Weekly Wrap up. Week 30. 2024. It's the Olympics!

Weekly wrap up. Week 30. 2024

The Olympics is starting!!

Firstly, no you haven't missed a week. A trusty friend pointed out that I was a week out of sync. I couldnt work out what had happened but think that infuriatingly my "The one where I met the PM" somehow got deleted and I repeat ed week 24 again the following week... SO annoying!

Not a great start to the week. Went into the changing rooms at the spa where I teach and saw WHO I THOUGHT was a good friend, standing with her back to me, on the weighing scales. "Nooo, get off quickly before you break them" said I but sadly, it was a total stranger, who gave me the best glare ever.

What a fantastic Summer of sport! As we wave goodbye to the Euros and Wimbledon, we are going to be fully immersed over the next few weeks as we see the start of the Paris Olympics so what better time to think about staying motivated and moving?!

There is so much information everywhere we look advising us on how to live better, for longer and how to be more healthy. We know this. We know about exercise and excluding processed food and why movement makes us feel better and how bad stress is and how important sleep is. Do you find it a bit boring or just simply feel it is information overload or do you actually take it on board with a view to making some subtle life changes?

I am typing this today (Wednesday) on "International Self Care Day" and before you yawn and sigh and swipe to another page to read, please just stop and take a moment to consider this. We have all been through the safety briefings on a flight, where we are advised (in case of emergency) to put on our own oxygen mask before then helping others. That can be used metaphorically throughout life and as the last schools are breaking up and families may be descending, is this not the best time to consider some personal boundaries and taking some small but effective steps to take best care of ourselves?

I see the numbers in my classes drop off dramatically in August and with good reason. You are on holiday, you have family staying, you are the family staying, you do not need to get up early, you need a break... all perfectly reasonable and understandable statements. However, if that then leads to weight, moving less and eating more just to return in September feeling fat, sluggish and yeuch, then what kind of holiday is that?

We used to discuss attitude to exercise when I worked on the Juicy retreats - so you "want a holiday? you want a break?" - a break from what? being fit and well and strong and healthy?!!

Every day you put it off, makes it much, much harder to then pick back up. Remember that! You are already factoring your exercise into your daily schedule so rather than just stopping, keep that commitment but halve the time?

Maybe this August, use the Olympic Games to motivate and inspire you!

Perhaps rather than letting it all fall off a cliff, try to plan just something short and simple every day. Dr. Rangan Chatterjee - (another podcast I really recommend) discusses this. He says that we clean our teeth twice a day for 2 mins. That is 4 mins a day. We do it because it is habit and it is easy. So add to that . 4 Minutes. YES, FOUR MINUTES! Nobody is "too busy" to not fit in 4 minutes. Hey! Live on the edge - round it up to 5? max. Promise yourself you will do 5 mins a day of squats or lifting some weights, or stepping up and down the bottom stair of the staircase or treading water in the sea or marching on the spot - choose anything!

Make it really simple and really accessible and make it a daily habit.

Focus on the end goal which is to make this a life hack that is as familiar and routine as cleaning your teeth.

Imagine the satisfaction of returning from holiday feeling rested but still well, energised and fit. Set an example to those around you who are perhaps less motivated.

“Think of your workouts as important meetings you schedule with yourself. Bosses don’t cancel”

EXERCISE SNACKS

August challenge. For my part to support you and to offer ideas, I am putting together some short 5 and 10 min classes in the Snack Bar for you to access - I will do some "Rise and Shine" mobility and from there, a whole range of different quick exercise snacks, that you will be able to do wherever you are so keep an eye in the library as I will be loading these over the next week or so.

NEW CLASSES GOING IN SO FAR - between 8 - 14 mins...

Strength - Back and shoulders - weights

Strength Legs - weights

Strength - Abs

Full body Rise and Shine mobility

Mobility - backs

Mobility lower body

Mobility chest and shoulders

To see more about the challenges, please go to the library and remember that there are lots of new classes in there already.

What’s coming up.

