Bodyweight workouts and Pilates
Bodyweight workouts are those that use your bodweight as the resistance and challenge instead of equipment. Think of lunges, squats, press up, planks. These types of exercises help you tone up and build muscle. Muscle increases the metabolic rate of the body so you burn more calories. The more muscle you have the more fat you can burn so the leaner you become!
Pilates is one of those types of exercises where we often use our own bodyweight as the resistance. This offers quite a few benefits:
1. You get to know your own body and get in tune with it.
2. You don’t need expensive equipment to do it at home.
3. Using your bodyweight has been shown to be an effective way to workout in a short period of time.
4. You can modify the exercises if you feel you are not strong enough whereas it can be harder to reduce the weight of some equipment.
Good Pilates exercises to do that use your bodyweight:
Planks: 1/2 planks, full planks, planks with leg lifts.
Press ups: against a wall, half or full.
Squats
Front leg Pull Back
Roll Ups
The hundred with pumping arms
Double leg stretch
Oyster
Next time you do Pilates think about how you are using your body as a weight/resistance and how you can work against the resistance to work even harder. Think about your arms/legs being heavy as you stretch them away or them being the weights.