Pilates for sports and fitness
Hearts and Bones Pilates® designs personal, functional training programmes that help you perform better in your sports or fitness activities. Make an appointment today.
Pilates is good for sports and fitness
Pilates improves your physical performance by helping your balance and movement as well as building strength and fitness.
Pilates develops your kinaesthetic understanding (awareness of how you place and move parts of your body), which helps you move more efficiently.
Many athletes equate strength training with bodybuilding. They fear gaining too much muscle bulk and losing flexibility, especially if they are involved in sports that require endurance and a good range of movement. Pilates makes it possible for you to achieve strength without sacrificing other important performance elements.
Functional training
Functional training uses exercises that mimic and develop the way your body moves in your activity, so that you can perform actions more easily. For example, if you are a swimmer wanting to improve your freestyle flip, your exercises would focus on improving your spine flexibility and increasing your abdominal strength.
Our programmes
Hearts and Bones Pilates’ functional training programmes include six important elements to help you meet your goals.
- Design for your body: Our first step is to assess your body and the way it functions. We base your exercise programme on this initial assessment.
- Focus on your goals: Your training programme includes exercises that meet your specific sport or fitness goals.
- Combine all elements of fitness: Your programme contains a variety of exercises that work on flexibility, balance, strength, and power.
- Increase core stability: Your training includes this important goal. Your body’s core strength comes from the deep postural muscles that extend from your pelvis to your rib cage and diaphragm. Having strong, stable core muscles is crucial for any sport or activity, as it allows you to transfer power more efficiently from your lower to your upper body. It also helps you maintain correct posture over long periods of time.
- Steadily progress training: Your exercise programme becomes increasingly challenging from session to session so you progress towards achieving your goals.
- Use periodisation for competitive athletes: Your training programme needs to fit within your cycle of competition. To achieve the best results, your training should vary throughout the year, peaking for competitions or races and building in recovery time.
Appointments and fees
Click appointments and fees to:
- make an appointment
- find out about our fees, payment options, and cancellation policy
- learn what to wear, and where to come, for your appointment.
Testimonials
I’m a keen gardener, walker and golfer and getting on for 60. Thanks to having regular sessions with Tania I’ve learnt heaps to enable me to continue to enjoy my outdoor interests for many years to come yet.
Gary
For years I ignored suggestions that better ‘core stability’ would probably help prevent recurring niggles (e.g. recurring leg problem stopping me tramping). Pilates mat classes in a large group didn’t help much, as they largely taught me that I was vastly less flexible than lots of other people, particularly younger women. Tania’s sessions are very different and provide much more lasting benefit.
What I particularly value is her remarkably quick and perceptive responsiveness. She isn’t limited at all to working through rigid routines, but varies things greatly depending on your body, whatever state it is in that day, and the feedback you provide. This particularly showed when I turned up with in rough shape after starting whitewater kayaking and she instantly created a session which bore little resemblance to what I’d seen of Pilates before. So she works with you not only to build up strength in weak areas that often underlie recurrent problems but also so that you learn how to take better care of your body to prevent new pains and to recover more quickly if you push things a bit far.
Charles