It is New Forest Show week and I shall be missing in action from Monday lunchtime, being terribly busy and important. Clare will be taking over the reins and as always please keep an eye on the calendar! I hope to see several of you at the show and am absolutely delighted to share that Becky who is currently working on my website and who I did my recent photo shoot with is official Show Photographer so if you see her (bright pink hair, carrying cameras!) do say hi!

The August challenge - going up in the library in the next few days. I hope you join in and as always, keep me posted on progress and how you got on in your July challenge.

We are going to postpone the Isle of Wight day out until Sept - August is getting too busy but please do put lunch in your diary for Wed Sept. 11th for an end of Summer catch up. Details to follow but it will be New Forest based.

Finally

"I hated every minute of training, but I said, ‘Don’t quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.” Muhammad Ali

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act but a habit.” –Aristotele

“Just believe in yourself. Even if you don’t, just pretend that you do and at some point, you will.” – Venus Williams

Have a great weekend everyone and I hope you are glued to the OLYMPICS - watch out for some "fun" in our classes as I get inspired!!

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By juliet • May 1, 2025

USE IT OR LOSE IT! I saw a post on instagram that I shared today. It is a video of a large family posing for a group photo, with many of them sat on the floor. Once the photo has been taken, they try to get up and that is where chaos happens (along with a lot of laughter) as they are clinging onto eachother, trying to get to their feet and getting into a total heap. Very funny... but also not... I was involved in a workshop today at Limewood and the phrase "Use it or Lose it" came up in the presentation. We all know the saying and can use it quite flippantly but how about acknowledging that if we no longer perform that particular activity, our body thinks it is no longer required and we find we CAN'T perform that movement. We need to condition our body and therefor when we first try a new exercise for example, we can feel quite unstable or uncoordinated and lacking in proprioception but as we repeat and practise, the move becomes more familiar and we grow in confidence and ability. Think of some of the sequences we do in Pilates or some of the more complex moves in our weights work - not for the faint of heart and performed only once we have built up the skills and have the coordination and understanding of what needs to go where. However as we stop doing those (or any other)moves they quickly become harder to reach. If you haven't seen it, do please watch "Secrets of The Blue Zones" on Netflix - about communities where people not only live beyond 100 but do so with good physical and mental health. It is a superb watch but the factors are the same in each community and one of them is of course, exercise, be it walking up a practically vertical hill to church or getting onto hands and knees to tend the garden daily. Whatever you do or don't do, please don't be the one rolling around because you cant get up from the floor!! Using it beyond all reason this weekend however are Lou and Clare - please join me in wishing them the very best of luck as they set off together at 6.45am on Saturday to run 100km around the Isle of Wight. If you recall, they did 50km last year and that achievement set them up for going the full distance this year. It also did something else as I went over to watch them and had a bad case of missing out, as I can no longer run and realised how much I missed the training and camaraderie of an endurance event and it was off the back of this experience that I came home and bought a new bike. So a year (and lots of cycling and joining a club) later, I am also off to the island on Sunday to cycle 100km on the IOW Randonnee. I respect that my challenge is nowhere near the scale of what Lou and Clare are undertaking but there are some big old hills over there... good job we have a Bank Holiday Monday to recover!!

