Foam Roller Pilates

This morning I met Nicole and Laura for a pilates session. We started on the reformer and did a lot of the regular stuff. After getting warmed up, Nicole had us move over to the mats and gave us each a foam roller. We laid down on the rollers from our heads to our tailbones with our feet flat on the floor (knees bent). Then we went through a series of exercises on the rollers. By far the best one was really more of a stretch. Nicole said that it was also her favorite. Basically it stretched your shoulders/neck/upper arms and felt awesome. I wished that we could do that all day long.

Of course, Nicole had other ideas for us. Instead of just doing stretches all day long, she made us do the entire ab series on the foam rollers. Ugh! That was really hard, but I'm sure also very good for me. Nicole had told me that she had learned these new foam roller exercises when I went two weeks ago and at the time I was thinking that it'd be really fun to try them out. I'll admit it sounded more fun to hear about it than it actually was to do it, mostly because keeping your balance and trying to do exercises turns out to not be that easy.

For fun, I decided that I would wear my HR monitor and just see what the HR/calories looked like from doing pilates. These are today's stats:

Calories: 216
Max HR: 126
Average HR: 100

Clearly, not the same type of workout as doing cardio. But, I'm still glad I wore it just for the sake of comparison. I was thinking that I might be able to get in some cardio tonight, but now that I realize that I have a lot of other things that need to get done this week, I might skip it and make sure I get a good night's sleep before tomorrow's Terrier run.