A blog about Pilates and fitness

Gymnastics. Sport of the young. The youngest athletes in the Olympic games, with an average age of female athletes being just 19 . But it isn’t a hard and fast rule that gymnasts retire young. Turning that rule - and herself - upside down is Johanna Quaas, still competing in her nineties! Born in Saxony, Germany, in 1925, Johanna is a few months older than the Queen. She took part in her first gymnastics competition in 1934, and although her career was interrupted by World War II and a subsequent ban on gymnastics by the Allied Control Council until 1947, she never lost her love of the sport. Following her marriage and the birth of three children, Johanna became a PE teacher and coach to young gymnasts, but did not resume competing. According to website sixty+me.com , “people take one of two paths in their sixties. Either they become a more extreme version of the person that they have always been. Or, they broaden their perspective and become the person that they always wanted to be. J...

Last Thursday, I hosted a Run For Your Life session which combined walking, jogging and running - a type of session called fartlek (Swedish for "speedplay"). I was asked by one of the participants whether this is what they should be doing during a race. Great question! Let's say you're at Parkrun and you know can't run continuously for 5 km, then it's absolutely fine to intersperse your running with the occasional walk to catch your breath. This is a great way to make longer distances achievable, particularly if you are new to running, or to that distance. However, if you know you can run the distance and want to maximise the speed overall, then you will find it best to run either at a steady pace, or run slightly faster in the second half of the race than the first. In practice, most people tend to run a bit too fast at the start, and steadily slow down during a race. This means early exhaustion, and spending most of the race tired! If you can learn to pace y...

Imported from janemansley.com blog post 16/8/2019 This week we have a guest blog coming to you from Myra, who is sharing her experience of getting into running, culminating in finishing a Parkrun - hopefully the first of many! She writes: I started running early last year. Most people have some sort of New Year's Resolutions. Mine were very vague, but included a feeling that it would be nice if I could jog for a mile. There have been a couple times in my life when I've tried to take up jogging/running as a sport, but my interest rapidly waned as I didn't have any real goals and I didn't particularly like running. Still, in January 2018 I thought: humans are supposed to be good at running, so I really ought to be able to run, even if for only just a mile. This remained a vague thought until March, when there was an email at work about a ladies lunchtime beginner running club starting up. The idea was that we would meet up for a relaxed pace run of about 2 mi...

A few months ago I noticed a dragging sensation in my pelvis while out running. On the first occasion, I didn't take action, but when it happened again a week later I hot-footed it to a women's health physiotherapist to get it checked out. ​"Loss of strength in the pelvic floor," she said, "is typical of women in the perimenopause." I nodded as if this information was no surprise to me, while the news that THE CHANGE was upon me blared inside my head like a klaxon. Perimenopause is the stage of a woman's life, typically in her 40s or sometimes earlier, when declining oestrogen levels signal the transition towards menopause. The shortening of my menstrual cycle and the lengthening of each period had come on so gradually that it had barely registered. Disrupted sleep and anxiety are no surprise in 2020, and with the weather this summer it hasn't been until the last couple of weeks that it's become clear that the heat that sometimes wakes me overnig...

Pilates teaches us to create strength in our body firstly by opposing gravity. Standing tall is an example of this. There's a reason that I'm always saying, "Reach the crown of your head to the ceiling!". Pilates elder, Lolita San Miguel spoke of a gold string attached to a helium balloon above your head. Using this elegant imagery, she said: "You are not crunching down in the torso. You are resisting gravity, which is what we are trying to do. We are trying to resist the downward pull of gravity. Axial elongation; lifting through this string."  - Lolita San Miguel . ​ Beyond finding strength by lifting up against gravity, we can also become stronger through opposing movements within our own bodies. This means that we are building strength by lengthening through the body at the same time as we are avoiding compression. ​Let's focus on spine stretch forward. We start sitting tall - lengthening the head away from the floor. At this point we are opposing gr...

Group fitness is awesome - you can't beat it for value for money and a sense of community. But have you considered the benefits of private lessons? Individual lessons are a chance for you to work on a personal programme tailored to your needs and goals. These sessions are great for a variety of reasons, such as to: ​address particular aches and pains  strengthen your body to support fitness or sporting goals gain fitness and confidence before joining a group class advance your practice and technique with personal guidance  When you take a private studio lesson at Ease Pilates you will have access to large equipment such as the Wunda chair and cadillac that aren't accessible in group classes. The exercises performed on these pieces of studio apparatus relate to the matwork that Pilates students are familiar with, but offer support to allow you to refine your technique (ie. avoiding the little cheats we all have!) and help to bridge the gap between different levels. It is highly...

Let's talk about bones. We are very focused on the health of muscles and joints, but at least of equal importance are your bones. I'll start with a little anatomy. Your bones are made of compact and cancellous bone - a bit like a Crunchie bar. The compact bone (that's the chocolate) is really hard and strong, but also heavy and dense. Cancellous bone (the honeycomb) is light and porous, allowing blood vessels and marrow to be contained within it.  Our bones experience a lifelong cycle of old bone getting cleared away and new bone being built. All being well, our bones develop increasing strength - or bone density - throughout childhood and young adulthood, up until our early 30s: building exceeds clearing (see the image "healthy bone"). ​ From middle-age onwards, bone density starts to decline. The more bone we lose, the more likely we are to experience fractures. Low bone density is known as osteopenia while very low bone density is known as osteoporosis (see the...