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By juliet • April 24, 2025

Blink and you miss it. There went Easter. I hope you all had a lovely time doing whatever you got up to and we now enter the summer term. I mean we don't really have terms but if we did, this is it... exams, summer uniform, netball and cricket and dusting off the bbq's. Personally, none of that really applies to me... well perhaps the summer uniform as I drag my shorts blinking and yawning from the back of the drawer. As for netball - I used to absolutely love it. I was always in the school team, playing Centre or Goal defence and did briefly join Lymington as an adult. When my girls were at prep. school, they reinstated a teachers v parents netball match and we won by a country mile -none of us really knew how but me being me, I went full out to start a mum's netball club one evening a week. Before we knew it, "friends" had mentioned us to the Bournemouth and Southampton leagues. This was very, very scary as we were just running up and down shouting "is that allowed? what are we supposed to do here? did that count?" so clearly in our infancy and anyway, we didn't have any matching kit but we did have a lot of fun - well, until someone went over on her ankle which promptly broke and that was the end of that. I have been spared life as a cricket mum or widow but sitting in a deckchair for hours in the sunshine pretending to watch sounds wonderful to me. As I watch my nephews revving up for the start of GCSE's, I thank my lucky stars those hideous days are behind me. I have a vivid memory of sitting at the kitchen table trying to revise while my mother sat outside in the garden listening to Wimbledon on the radio and the two are forever linked for me. Wimbledon with exams not my mother. Apparantly we have wonderful weather next week so dig out your sunscreen and if you can make it, I will be teaching on the beach for Monday and Tuesday's classes. We went through the 34 Moves recently and the upside down/inversion moves are usually the ones that need the most practise. You can really get a deep dive into these moves on the studio equipment if you ever go to a studio but we have several in our mat work - Roll over, Rolling moves, High bridge, Control balance, High Scissors and Bicycle. Remember that Joseph Pilates' philosophy was to perfect on the studio equipment and practise on the mat, hence we use all sorts of equipment and creativity to recreate as close to the studio work as we can for the vast majority of us who do not have access to a fully equipped studio. Why inversion? Gravity can lead to compression of the spine and their little shock absorbers known as discs that can become dehydrated. When we tip our body upside down, we can reverse the gravitational pull. This can help to create more space between the verterbrae and studies suggest that this allows for the discs' soft tissue to absorb moisture and rehydrate and plump up. Exercises like Roll over or the rolling moves can provide a massage for the spine and fascia as well as improving spinal mobility and of course, abdominal strength. (please note in photo above, my right arm is not perfect - my wrist should be flat and my arms could be stronger and better connected to the floor but it was the best pic I could find for now and I wasn't sharing that space with anyone else so it was a mediocre me or nothing!!!) Want more? Well, it is widely believed that being upside down can stimulate the lymphatic system and help with lymph drainage. Also the action of being upside down can increase blood flow to the stomach and therefor help with digestion and digestive issues. You don't need to be performing an advanced Control Balance move - some of the rolling moves and spinal extension we have been working on do the job in a modified way and anyhow, high blood pressure, glaucoma and spinal issues are some of the reasons why full, advanced inversion is not ideal - there are always ways to adapt, modify and practise safely. What we established in our 8am class yesterday was how many ways we can break down, build up and practise. For example, consider the Roll up, Roll down and Roll over as exactly the same exercise but variations come from the position you start from, how you work against gravity and whether it is your upper or lower body that moves. Thinking about Roll over, and going into the inverted positions (where your hands support you from under your hips), we worked on how to open up the chest, the need for strength through the traps, lats and triceps, length in the hamstrings, strength in the core and so much more. So for example, to improve High Scissors, you could consider side lying chest opener, Roll down with arms behind you, Saw and upper body only double leg kick - all moves to open up the chest and strengthen the upper body. In addition, hamstring and hip flexor stretches. Focus on pelvic floor and deep core connection so lots of abdominal and core strengthening- we could (and do) a whole class on moves to prepare us for one single and seemingly evasive exercise. What we do know is that to get better, we need to practise - a few daily exercises relevant to what you need to build on will make ALL the difference so.... with that in mind, I am going to start planning some workshop style classes again as we haven't done this for a while so your input would be welcomed. What moves really challenge you and what would you like to work on? I will get my creative hat on and build a class around the strength, stretch and mobility we need to focus on. What I continue to hear from you (and feel for myself) is the benefit of building strength from lifting weights and how that really helps with your Pilates progess. Isn't it great!!

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Weekly Wrap up. Week 9. 2025. It's nearly our 5th Birthday!

