Yoga vs. Pilates

While both yoga and Pilates take an integrated mind-body approach to fitness and well-being, their origins, approach to these objectives and methods differ greatly.

The emergence of mind-body classes like PiYo and Yogilates can make it difficult for people to distinguish between the two. Although the two can be pursued as complementary activities or integrated into one style, like PiYo, they are not the same.

It can be beneficial to practice each independent of the other and which one you practice depends on what you want to achieve.

The Origins

Yoga

Yoga is a spiritual practice with a physical aspect. It evolved in India 3,000 to 5, 000 years ago. Yogis, people who practice yoga, use breath work (pranayama), physical poses (asanas), meditation (dhyana) and personal practices to pursue the full integration of mind, body and spirit or samadhi. Samadhi refers to attaining the state of enlightenment, bliss, or union with the divine.

Pilates

Pilates emerged in the late 1900s, introduced to the world by its namesake, Joseph Pilates. Pilates developed his method as part of his efforts to heal himself. He suffered from physical weaknesses, rheumatic fever, asthma, and rickets, during his childhood. In his efforts to cure himself, he studied Eastern and Western forms of exercise, Greek and Roman exercise practices like wrestling, gymnastics and calisthenics as well as yoga.

How Yoga & Pilates Differ

In general, Western yoga practitioners are most familiar with the physical postures of yoga. Asanas, are only one component of an extensive system of philosophy, spiritual practices, and science. The poses are intended to build strength in the body and encourage mental focus. The asanas develop and strengthen every part of the body, joints, muscles, organs, glands, bones, and metabolism.

During yoga, the breathing is deep and continuous linked to each movement and asana throughout the practice. Yoga’s extensive and currently exponential growth in popularity in Europe, the United States, and Canada supports the development of a broad range of yoga asana styles, including the more popular styles:

• Ashtanga
• Vinyasa
• Anusara
• Hot Yoga
• Yoga Therapy
• Restorative
• Chair Yoga
•  Bikram

How Pilates Differs

 

Pilates differs from yoga in several ways. Both yoga and Pilates focus on integrating the mind and body, but Pilates does not include any spiritual pursuits. It does generally increase practitioners’ sense of well-being, but this is not its primary purpose.

Pilates also takes a less organic approach to movement. All Pilates exercises extend from the body’s core, also called the powerhouse. The powerhouse spans the center of the body from the pelvic floor to the top of the shoulders.

Pilates practitioners focus on stabilizing the powerhouse and allowing other limbs to move freely to guide the body through the Pilates regimen of movements. Pilates also incorporates the use of exercise machines to offer support and take muscles through their full range of motion with optimal levels of extension and contraction.

During Pilates, the breath is coordinated with the execution of each exercise. The primary focus of each move in Pilates is perfect execution, versus repetition of any particular move.

The Mindfulness Element of Yoga

Overall, yoga offers more than 60 different health benefits for mind, body, and soul. It reaches into every aspect on one’s life and goes way beyond fitness and physical achievement. For example, the mindfulness approach taught in yoga that is not a part of Pilates helps one to improve many elements of life, including weight loss, where you're getting in touch with the true needs of the body, such as hunger helps to reduce incidence of emotional eating or eating for any other reason but hunger.

The mindfulness aspect of yoga can be viewed as “life skills” training. In addition, this training can help deter many emotional and mental health problems, and the associated physical manifestations that result from them. Mindfulness during yoga brings calm and peace to your mind, body, and life. Through the process, you become more in touch with how you really feel, and that includes symptoms of stress. Such a heightened state of awareness allows you to better manage the triggers and affects that stress can have, thereby allowing you to avoid its serious health complications.

Many scientific studies have demonstrated the practice of mindfulness to have impressive and wide reaching benefits, including:

• Greater sense of well-being
• Stress and anxiety reduction
•  Better mood
• Reducing risks for depression
• Better immunity
• Better social relationships
• Improved cognition, memory and focus
• Improved awareness of oneself
• Improved ability to make decisions
• Improved sleep
• Reduction in chronic pain
• Lower blood pressure and reduction in risk for heart disease
• More enjoyment of life in general
• Overall improvement in quality of life

So Why Choose?

