Ageless Pilates: The Secret to Moving Comfortably, Easily and Pain Free for the Rest of Your Life

Author Christine Binnendyk (no, that's not a typo, it's her name) author of  Ageless Pilates, The Secret to Moving Comfortably, Easily and Pain-Free for the Rest of Your Life wrote and offered me a review copy of the book.

Although I like the idea of a gentler pilates workout, and the "look inside" feature on Amazon looked appealing, I just don't have the time to do a proper book review right now, but I told her if she wanted to send me an excerpt, I'd publish it.  Which she did, and which I did.  If the book sounds appealing to you too, see the article, "Try the Pregnant Cat for a kinder, gentler abdominal workout." 

I tried the Pregnant Cat, and it may be easy, but it's not a sissy move.  I'm trying to figure out how to do it on the Power Plate machine without it rattling my teeth to the bone.

This week's notes from my Power Plate workout

Three articles caught my fancy this week about Power Plate -

Health and Fitness magazine had an article about a Power Plate cellulite-busting routine, which as much as anything just shows how accepted the Power Plate is in the UK as part of the fitness landscape.  I still have some reservations about anything as a cellulite busting routine, short of building up sexy muscles that eventually replace the unsexy flab.  But, sure,  I'm doing the cellulite buster as part of my overall Power Plate workout.  Y'know, we're all suckers for that.  Me included.

ELLE UK  Editor Carrie Gorman wrote about her first Power Plate workout at Harrods (the tony London department store) in a blog post, once more showing the brand-name awareness in UK.  She starts her post, saying, "I have smugly dismissed Power Plate in the past as the lazy girl’s exercise of choice." and describes the 30 minutes and how she barely broke a sweat.  Then she ends her post with, "But the next day, my body ached from the - I won’t say “work” - experience. If this works, I’m telling everyone!”"  I'll be curious to follow along and see how her results come along. 
UPDATE:  It's not worth a separate post, but being that I'm pretty much on the same track as Carrie Gorman, I thought it was interesting that on May 14 (two weeks after her first post that I quoted above, she wrote this: Four sessions down and I’m hooked. The Power Plate class is over before it’s even begun, meaning that I no longer have to chose between having an evening and going to the gym. Here I can do both."  My workout is nowhere near as grueling as hers (read her post for the workout) but I love that the PowerPlate is a quick workout. 

Here in the US, Women on the Web picked up on Power Plate as an Obsession of the Week, and Jane Buckingham told her readers  ...[it] could be the best thing to happen to fitness since spandex....It’s the most efficient and effective exercise I’ve found since not exercising (which frankly, wasn’t working so well). 

On the personal front, my friend Lakshmi's arm & shoulder "froze" on her at work and I invited her over for 10 minutes on the Power Plate, which restored circulation and gave her back range of motion in her arm.   The day before she'd had to leave work and go home and it took Advil and several hours to diminish the pain. Her pain came back today, of course.  

As for me, three times a week I'm doing an overall 25 minute workout.  On another three days I'm doing a 15 minute stretch and massage routine.  Last week after visiting 31 artists studios (it was Silicon Valley Open Studio weekend), I came home and plopped my weary feet on the machine and did an"ahhh, this is nice."

The fact that Power Plate is so unknown here in Silicon Valley still amazes me.  There was a Power Plate listed for sale on Craigslist from someone in Palo Alto. Bought in 2003, and "like new. hardly ever used."  No wonder.  Even being very motivated, it's not so much fun to be the only one using a cool exercise routine.   

More about my Power Plate experience: week one; set up

Power Plate and me...week 1

It's been a week since my Power Plate my5 arrived. So far: YEA.

I haven't lost inches, I didn't expect to in a week. I don't know if I've lost weight (I haven't had a scale in my house in 10 years), but I expect not.

But I do have that lovely long and lean feeling that comes with effective stretching and flexibility. I used to feel like this when I did yoga every morning, a good habit that went by the wayside a year or so back. That routine took an hour. My Power Plate workout is 15 minutes.

The one other, unexpected, result is that I've been going to the bathroom .... a whole lot! I didn't make the connection between the dozens of bathroom breaks and the Power Plate workouts until this morning. Reading articles on the UK Power Plate site, I saw that the gentle massage and stretching I'm doing serves as a mild detoxification. It increases blood flow, circulation, and releases toxins from the muscles. And since I'm staying very hydrated throughout the workouts, the combination has led to my multiple departures from all the meetings I was in. Oh well. Maybe it's helped my complexion?

Anyway, for the past seven days, I've done 15 minutes each morning of basic acclimation exercises. I'm still disappointed Power Plate was unable to find a certified trainer in the area; I somehow expected there would be several. The incredibly helpful Power Plate PR person, Hailey, was fabulous and did come up with one name in Menlo Park. Not exactly next door, but better than having to go to Los Angeles.

There is a Power Plate at the nearby Club One but in typical Club One fashion, they wanted to know if I was going to write about the experience, when, what, etc. Forget it. On a number of occasions I've found Club One's external PR folks to be great. Their internal people have routinely been ...hmmm, dismissive and ineffective. Anyway, a nice Menlo Park person and facility is better than a lousy one close-by.

I considered going to the training myself, but the $275 course fee plus travel, hotel, rental car etc deter me right now.

Here's a brief video about the Power Plate, just in case you aren't familiar with it.

Power Plate and me...and Madonna, and Cindy Crawford and Serena Williams...

My Power Plate machine arrived last Friday, and I'm just now getting around to writing about it...why? Well, I wanted to give it a go for a few days. And at the end of a week, I say, "So far, great!!"

The Power Plate, as I hope you know, is a very impressive piece of exercise equipment: it has a 3 dimensional vibrating plate, and you do your regular exercises on it, which are aided and intensified by the fact that your muscles are vibrating 30-45 times a second. For stars and celebs like Madonna, Cindy Crawford, Hilary Swank, models like Elle MacPherson and athletes like Serena Williams, it's about warming up and exercising in a shorter time. For me, it's about the studies showing how effective it is in helping osteoporosis.

Randy and Ryan (pictured to the right) delivered it to my house and set it up for me. They were so funny and nice, and had just come from delivering a couple of Power Plate machines to Stanford U. Poor guys had to make the drive to my place from Stanford in Friday afternoon rush hour traffic. (A normally pleasant 20 minute drive becomes an hour-long frustration if you run into the Apple workers as they leave for the weekend.)

My only gripe about the machine is how hard it is to get specific training here in Silicon Valley. Some cities have Power Plate studios. In London, posh department store Harrods has in-store Power Plate training in the 5th floor studio. In New York, LA, Denver, and elsewhere, finding qualified trainers is not a problem. Here in Northern California the equipment is mostly found in the training rooms of our pro sports teams: 49ers, Raiders etc.

So I'm scrounging around the web, getting all the YouTube videos I can about different training techniques, and I downloaded the exercise guide from the Power Plate web site. Still, I'd like someone to work out three or four routines for me.

Til I get my own workout, I'll occasionally publish some of the YouTube stuff I've found helpful. I hope you like it. If you have Power Plate videos to recommend, let me know.