My near death experience

After my roaring success with hot yoga earlier in the week, I decided to try out Pilates. I've never done Pilates before, and had no idea what to expect. Someone on twitter told me it was easy - easier than yoga, so I went in feeling very confident.

I sat on my nice squishy yoga mat and chatted to another lady who was doing pilates for the first time. She, like me, was a little overweight, but carried her weight in her tummy rather than her hips, thighs and chest like me. We had both done hot yoga earlier in the week and loved it, so were back to try something new. We were still chatting when our instructor walked in. She was one of those 'yoga types', you know, the women who are really skinny, but muscular at the same time, but not bulky muscles, rather, very long, lean ones. Her stomach was totally flat, and she didn't even have that little bulge in her tummy when she bent over.

She's pretty much my body idol - she still had curves (little boobs though :( ). Every time I go to one of these sort of classes, I see the instructors and truly believe that the yoga/pilates stuff works. They all look amazing, but I guess the gym probably wouldn't hire chubby instructors!

Anyway, the first 15 minutes of the class was great. We went over how to stand and breathe, then got onto the floor for a warmup. By god, that warmup alone made my abs hurt - I was sure that this must be it until our lovely instructor announced that we were going to work on our 'powerhouse'. My new friend and I exchanged horrified looks - and just got worse and worse! I could to about 5 reps of everything before I was sure that my abs/thighs/butt was going to explode, but managed to finish (albeit sloppily) pretty much everything.

The highlight of pilates for me was definitely the rolling on the floor. We had to sit on the floor with our legs bent up, then put our arms between our legs and grab the outsides of our opposite legs. That probably doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense, so just picture a very chubby frog. We had a rounded back, and just had to fall backwards then roll forwards again. It was fun, and pretty much the only thing during pilates that I could do without feeling like one more rep was going to kill me.

When the class finished, I looked around at everyone else. There were about 8 people in the class - one was an elderly man, probably at least 65. He approached the instructor and informed her it was his first class. You should have see the looks my neighbour and I gave him! He was probably 30,000 x stronger than me!

All in all, pilates was freaking hard. @Kassh must be superwoman if she thinks pilates is easy!!! In saying that, I think I might have to go back next week! I'm back tomorrow for another hot yoga class which hopefully won't be as hard as my pilates!

Hot Yoga

A new yoga/Pilates studio has opened upstairs in Porirua City Fitness called Abundance. A few years ago, I was a member of PCF, but quit after I stopped going to the gym. You can get a separate membership to Abundance only (without being a member of PCF). They offer mat pilates, machine pilates, basic yoga and hot power yoga.

I've done yoga classes a few times before (nowhere near a regular, but more like once a week for 6-8 weeks), and I grew up doing ballet, so I was quite flexible. I'm finding as I do more swimming and running, I'm getting less and less flexible, and I think flexible is very important for many reasons. I also found yoga quite relaxing when I've done it in the past, so I thought it would be a great thing to do alongside the C25k program.

I was quite worried about doing hot yoga, yoga is hard enough as it is, and I'm not a person who suffers in the heat well. I tweeted about it, asking if anyone had done it before and got lots of replies saying that the room would be about 40degrees, 40% humidity, and would get very very hot. Apparently, the purpose of it is to loosen your muscles and make you sweat out all the toxins in your body.

Understandably, I went into the class a little bit wary of how hard it would be. The first class is free, then you can buy 2 classes for $10 to see if you like it. They have done a major upgrade to the gym since I was a member, and the upstairs area has totally changed. I spoke to a couple of the ladies while we were waiting outside for the class before ours to start, and I was quite relieved to hear that they hadn't done hot yoga before either.

The class was really great - tiring, and very hard on my weakling arms, but I felt stretched and relaxed. The heat did make me sweat a lot, but it wasn't unbearable. I'm definitely going to go back. Today my shoulders are really sore, they have that nice 'I've exercised' feeling which is good because I haven't been getting that from running.

I'm going to be going to mat pilates tomorrow. I've never been to pilates before and I have no idea what to expect. Initally, I thought it was a really good deal to join, but when I worked it out, it's not so great. It's $18/class if you're not a member, or if you are a member, it's $14.40/class + $19/month. If you go to two classes a week, that's $135 a month. Most other yoga classes are about $15/session.