We were explicitly & emphatically encouraged to go at our own pace -- to move slowly; to do only as many repetitions of each movement as felt comfortable; to modify exercises to make them harder or, more often, easier; and, if anything felt at all uncomfortable, to stop and just focus on our breathing until the class moved on to the next exercise.
For me, the foundation of in-person lessons led by an instructor who was competent to identify when I was hyperextending and show me what "correct" felt like was absolutely necessary for me to feel comfortable coming back around to doing any of this at home. Even so, in 2017 a day with a Pilates class (or a gym session!) was a day when I didn't do any other physiotherapy, & I was significantly put off trying to do any at home, unsupervised, after the week where I decided I was going to count up to ten reps and... promptly infuriated my bad knee to the point that it took several weeks to recover, & had to back a long way off on everything while it sorted itself out.
The UCLH classes varied the repertoire week by week. There were commonalities, but we definitely weren't just doing the same things in the same order all the time. I knew I wasn't going to manage that unguided, and I knew that I was... unlikely... to find audio classes that worked for me, and that I wasn't comfortable going to classes at my gym aimed at healthy people with an instructor who didn't know anything about hypermobility.
So I bought some books! From charity shops!
Specifically, I bought one book that contained a lot of anatomical background (actual labelled diagrams of the musculoskeletal system!) and a bunch of exercises I didn't recognise -- PilateSystem, published by hamlyn in 2001. The other is much less anatomically detailed but included some exercises I recognised from the UCLH classes that weren't included in the hamlyn: Simply Pilates (Instant Master Class). Both books contain photo + text descriptions of exercises, including things to watch out for/avoid & variations and progressions.
As for the actual practice: what I actually "need" to do to cross off "I did Pilates this week" on my glorified sticker chart is: get out the mat; lie down on the mat; and do ten slow breaths paying attention to what I'm doing with my core muscles during them. If I am feeling really enthusiastic I can optionally add some pelvic tilts! But just getting the mat out, and lying down, and concentrating on my breathing for a minute or so? is Enough to count as Did The Thing. See also: Just One Note being sufficient for music practice.
But! I do in fact also structure the Getting Onto The Mat in a way to make it as easy as possible to do more, from there. A & I exercise buddy: we aim to Do An Exercise on Thursday evening, once he's emerged from work. If Thursday doesn't work (because migraine or exhaustion or or or) I have until Sunday to either manage a full sequence or give it up as a bad job and just lie down and breathe. I have my books in reach of the place where I unroll the mat. I alternate which I have on my book chair (e.g.), so as to alternate sequences and vary the movements without actually having to engage executive function. I absolutely have been keeping this all up vastly more reliably since I started bullet journalling and actually made the sticker chart.
On days when I was up to doing more than just breathing, I started out with more-or-less keeping going through the book until either my knee started complaining or the amount of time I was spending lying on the mat staring at the ceiling between exercises exceeded about five minutes. Sometimes, if the issue was a grumbly knee, I'd skip exercises in the sequence that would aggravate it further. I would, at the beginning, start out doing at most the minimum number of reps of the most basic forms the book recommended -- and often much less than that.
And then, very gradually, I increased it, and now I am at the point where I am contemplating acquiring some more books -- preferably still with a strong focus on anatomy -- in the interests of adding more variety. (I keep flapping about what to do with the hamlyn book, in fact, because it's subdivided into a number of sections and there's no clear advice on how to integrate them, so I keep getting to the end of the main sequence, staring at the shit that requires weights, and going Not Today.)
In summary: I'm managing to keep this up through (1) a lot of structure, (2) a glorified sticker chart that Gives Me Dopamine, and (3) a very achievable Designated Acceptable minimum quantity.
It helps that I get endorphins out of it as well! And that I'm enjoying being stronger and getting better at isolating individual muscles and generally feeling a sense of increasing mastery! But I also cannot help but laugh a little that the endorphins Do Not Condescend To Arrive until after I am done with the Pilates and have rolled the mat up to put it away, where they reliably show up 20 minutes more-or-less into using the exercise bike rather than needing me to stop first...