The Benefits Of Pilates If You’re Overweight

W hat Is Pilates?

Pilates is a method of exercise that aims to move your whole body and improve your body and your quality of life.

The main focus is on improving your core strength, which in turn improves your motor functions, flexibility, and movement as a whole. The exercise lays great emphasis on tuning your movement and your breathing. This way, it helps to stabilize the muscles and align your body. But if you’re overweight, the benefits of this exercise practically double! Here are the benefits of Pilates if you’re overweight:

Decreases Back Pain

Back pain can become quite an issue for people who are overweight. Since they carry on more weight than others, their vertebrae and the muscles surrounding them, strain more due to all this weight. However, Pilates can help this issue to a great extent. 

Pilates works heavily on the lower abdominal muscles to make them stronger. Once you develop a healthy routine of these Pilates exercises, your back muscles will strengthen and be better equipped to handle the extra weight, reducing your back pain.

Increases Core Strength

Core strength is one of the main pillars of Pilates. In fact, increasing your core strength is what it's best known for.

You may be wondering, what exactly is the core? The core is the main torso area, the pivot of our body. The torso is the most central area of our body that controls our balance and all our functions, ensuring its strength is extremely important.

Since the weight of most overweight people is concentrated around the torso area, ensuring that your muscles are strong enough to keep your balance is of utmost importance.

Pilates exercise does a great deal in improving your pelvic floor strength, decreasing hip pain, and increasing your core strength and balance overall.

Decreases Chance Of Injury

Our muscles have a very fine balance; this balance can be disturbed if excess pressure or strain is applied to the muscles. This strain may cause the muscle to get pulled or snap, which can lead to injury.

Pilates can help balance your muscles so that even if they do experience more strain than usual, they are strong enough that it won’t cause you to pull, or tear your muscle.

Improves Breathing

Overweight people often find themselves easily out of breath or having difficulty with breathing. This can be quite a nuisance and worsen your quality of life. One way to work on this is through Pilates. Since Pilates lays great emphasis on breathing exercises, it helps improve your breath control, breath capacity, and increases your stamina as well.

Reduces Menstrual Pain

Many overweight women also suffer from a condition called Polycystic Ovary Syndrome or PCOS for short. One of the side effects of this condition is that your menstrual cycle becomes more painful than it is for women without the condition. 

Research suggests that the impact Pilates has on your body can also help you deal with menstrual pain better as your muscles can handle more strain

Helps You Energize

The breathing exercises in Pilates help improve your circulation, breathing, and lung capacity. When your breathing becomes better, it helps increase the oxygen in your blood. This causes you to feel better and be more enthusiastic in your work. All of these effects increase your energy overall and make you a more productive person.

Helps with Balance 

Pilates exercises help increase your overall awareness of your surroundings. Overweight people often find it hard to reach up to places or twist as it is quite easy to lose your balance due to your excess weight. However, Pilates exercises increase your core strength and awareness, which helps improve your balance, increasing your mobility without the risk of falling over.

Helps Lose Weight

Pilates is a great way to exercise. Overweight people often find it hard to exercise as it is quite inconvenient for them to move that much, and it tires them out quite easily. However, Pilates does not require you to move a lot. In fact, Pilates exercises are fairly easy to do and you don’t even have to jog around or lift heavy weights to do them! You can do them from the comfort of your home entirely. Developing a healthy routine of Pilates exercises is a great way to lose weight along with the other benefits it brings to your body.

Overweight people often look for options to help their health. We hope that we were able to enlighten you today by telling you the benefits of Pilates if you’re overweight!

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