While yoga and Pilates provide similar benefits, a strong and toned body, endurance and a sense of well-being, their end goals differ. Pilates focuses on strengthening and rehabilitating the body for optimal physical health; the mind or will is employed to achieve this goal. Yoga's physical postures and breath exercises strengthen the body and discipline the mind in preparation for meditation and spiritual evolution.

In short, Pilates is outwardly focused and yoga is inwardly focused.

Making the choice between doing Pilates and practicing yoga comes down to one of intentions. If the intention is simply to form a strong and balanced body, Pilates will serve. If the intention is to achieve a strong and balanced physical body while gaining mental and spiritual benefits, pursue yoga. If both outcomes seem like something you would like to experience, try them both and see which one you find most accessible and beneficial. It just may turn out that you are not willing to let either one go.

Do you prefer yoga or Pilates?  What's your favorite style of yoga?

6 Ways Women 50+ Can Benefit from Pilates

Pilates is a type of anaerobic exercise that is designed to increase the strength and flexibility of your core muscles.  The beauty of Pilates is that it can be done by just about anyone at any fitness level (see me & Pilates on Facebook).  It involves very little in the way of exercise equipment and can be done anywhere.

Pilates isn’t just for the young, athletic person.  Because it doesn’t put undue strain on the heart, it can safely be done by older adults, including those over the age of 50.  It can improve the health of woman over 50 and doesn’t take a heavy toll on the body.

There are many reasons why Pilates can be a good exercise for women over the age of 50 years of age.  Some of these benefits include the following:

1. Pilates involves an invigorating mind-body workout. Pilates places a heavy emphasis on using proper breathing techniques, aligning your spine correctly, and keeping your pelvic aligned.  It involves concentrating on flowing, smooth movements that help you become more in tune to your mind and body.  When you do Pilates, you learn to control your movements by practicing quality exercises that focus on the core.  There is a focus on breathing to the tune of your movements so that you can use your power to efficiently move your body.  By being a mind-body workout, Pilates teaches you how to breathe better, which can be great for women who are under a great deal of stress.
2. Pilates helps you develop strong core muscles. Much of the focus in Pilates is the strengthening of the core of your body.  The core of your body is the central part of your body—both the abdominal muscles and the back muscles.  Pilates helps you strengthen these muscles so that you can move with ease as you go about your day with complete control over these essential core muscles.  Pilates can help you find integration between your pelvis, trunk, and shoulder muscles so that they function as a strong unit.
3. Pilates helps increase flexibility and allows your muscles to lengthen.  Many anaerobic workouts, such as weight lifting or using weight machines will only lead to muscles that are bulky and short.  These muscles tend to be more likely to be injured and aren’t the kind of muscles you want to have.  Instead of bulky “body-building muscles”, Pilates helps you elongate your muscles, strengthening them at the same time.  Your muscles will become more elastic and you will have increased flexibility of your joints. When you achieve these kinds of muscles, you are less likely to become injured.
4. Pilates can help you prevent muscle injuries and can improve your performance in other sports. Most other anaerobic workouts work the same muscles over and over again, such as the biceps muscles or quadriceps muscles.  Sometimes these muscles are exercised to the exclusion of other muscles.  You can easily over-strengthen certain muscles, while other muscles are under-strengthened.  In Pilates, all the core muscles are strengthened at the same time so that you have a decreased chance of becoming injured while working out or by doing your ordinary activities of daily living.
5. Pilates conditions the entire body. In doing Pilates, you strengthen not only your core muscles but also strengthen the muscles of your extremities.  Pilates doesn’t emphasize one set of muscles to the exclusion of other muscles.  When you do Pilates, you can function better in daily living and will be better at sports with a decreased chance of becoming injured while doing other types of sports.
6. Pilates helps you move with better efficiency.  When you do Pilates, you train many different muscles at the same time.  Pilates involves doing smooth and continuous motions so that you can train your body to move with more safety, decreasing your risk of falls and the fractures that can come with falling.

As you can see, Pilates is an activity with many benefits for women over 50. If you are interested in doing Pilates as a form of anaerobic exercise, take a Pilates class or purchase a DVD (such as those in my Amazon store below) that will teach you how to safely do the exercises.  You can practice Pilates every day with a low risk of suffering from any kind of overuse injury to your muscles.

