Weight Loss Pilates for Beginners by Brooke Siler - My First Impressions

I was lucky to win the Pilates and Yoga DVD pack from the Relax group here at Gather, and the the prize pack arrived Friday morning, and it included two dvds:

Element: Weight Loss Pilates for Beginners by Brooke Siler $10.99 at Amazon.com

and

Element: AM & PM Yoga for Beginners by Elena Brower  $12.99 at Amazon.com


Friday afternoon I lucked out, when my oldest son decided to take a powernap on the couch, while my youngest son was taking his daily nap. This meant that I had a little time to try out one of the dvds, and I decided on Weight Loss Pilates for Beginners by Brooke Siler, since I had always wanted to try pilates. In fact two of my friends have encouraged me to try out pilates, but since I just tried yoga for the first time last year, I had not had the courage to expand my horizon even farther.






The Weight Loss Pilates dvd includes 48 minutes of pilates, and to my surprise I was able to go through the entire dvd with out interruption. Yesterday, I got lucky again with the boys taking naps, so I made another attempt at doing the video. My youngest son woke up half way through the video though, and the last ten minutes were less relaxing as I had two energetic boys running around me.


Weight Loss Pilates for Beginners by Brooke Siler is filmed overlooking the Pacific Ocean in an amazing garden, and I really found this scenery to be relaxing. It starts out slowly, but it only took a few minutes, before I had to turn up the fan, and by the end of the dvd I was ready for a shower. Siler is trying to maximize the calorie burn while teaching the basics of pilates, and I feel she did both of these perfectly.

I found myself comparing pilates to yoga, and the main differences to me was the speed, the breathing and the robotic movements. The pace is faster than yoga, and I kept thinking about yin & yang, as there is a great focus of balancing forces and muscles against each other.  According to Brooke Siler "pilates is the art of muscle control," and I found this to be great.

I have asthma, and I often find that I have a hard time breathing as slowly as I am supposed to during yoga, and the pace of the breathing exercises in this pilates dvd fit me perfectly. This made everything so much more comfortable for me, and it also increased my relaxation.


Pros:

• Instead of having the instructor speak while doing pilates, there is a voice over, and this really helped me focus on the movements.
• The movements are fast and focus on having a balance
• The combination of endurance, balance and muscle control really seemed to work great.
• In stead of doing two sets of squats, Siler combined many different squat exercises, and this made it easier to do, while I still felt like I did a lot of work.
• Siler combined crunches and sit-ups with a deep abdominal lift, and this works so much better for my neck.
• Although I was sore the next day, it was not as bad as expected, and I suspect this was due to the stretching exercises in between the strength training instead of only stretching in the end.
• I was afraid that some of the exercises would cause my whip lash injury to give me a headache, but I had no pain afterwards.

Cons:

• There were some neck exercises where I had to be careful, as I have an old whiplash injury.

I really like this pilates dvd, and I can highly recommend it. I am going to give it 5 stars out of 5, as I was so positively surprised. This has in fact become my new favorite exercise dvd.


You can read more about Weight Loss Pilates for Beginners by Brooke Siler here.





Have you ever tried pilates? Have you tried yoga? Which do you prefer and why?