Saturday, Day 16 - We are in Avignon today, staying right in the old town so my workout location was a beautiful 18C building with all the trimmings! I woke up and without thinking about it (remember the not thinking in order to just get sh*t done that I talked about before?) I put on my shorts and top - yes the same stinky shorts and top I’ve been wearing for the last 10 days, I will change them soon I promise!! I decided that I need to wake up my creaky back so I started with some pilates to see if I could mobilise and stretch it out before I contemplated doing anything else. Pilates today was a lovely mix of weight bearing arm/shoulder stability and moving into down dog type variations.
Garuda pilates is a beautiful mix of classical pilates, yoga and dance - something I had no idea existed until I found myself asking if the 3 movement disciplines I love most could be combined, and the wonderful James Da Silva has created this super challenging and beautifully flowing style. What I love is that it challenges all the areas we humans need to be able to function well and also keeps every session flowing so we don’t have the restriction and conformity that classical pilates gives you - we don’t spend 20 minutes on your back doing 20 repetitions of each exercise! So today’s flow was some on hands and knees (quadruped position), getting the shoulder blades moving and stabilising in this position, and then “gaining trust” by going into a down dog/plank/crouch flow and then on to side planks with side flexion and rotation. This really got me mobile and moving so I had the urge to go on to the circuit for this week - week 7 of the Love Movement Conditioning programme.
As Love Movement is a progressive programme - starting with simple, easy to follow exercises and building up to more complex exercises and more challenging workouts - I step it up a little in week 7 so we are now on 45 seconds on/10 secs off. It might be even more challenging to go for 20 secs on/10 off to really go heavy on the intensity, but I want to make sure switching between exercises doesn’t take up most of the time! The increased intensity here really got me sweating, so I felt like I’d done a brilliant workout by the time I finished. As you can see the kids were watching French cartoons while I got on with this one - how is it they don’t seem to mind not understanding what’s going on, same gawping face as in English!!
Exercises were:
1) Reverse lunge to kick front (hand goes to foot)
2) Baby broad jumps - basically a big jump across a distance of about 1-2 metres landing in a deep squat
3) Quadruped hip circles - all 4s start, leg goes back, up, out and round then down to start
4) Spiderman mountain climbers
5) Crab position - dips to full crab
