Good evening  🙂

I know what some of you are thinking…challenging my inner cynic doesn’t sound like exercise. I know what some others of you are thinking too…inner cynic? is that the one hiding inside the great big outer cynic? and that challenging that would take more than 365 days. Well shh for now and read the post.

After my success earlier in the week with Pilates, I decided that It would be a good idea to have another go at this, balancing out the heavy lifting and leaping about of the first 3 sessions of the week with something calmer. There was no easily available Pilates so i decided to give a class called Body Balance a go.

What the Les Mills website says about body balance

That is a snip from the Les Mills website, the company who invented body balance. I am not sure it did any of the things it says it would do, apart from build flexibility, with practice I suspect it would build flexibility. But I am not sure it did anything to make me calmer and there was definitely no harmony. This is where my inner and outer and general right through the middle cynic comes in. I am not sure I want harmony, I want fitness…I would like flexibility but there are probably other ways to achieve that, Pilates for one…

The other thing that I couldn’t help but notice was the amount of stereotypes attending the class; there were the skinny girls with perfect ponytails who could bend into impossible positions and there was even a man in drawstring cream linen trousers! This was a little too much for me, it made me wary before we even started.

The other problem I had with this class, was the almost obsessive need to hyper-extend my back, the “back bend” as it was known came up all the time. Now I am a person who, due to years of gymnastics as a child and sitting as an office worker, has a tendency to hyper-extend my joints, especially my back too much any way. So the added  bending backwards didn’t actually do me much good, to the point where I came home and had to attack it with my foam roller to put it right.

So all in all of the exercise classes that I am labeling “exercise with no shoes” Pilates: yes, Body Balance: probably not.

however, it was worth a try, and you never know if you will like these things until you try them 😀

Day 20 complete

PS the last item of this class was relaxation…I spent most of it trying to compose a Haiku about the class… I failed because there was a woman talking calmly at me…I think I may have missed the point…

Published by Sam Catchpole

She/They | Aspiring Strongperson, Photographer, Artist, Writer, View all posts by Sam Catchpole