Winsor Pilates Intro & Yoga

[Guest guest]

For strength training I pulled out the box of Winsor pilates VHS tapes I got at a garage sale last summer. It is the complete set. The woman I bought them from (for about $5 I think) had wanted DVD but ordered VHS instead and never used any of them and this was my first time too. I wanted to learn to do the moves right (I've been following along with other videos and never really sure about my form on some things) so I did the intro tape today. It is 30 minutes and has Mari Winsor instructing with 2 exercisers. One woman does the full movement and the other does the modified form. She teaches proper breathing and then 7 moves: the hundred, the roll-up, single leg circles, rolling like a ball, single leg stretch, double leg stretch and spine stretch forward. It is not a workout. It is an instructional video. They demonstrate one movement of each exercise at a time and you do them each, then the entire exercise is done as one unit of movements. It is, from an educational standpoint, very well done and I have more confidence now than I did. I also noticed I'm way stronger through my core than I thought I was. She has you hold some of those positions for quite a while and for most of them, plus putting my head up from the floor to see the TV better, I was able to hold them as long as she wanted us to. That was cool. I'm looking forward to doing other workouts in the set soon. I might have to have a pilates day once a week for a while so I can use them and keep fresh with what I learned today.

After pilates I did 10 minutes of yoga from Rodney Yee's Yoga for Energy. I did the Awakening sequence. It was nice for my very tight hips and quads. My hips, by the way, are finally recovering from P90. It seemed like for the last month or so I could never get rid of the soreness in my hips from all the squats and lunges you do in Sculpt 3-4. It told myself that needed to completely go away before I do any more lower body workouts. I think it is almost gone now.

I also did day 1 of my personal pushups challenge (keeping up with the progress I made doing P90). After nearly a week off from pushups it was a struggle to do 12 on my toes, that last one almost didn't make it into the count, but I did it. Having the chart right there in my workout area reminded me to do them so that was a success.

I've gotten almost all my housework done, did my errands already and am taking a short break to type this. The timer went off so now I'm off to finish housework then I'm going to spend a little bit of time cataloging my workouts (I have a very large pile I brought upstairs sitting on the couch next to me right now).