Here is what one of our Adelaide Pilates clients has said about Inner Strength Pilates…

“My favorite thing about Inner Strength – the personal attention, the working with people who know what they’re doing, who really know Pilates inside and out, who tailor my programme for me.

You notice when there’s other people in the studio, they’re doing quite different programmes tailored for them so we’re not all just doing the same exercise at the same time. And it’s just got a really welcoming feel.

When my friends ask me about Pilates, I say definitely give it a try. It’s a surprisingly good workout and particularly to go to Inner Strength because I find the personal attention is excellent, the small classes, only for up to five people is great.

And yeah, I never feel like I don’t know what I’m doing or if I don’t know what I’m doing someone’s always there to help me, which is good.

Before I came to Inner Strength, I thought Pilates was quite a gentle form of exercise. I’ve been surprised how hard I work, how much I work up a sweat and I really do get an all-over workout. I’ve been going to the gym for years before this and I’ve work just as hard at Inner Strength so it’s fantastic.

Before I came I didn’t have any serious injuries but I did used to get a lot of headaches and with Tam’s help I’ve strengthened my back muscles and I get fewer and fewer headaches, which is great.

My job involves sitting on the floor quite a lot with small children and I’ve noticed that I’m much more flexible. I get down on the floor with them, I can get up without creaking and groaning. Yeah, I really feel much, much stronger.

I used to go to the gym for about 15 years to the same gym and I got a bit tired of the same routine, didn’t feel like I was getting personal attention and I was looking for something else so I decided to try Pilates and Inner Strength was strongly recommended and it’s been great.

I no longer go to the gym. I walk the dog, sometimes ride my bike and I’m fitter than when I went to the gym so it’s fantastic.

I guess one of the plusses with coming to Pilates is that I do feel more relaxed at the end of the day. After a day full of small children it’s nice to come and relax and I can go home and feel ready to face the large children.”

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Tamara,

I know that you know your staff are great. However, I just wanted to say how helpful and pleasant Pepa was this morning. She made a great start by referring to me as a ‘gentlemen’! She keeps an eye on everything that is going on and gave me loads of stuff to do and learn. My core is really feeling ‘worked’ right about now! and so I’ve booked in again for same time next week. Initially I felt that it is a long way to go for a Pilates class and was looking to combine my trip with other errands or training. But, after this morning, the trip was well worth it.

Tim.

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Hi. It’s now been eight weeks since I’ve had my little baby boy, Cooper, so I want to show today is a fabulous exercise that focuses purely on engaging the core, not the rectus abdominis but the transversus abdominis muscle and your pelvic floor as well.

What you want to do is just lay down onto your back. Make sure your shoulders are nice and relaxed and the neck, laying in neutral spine, you can actually work with a flat back for this exercise or you can just make sure you’ve got that tiny little gap underneath the lumbar spine so that your back is nice and supported.

Keep your shoulders and arms nice and relaxed. You’re going to bring both legs up, flexing the feet so pulling the toes down towards the knees and towards your chest. Keep the knees nice and straight.

Take a breath in to prepare. Exhale. Engage your core, so engage the core first and then you’re going to draw a little circle with the legs; now it’s only a small circle, not too large. Take a breath in to prepare, exhale. Engage the core and you’re going to go in the opposite direction.

Breath in, exhale. Breath in to relax the core, exhale. Engage the core. Keep the core engaged there. Breath in to relax the core. Ok so on the inhale you’re going to relax the core. Exhale, engage it first and then draw the circle. Breath in, relax the core again. Exhale, engage the core and draw the circle in the opposite direction.

You want to do about five in each direction. Breath in, exhale. Breath in, exhale. Now you shouldn’t feel your back arch at all. If you feel when you do the circle your back lift up off the mat then you’re doing it completely wrong so just be really careful of that. Otherwise you could walk away with a back injury or a sore back.

What you should be engaging and feeling is just the lower abdominals working. You shouldn’t feel your back muscles at all and you will feel a stretch through the legs, through the hamstrings and you might feel your quads working a little bit as well.

Ok, but definitely no movement through the back; be very careful of that. Let’s do a couple more, breath in. Exhale. Keep the pelvic floor lifted there. Breath in to relax it. Breath out.

The idea is to keep the pelvis stable. Your pelvis shouldn’t be rocking off of the mat. It looks quite simple but really it’s quite a strong exercise to do, fabulous for the core.