Mindfulness & CBT

By using the techniques from last week, you’ll find you’re able to increase your wakefulness, your mood and your general performance on a regular basis.

But now we come to the next trick – changing your mood instantly and switching from one mental state to another. What we really need to be able to do in order to perform at our very best is to switch to a stressed and motivated state when something requires our attention, to become angry in a controlled manner when we’re arguing and to switch off and relax from work when we get home in order to allow our brain to recover and to actually enjoy ourselves. Having an understanding of our neuroscience will help and so will having a good foundation of health. But now we’re going to take full control of our mental state and our attention.

It’s All About Perception

As mentioned earlier, our experiences are largely what control our emotions. Simply seeing a lion is enough to trigger a cascade of different changes in the brain that ultimately result in us becoming highly aroused both mentally and physically.

When tired, you could wake yourself by taking that cold shower or by seeing a lion!

When you’re drunk, it’s because you have excess GABA in your brain. But if your friend gets hurt, the rush of epinephrine and dopamine will be enough to actually make you feel sober and sharp again so that you can deal with the crisis.

But what if the lion wasn’t there and you only thought the lion was there? What if the lion was there and you didn’t see it?

Ultimately, it is not the actual lion that triggers the response but rather your perception of that lion and your beliefs about the lion. Put it another way: if you were to see a lion and you didn’t know what a lion was, then you probably wouldn’t have the same fight or flight response – you might even think it looked cute and get an oxytocin release instead!

It’s your understanding of the situation that impacts on the way you react to it and this in turn changes the way you feel and the way you behave. And this is actually what happens all the time throughout our lives to a lesser extent. This is why some people are calm and relaxed all the time (we call them ‘laid back’) while other people are constantly stressed and anxious.

Let’s imagine you’re in your office and you have a very bad deadline that you don’t think you can meet. Some of you might now feel incredibly stressed and thus experience that fight or flight response. But others among you might not have that response at all and you may instead find you’re able to stay very calm and collected.

There’s of course an ideal middle ground here – being too stressed is bad for your health and can actually cause you to become less productive in some cases (the response is sometimes actually referred to as the fight, flight or freeze response!) while being too relaxed as mentioned can cause you to end up not actually doing anything about the situation.

The simple fact of the matter is that in these situations, some people see a lion and some people see a cat. The scenario is the precise same but their reaction to that situation can be very different. This is based on your life experiences, diet, health and personality – but you can take control of it once you know how.

The Idea Behind CBT

CBT is ‘cognitive behavioral therapy’, which in turn is a type of psychotherapeutic intervention that is based almost entirely around the concepts we’ve just discussed. This asserts that our behavior is a result of our associations (this is behaviorism) and of our thought processes that actually allow us to reinforce an idea in our heads.

So when faced with a stressful situation, you will be stressed partly because of the beliefs and associations you hold regarding that situation. At the same time, you’ll then start playing out what you expect to happen in your head and when this happens, areas of the brain fire almost as though that thing were really happening. You might imagine getting fired, having your house repossessed, or being injured depending on the scenario.

This then causes the release of even more stress hormones, just as though you were really in those situations and you can end up anxious, aroused and potentially less effective. This is where a lot of phobias come from but it’s also what can make us less self-confident, less likely to take positive risks and generally less successful than we otherwise could be.

So CBT aims to change this, partly by creating new associations and partly by changing the way you think and changing what you’re visualizing. There’s more to it than that of course but this is the central concept and the tools used to this end are collectively referred to as ‘cognitive restructuring’.

So let’s say that you want to be calmer at work, or you want to overcome a fear of heights. How might you do that using CBT?

The first step would be to become more aware of your existing thoughts, beliefs and emotions. You can do this in a number of ways. One common tool is journaling, whereby you keep a journal of your thoughts, feelings and emotions pertaining to the thing that frightens you. This way, you can really deconstruct the thought process that is leading to your fear.

Another option is to use mindfulness. This is a form of meditation that doesn’t focus on making your mind blank but instead focuses on letting your mind become detached while you watch the contents of your thoughts. This process in itself is very calming and can help to prevent a fight or flight response.

Once you have the thoughts that make you stressed though – or you’re aware of what you’re visualizing – you can then go about deconstructing them. For example, if you’re afraid of public speaking then this might mean that you picture yourself stuttering and being laughed at. If you’re afraid of heights, you might think things like ‘I’m going to fall’.