By juliet • February 27, 2025

I very nearly missed it. I was thinking about an April challenge or similar when I suddenly realised that WE ARE 5! In March, we will have been online for a whopping 5 years and as we grow ever stronger, this needs to be celebrated! Friday 17th March 2020. I was in a totally empty Beaulieu Village hall as everyone was staying home and with legs shaking and heart racing, I leant my phone up against a speaker on the stage and started my first ever Facebook LIve class. A lot has happened in 5 years and we are all far more tech savvy now but this was ground breaking for me at least and I was terrified. Seeing little hearts and smiley faces floating up the screen as more and more people logged on was the biggest support I could have imagined. That week before what we all knew was coming, I was facing the “what’s next” along with millions of others. For me, “what next” was a 3 day non stop run of no sleep (adrenaline has many uses) and a huge learning curve. Along with fellow fitness professionals, I was learning how to use Zoom, membership platforms, booking programs, how to manage my website, multi screening, recording and editing. There were a lot of tears and coffee and I did not see my bed for 3 nights straight. BUT…. (indulge me here please) scrolling back through my old blog posts (still there for you to see!) I saw my first post about Live, free Facebook Pilates on March 20th and my first calendar of classes the same week as we went into lockdown. I went live, online for free every day, one way or another for 6 weeks right at the start. It nearly killed me and how Joe Wicks kept going, I do not know but I am so proud of that and what we achieved together. I was reaching into countries all over the world as at that time, not as many people were offering this and as everyone was at home, time zones were not as relevant. Friends and family were sharing the links so that they could do classes together and see eachother from wherever they were. To be honest, it is all a bit of a blur (as I am sure it is for many, many people) as I just fought hard to save my business and my sanity. I do vividly remember one class where we had zooms from Australia, America, Qatar, Dubai and Mallorca. I wrote it down on my office whiteboard where it stayed for years. It was just surreal and I honestly could not believe this was me! I was doing all this on my laptop mirrored to my TV, in my lounge! You saved me! I was on my own and horribly lonely and isolated and slowly going a bit mad and “having” to log on daily and be positve and upbeat and full of energy to motivate and inspire you genuinely saved me. I have removed most of the old lockdown content and anything that still triggers me into a shivver of how awful it was, but one thing that I hold in my heart with enormous pride is my online community. I am more proud of this than I can begin to descibe. You are my family. I created this, built and nurtured it and continue to be indescribably proud of what we have all acheived together. Our Christmas lunches, when I sit back and see so many friends, the care and what we share - please know that it means the world to me. We have got up to SO MUCH online over 5 years. I am not going to go back over it because a) it is all there in old blogs and social media posts and b) full disclosure, I am only truly, this last year, coming out of what the lockdown era took out of me and I do not wish to revisit it but…. True friendships have grown and we all know we really are “SO MUCH MORE THAN PILATES”. Only last week when a group of us met for a walk, I took so much from hearing you talking about how much YOU get from it - not just the exercise but the daily morning chats and check in’s, the community and support - that you cannot believe how you used to do one class a week, whizz in, whizz out and that was that until the following week whereas now you are doing multiple classes a week and what’s apping fellow members, logging in to see friends and sharing so much. I have been able to teach from Cornwall, Botswana, Croatia ,Pembrokeshire, the local beach…. and as my feet get ever more itchy, the wonders of online means have van, have wifi - you can come with me! I have never wanted to go down the commerical studio route. That was never for me. Far too restrictive - and as online works, the world awaits! So here we are. This last week we have beamed into MELBOURNE (furthest reach so far!), Singapore, Tanzania, Germany, France, Spain, Greece and never forgetting the Isle of Wight… we have more members than ever, a wonderful variety of classes and the library has had another update with more to come. Teatime talks are shaping up (new page on the website under construction), we have 2 socials in the diary and it’s still only February. This year is my 20th anniversary as a Pilates teacher and 22 years since I started out as a Personal trainer. As the wonderful Master Teacher Michael King (who I am going to for a week of Pilates in Crete in May) says - “Old Pilates teachers never retire. We just roll down one day and never roll back up” For our fifth anniversary, it seems only right to go back to where it started so bear with me and watch this space as I plan a collection of extra FREE classes available to EVERYONE, some on Zoom, some on instagram live. This will be week commencing March 24 March and PLEASE put Saturday March 29th in your diary and come to Beaulieu village hall for old time’s sake for a FREE class open to ALL starting at 9am - and coffee and pastries up the road afterwards at Steffs. I will sort the times and days and post next week and in our members’ calendar but everyone is included. Do also keep March 11th in your diary for the first of our Teatime talks - again, open to all. The wonders of being online.