My Pilates Journey
Hey everyone! I hope you’ve had a chance to get through at least one of Studio Formah’s classes and loved it! Today’s blog post is my story of how Pilates came to be my favourite form of movement.
I started exercising properly in 2016 when I was at university. After a year of training and trying different things, I thought I’d found my place as a high-intensity girl. I was in the gym most days, sometimes twice, and you could usually find me ‘jumping around like a lunatic’ (in my Dad’s words). If it got my heart rate up, I was doing it. I loved boxing, spinning, circuit classes, sprints, and box jumps were my favourite. In early 2017, my personal trainer recommended I try Reformer Pilates. She had been to a class and thought I’d love it. She was 100% right. I was hooked from the get go and started going to classes twice a week. It was the one thing I did in my life that slowed me down and allowed me to truly connect to my body.
I’ll bore you with all the details in another blog but let’s fast forward to a year post lockdown. Gyms and studios had just reopened after over a year and I was, once again, crippled with anxiety. For the first time since I’d started training, I was hating every second spent at the gym. The thought of going filled me with dread. I had zero motivation and three/four years into my ‘fitness journey’, I felt like like I had no idea what to do. I’d sit in my car in the gym carpark for half an hour, eventually forcing myself inside and then I would just wander around aimlessly. The place I’d fallen in love with, that had for so long been my happy and safe place, felt threatening and exercise had become a chore, rather than a privilege.
A podcast episode changed my outlook and ultimately, changed my life.
The episode discussed cortisol - something I knew nothing about but that for a few years, had been running my life. Cortisol is the body’s stress hormone and it was clear that I was constantly in fight or flight mode. Lauryn Bosstick of The Skinny Confidential describes it as sabor-tooth tigering and I was always running from the tiger. I’ve linked the podcast above - it was We Met at Acme and the guest was Melissa Wood-Tepperburg. This podcast discussed how the guest’s obsessive behaviour and thoughts around her body and exercise led to such a spike in cortisol that not only was she anxious, not sleeping well, unhappy and engaging in unhealthy behaviours, she was also nowhere near achieving her goals.
I listened to more podcasts and dug deeper into the subject of cortisol, stress and anxiety, particularly around body image and exercise. Cortisol can have a number of effects on the body - these include suppressing your immune system, causing headaches, irritability and making you retain weight. The podcast guests all seemed to go down the same route to try and reduce their cortisol - taking a breathe (literally and metaphorically), focussing on the forms of movement they enjoyed and changing their mindset to how their body felt rather than looked. For me, that meant no longer forcing myself into HIIT workouts. It was eating more but eating well, walking (which has been proven to interrupt rumination) and Pilates, both Mat and Reformer.
This truly changed my life and is the advice I give to all my friends and clients if they come to me stressed, anxious and hating the gym and their bodies - relax, find a movement you enjoy and be a bit kinder to yourself. Doing this bought me closer to my fitness goals than I had ever been and I began to once again enjoy movement and enjoy life. I’m certain that the mind-body connection fostered through Pilates continues to ground me and reduce my anxiety and now when I feel like my cortisol is spiking, the first thing I do is get on the mat.