What you don’t realize is that simply thinking these things is strengthening those neural connections and coding the experience as ‘bad’ and ‘dangerous’ making the response stronger in future.

So now you’re going to unravel those beliefs and try to remove them. One way to do this is with ‘thought challenging’. Thought challenging essentially means that you’re going to really analyze your belief and decide if it might actually be true or not. So if you’re afraid of being laughed at on stage, you’re going to think about how likely people really are to laugh at you and whether or not this is something that you would do in their position. The reality? Most people are kind enough and mature enough to just politely wait for you to get it back together. If anything, they’ll probably only sympathize.

You can also help this process by coming up with contingency plans. In other words, if you do stutter, what can you do to make it less devastating? Probably just make a joke of it to ease tension!

Also: do you really care if these strangers who you’ll never see again think any less of you?

Another scenario might be low level anxiety that you’re holding about your job because you’re afraid of being fired. Let’s say you made a big mistake on a report that won’t come to light for two weeks – now you’re worried you’ll be severely reprimanded.

So let’s address this situation logically with thought challenging: is your boss really that harsh and unfair? Aren’t there laws that would protect you? Can’t you explain that it’s an honest mistake? Could you blame it on your tiredness or stress at the time? If you really did get fired, wouldn’t you be able to land back on your feet? Now picture the way it’s much more likely to go and let that sink in. Suddenly, it’s not so scary.

In both these situations you have taken that mental lion and turned it into a small kitten! You’ve neutered the dragon and you can thus remain much calmer thanks to your new perception of the situation. And the more you practice this, the more you’ll find you start to adopt it and it starts to become a part of who you are. Suddenly, you’ll be able to stay calm and collected during all kinds of crises at work and eventually people will start to turn to you for advice whenever something goes wrong!

Another tool is even more powerful than this and it’s called ‘hypothesis testing’. The problem is, that in order for you to really be able to overcome a fear or phobia, you have to really believe what you’re thinking and visualizing. It’s not enough to just keep saying that it’s a cat and not a lion – you have to really believe it right in your heart.

So the next logical question at this point, is how you can convince yourself of your new thoughts and beliefs. And one way to do that is to use hypothesis testing – simply proving to yourself that your old beliefs were wrong and your new ones are right.

In the case of a person afraid of public speaking, such as myself (wrote about it in 2013), what would that mean? It would mean actually making a mistake in public on person – or even standing there not saying anything for a while. You’re facing your worst case scenario, trialing the worst outcome and hopefully proving to yourself that there’s actually nothing to be afraid of. In doing this, you should find that no one laughs and people just wait politely. At this point, you now know that your fears were unfounded and you will find they bother you much less in future.

This is also a little like re-association or exposure therapy. By consistently exposing yourself to the situation you used to be afraid of, you can create new associations and remove those old negative ones. You can even eventually become desensitized as you learn that there’s nothing to be afraid of. A paratrooper's heart rate can remain at 60bpm throughout the entire jump. Why? Because he’s done it hundreds of times before and his body knew that this was nothing to be afraid of.

You can work your way up to this if you’re unsure but just exposing yourself to these dangerous situations will eventually be enough to help you overcome an unwanted physiological response.

One of the most powerful and effective uses for this? Becoming socially bulletproof; this is what I'm working on. Almost all of us have some kind of natural anxiety when talking to strangers and this causes us to have a minor stress response. As mentioned, this then makes us appear to lack confidence and sends the signal that we are the inferior party in the interaction – again, it all dates back to our evolution.

But if you keep exposing yourself to new social situations and even make them purposefully awkward, then eventually you can completely get rid of any anxiety you previously felt at all. Try going to a shop (not one near you) and ordering your items in a funny accent. You’ll find they politely nod and give you your things without saying anything. Try chatting to people you don’t know on the street – even picking up the phone a bit more and calling people by typing in random numbers. The more you do this, the more accustomed you’ll become to speaking with strangers and the less of a stress response you’ll have in future. By the end, you’ll find that you’re perfectly able to speak with complete, calm confidence in almost every situation!

Has anyone done a challenge for being purposefully awkward?

 Next week we'll talk about "dressing" ourselves for success.