All you need is a mat or a nice blanket to lay on, to soften the floor for your spine and just make sure that you know how to engage your core correctly and that you keep it engaged throughout the circle.

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A great exercise for an entire body workout is this exercise I’m going to show you, which is called “Cleopatra”. What it does is it works your arm or your arms when you do it on both sides and you need to focus on your shoulder girdle stabilisation so it works all your rotating cuff muscles in the shoulder.

It also works your obliques, your core and your legs also need to do a bit of work as well so really it’s an entire body workout. Now all you need is a mat at home and preferably, if you’ve got a mirror to watch yourself in the mirror to make sure you’ve got the right alignment, that will help as well.

What you’re going to do is you’re going to lie on your side like I am. Pop one hand down. Make sure both legs are straight and you’re going to lift up to make a plank?-type position.

Now it’s quite difficult to keep your feet directly on top of each other so you can bring one foot out in front if you like. Otherwise just keep them on top. Now just be careful as well, it does put quite a bit of pressure through your wrists so if you’ve got sore wrists just be careful of that.

So lifting up into the plank position, hand on your side. Breath in to lift as high as you can go with your hip and breath out, drop down so that your hip just hovers a couple of inches off the mat. Breath in to lift up. Breath out, tummy, pelvic floor, look towards your feet. Breath in, breath out, tummy, pelvic floor.

Probably about six of those is plenty to do. If you can do more, fantastic. Just be careful of your wrists and perhaps if four or five is enough, swap sides, do the other side and then you can always come back to the first side and repeat again.

I’ll show you on the other side because I do get a little bit of sore wrists since my pregnancy. I’ve just had a little baby eight weeks ago so I just need to be careful of my wrists at the moment, so let’s do it on the other side.

Feet on top or you can have one foot out in front if you’re struggling with the balance and breath in to lift up as high as you can go. Exhale, engage your tummy, lift the pelvic floor. Breath in, pushing the hip up. Exhale, tummy, pelvic floor. Breath in, oh, my balance isn’t too good today and breath out, tummy, pelvic floor.

So it’s a lovely exercise, yeah. Just be careful of your wrists. Make sure you’re engaging your core correctly. Keep your shoulders away from your ears.

Careful you’re not like this when you’re lifting up towards the ceiling. Drop your shoulders down, keep lots of space between your ear and shoulders. Aside from that, all it takes is practice and a nice strong core to keep you balanced.

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Here is what one of our Adelaide Pilates clients has said about our studio…

“I started coming to Inner Strength Pilates about six months ago. At the beginning I was considering an alternative to taking care of my body. I started having some pains in my lower back. I’m a baker so there’s a lot of work that involves the use of my body and also I teach, which also implies standing up and so on.

I was really thinking that perhaps because of getting a bit older, the feeling back pain is inevitable but in verity, coming here I realised that I could almost turn back the clock and it’s really been the first thing that has given me improvement.

I have really got rid of the back pain within a couple of months. And also my posture has improved incredibly. My figure has started to benefit too.

It’s really, for me, been the first best thing that I can think of that I’ve done for my health and for my wellbeing because again there’s so much more than just doing exercises. It’s not really a mechanical type of workout and I wouldn’t even call it a workout.

It’s more of a blend of meditation through breathing and gaining awareness of your body, of the existence of the core and releasing your tensions and focusing basically on being and feeling straight and aligned with you’re core engaged. It’s wonderful especially for a busy person. It’s a great way to relax.

Well obviously because my job involves a lot of handwork and sometimes quite heavy lifting, not necessarily the obvious things but sometimes I would do repetitive movements that involve a lot my hands. I was straining my elbows and especially the right hand because obviously the right is my dominant hand.

And by repetitively clutching on things I’ve developed some tendonitis.  With coming here and doing Pilates at Inner Strength Pilates I’ve managed also to get on top of this particular problem that seemed to be quite pernicious, wasn’t going to go away. I’m feeling so much better about that as well.

First of all, the most important thing is the individual attention you get. Tamara is extremely professional and very knowledgeable and very attentive and seems to always remember where and where you were at the last time she saw you.

She’s very, very aware of you as a whole and your little quirks, how you tend to stand or how you tend to use equipment and do you keep your shoulders too high, you’re twisting your pelvis and all these things.

Just saying it like this doesn’t sound like very much but I think all those little things contribute to bad posture, tension, muscle pain and can in the long run actually give quite tangible problems. So yeah, that has been a great improvement.

Yes, my husband always says when I get back “I can tell you’ve been to Pilates because you just look taller, you walk taller”. And I also feel so much strength and when I just get out of the studio and sit in my car I just feel a sense of wellbeing and also a sense of completely straight and tall.

Tamara is very good at supporting the client’s use of the techniques that she teaches so I also do some of the exercises I do at the studio I do at home and whenever I do bits of stretching and some of the routines we do here, I do notice a big difference and I maintain those benefits for a lot longer.

If anyone I know, family, friends or acquaintances ask me if I was to go out and choose a Pilates studio, which one should you choose I would definitely recommend Inner Strength Pilates on a number of counts; the first one being that because Tamara follows a very small group of people.

You get the benefit of a one-to-one approach and also there is also an emphasis on the person and not just being within a group of people that that’s a group exercise so each and everyone gets a set of exercises every time that changes depending on how you are on that day and that’s a very unique thing.

And also, Tamara is very generous with her time and every time you have a problem she’s quite happy to reply to the emails you send her. I would definitely wholeheartedly recommend this studio; it’s being fantastic. I would not hesitate to recommend it to anyone who is serious about getting their body realigned and a bit of quality time back to yourself in your life.”

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Hi. So it’s been three weeks now since I’ve had my little baby boy, Cooper. So what I want to do is show you an exercise that is fabulous for the core and it’s really just all about focusing on the core.

For post-natal women, what this will do is help bring your abdominal separation back together so it’s really, really important that you don’t do any curling type abdominal exercises so this exercise is going to be perfect for you.

And then for people who have done Pilates for a long, long time and have tended to taking on all the curling abdominal type exercises with all your workouts, it’s great to do this exercise just to bring yourself back to basics and to make sure that your abdominals are working 100 percent correctly because as you know it is intricate to engage your core. So you’re just always going to do a basic exercise here and there just to make sure that everything’s working properly.

This exercise is called toe taps. What you’re going to do is lay down on the ground on your back, whether you’ve got a mattress home or just a blanket just to make it more comfortable for your spine. So you’re going to lay down onto your back, arms relaxed by your side. Make sure your neck is nice and relaxed, no shoulder tension. Keep your shoulders nice and relaxed and then bring both legs up into chair position.

Chair position is with your knees at a right angle and knees on top of your hips. Ok so you’re going to take a breath in to prepare. On the breath out, engage your core and then you’re going to lower one foot down just to tap the mat. Inhale to return.

Now make sure that your back doesn’t move at all, you want to be in neutral position. So you should have just the tiniest little space underneath your back. If you have quite weak abdominals then you can push your back flat into the mat if you’re feeling a little bit weak.

Now the other thing that you can do is you don’t have to tap the mat with your toe. You can just take it halfway and back. What you want to focus on is your core working correctly.

Taking a breath in, exhale out through the mouth, engage your core before the leg moves and keep your core switched on. Breath in to return. Breath out, tummy, pelvic floor switching on, keep the pelvic floor lifted throughout the movement of the leg down. Breath in to return the leg.

And on the inhale you can relax your abdominals. Exhale, breath in, breath out, breath in to return the leg, breath out, breath in. Now it looks quite like a simple exercise. What you don’t want to see or feel is your back arching and you don’t want to feel like your pelvic floor is not working.

You want to make sure that that stays lifted throughout the whole movement of the leg down and you shouldn’t feel any back pain or discomfort whatsoever. What you should feel is a nice tightness through your lower abdominals to make sure that your core is working correctly.

To make that exercise harder you can pop a chi ball underneath your tailbone so that it’s a little bit more unstable for you and that will work the abdominals even stronger or a nice big foam bolster that you can lay your entire spine on.

But the important part about this exercise is that you are laying flight and that you’re not doing it in a curl. The reason for that is that you’re just targeting your transversus abdominis and you’re not getting your rectus abdominis working, which is that six-pack muscle.

Ok, Enjoy!

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For this exercise, all you need is a mat or a blanket to lay down on at home, and also a towel, if you can get a towel and roll it up. That’s going to be for your forehead to rest on just to help with the neck alignment.

This exercise is called the Sphinx with arm lifts. What it is is a fantastic exercise to strengthen through the rhomboideus and your serratus and those lats in your upper back muscles is what I’m talking about. The reason why I’m showing you this is it’s a fabulous exercise I’ve been doing it at home to help in my posture.

I’m now three… well my little boy, I just gave birth three weeks ago to my little boy, Cooper, and what I’m finding is with all the breastfeeding and the lifting and the carrying it tends to make you get that kyphotic-type posture where you become quite round through the upper back.

So this exercise is great for anyone who has got a little child, a little baby or even people that work at a desk or have an office job. You’ll also find that your posture might be quite similar as you’re typing away at the computer.

Ok, so let’s go ahead. It’s a quite simple exercise but it’s really wonderful. It helps open through the chest, through the collarbone and strengthen your back muscles.

So laying down onto your tummy, you’re going to rest your forehead down on the towel to help with that alignment and what you want to do is always keep your neck nice and relaxed. You don’t want to lift your neck up and cause any neck tension.

Arms out by your sides, almost at a right angle so your elbows will just be slightly lower than your shoulders and your elbows create a right angle. And with your toes join them together but just let your heels flop away from each other.

What that does is helps to relax and switch off the legs because what you don’t want is your bottom, your glutes, to work or your leg muscles. It’s purely your core and your upper back.

Ok so let your shoulders shrug forward and relax completely. Breath in to prepare, exhale, engage your core and slide your shoulders away from your ears. Once your shoulders are away from ears squeeze your shoulder blades together and lift your hands, stretching through the fingertips that helps stimulate the nervous system. Breath in, relax everything forward.

Ok so the first step is starting the shoulder blades down, and the second step is trying to squeeze them together and the third step is lifting. Now all three steps happen on the breath out. Inhale, completely relax and shrug your shoulders forward.

So hands in position, legs and bottom relaxed, breath in, breath out, shoulder blades slide down, squeeze together, keep breathing out, lift the hands and elbows, try and get your hands and elbows level with each. You don’t want them like this. Breath in, relax back down.

Breath out, slide, squeeze and lift. Breath in to lower and relax. Now of course on the exhale, every time you engage your core on the exhale and the breath in is to completely relax.

The core is obviously very important especially if you tend to get the sore lower back. You shouldn’t feel your lower back engaging through this exercise at all. Breath out, shoulder blades down, squeeze and lift. That’s with the core engaged. Breath in for a rest.

To make this exercise a little bit harder you can also use some hand weights, half a kilo, one kilo. For some people you might be strong enough to get up to 2 kilos, as long as you don’t feel any neck tension or your lower back hurting.

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Ash explains how Inner Strength Pilates has helped her pregnancy!

For this particular client, our clinical Pilates studio has focused on:
- rehabilitation for aches and pains in her hips and lower back
- correcting her posture
- strengthening muscles all over in preparation for birth
- pelvic floor strength
- breathing techniques in preparation for birth

Here is what Ash said…

“I’ve been doing Pilates for about 12 months and I come five days a week. As far as aches and pains go, I just get general stiffness and soreness in my shoulders and my neck and overall just from sitting at a computer desk I find I would get quite tight through my hips and my legs so obviously Pilates can just stretch everything out.

The most amazing thing about Pilates is I never thought that I would achieve what I’ve achieved. I never realised how tight and how weak my frame was until I actually started and I’m blown away at being so pregnant and being able to have the fitness and the strength that I’ve got, and that’s through Pilates so it’s quite exciting actually.

At the moment I’m five-and-a-half months pregnant and obviously I started Pilates a year ago with the view to starting just before falling pregnant with the aim of sort of making sure that the pelvic floor muscles were quite strong before we got pregnant and obviously I’m continuing to do Pilates right through my pregnancy hopefully until we have the baby. So yeah, but I feel it’s really given me a lot of strength and also the flexibility to be able to keep moving.

With this pregnancy I’ve had a bit of pain in my hips as the weight’s started to come on with the pregnancy because your centre of gravity shifts. So basically I was able to get some exercises and some stretches that strengthen my hips and also stretched it out.

And I was able to do those at home as well, which has really helped and I found that I don’t have anywhere near the pain that I had sort of a month ago when it really started so it’s fantastic.

I had a great arch in my back and I was quite slumped over from working at a computer with my job. I like it because I feel that it’s… you not only having- using your body but you’re having to think about what you’re doing so you’re not just doing mindless exercise.

It’s controlled and there’s a real technique to it and I like the challenge of actually getting it right and you do know that when you feel the core working, you can feel that the exercise is so much stronger and after an hour you certainly feel like you’ve worked very hard.”

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All five clients in each class will perform the same exercises at the same time, which will encourage & push you to work hard without resting in-between exercises. These classes give such a high intense workout, so they are suited for those who are at an intermediate – advanced level in Pilates. This workout will give dramatic results!

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