The Summer Body Mentality vs the Mindful Movement of Pilates

Maybe you made goals near the beginning of the year to have the perfect summer body by now, or perhaps you decided on spring break that you didn’t look beach body ready. Whatever your reason for wanting to get fit and whatever current shape you find yourself in at this moment, shed that summer body mindset and start working out for an all-season body.

The stress of carving out the perfect body in a few weeks wreaks havoc on your overall health—body, mind, and soul. However, your workouts on a Pilates reformer from Frame Fitness can both offer the benefits of overall health and well-being and provide the most effective full-body workout to get you in shape for a lifetime.

This post walks you through how working out on a Pilates reformer can provide you with better health and fitness than stressing over the perfect body.

How Mindful Movement on a Pilates Reformer Benefits You

When you mention wanting to get the perfect summer body, most minds turn to thoughts of drastic workouts, deprivation of things you love, and desperation to reach the point of looking beach body ready. Such measures lead to discouragement, not health and fitness, and you simply can’t sustain that way of living.

However, the mindful movement on a Pilates reformer allows you to connect with your body, focusing on precise movement and breathing. You can ditch your beach body goals and set yourself up for a lifetime of fitness simply by shifting your mindset away from perfection, which disconnects you from your body, and bringing it closer to real fitness, health, and well-being, fostering a deep connection with your body.

Using a Pilates reformer allows you to achieve a full-body workout that increases your stability and strength. Although it’s low impact, a Pilates reformer still gives you the benefits of muscle building with the added benefit of working opposing muscles at the same time. Because Pilates movements have you focusing on aligning your body and increasing body awareness, not only can you achieve better fitness, but also you gain better posture and balance, making everyday movements even easier.

When you have quality Pilates equipment at home, you not only own the equipment, but also you learn to own your movement. Being mindful of your movement throughout each workout increases your body awareness throughout each day, providing you with increased function because of your fitness.

Using a Pilates reformer improves your strength and physical fitness but not just for you to look good and lift more weight. Using a Pilates reformer allows you to gain functional strength and mobility so that you look and feel good both on the beach during the summer and throughout the rest of the year. Rather than sweating away for a beach body, you can work steadily toward a happier, healthier you in a body you’re proud of.

Resetting Your Summer Body Vision and Goals

Rather than working out to get beach body ready, you need to change your mindset and goals to achieving good health and fitness habits. Doing so requires a bit of an adjustment to

• Your motivation: Rather than focusing on how your body looks, a Pilates reformer emphasizes how your body feels, how it aligns, how it moves, and how it functions. Using a Pilates reformer reinforces your fitness, not what size bathing suit you fit into. Each challenging workout helps to focus your mind on keeping fit, encouraging you to get stronger and increase your mobility. In fact, Pilates not only offers a motivating workout but also people who use Pilates reformers get motivated to work out from intrinsic, rather than external factors.
• Your goals: As you adjust your attitude to center on fitness and health, your goals should adjust as well. Rather than looking for specific numbers on a scale or with a dress size, create goals that refer to function and mobility. If you’re comfortable and confident with your movement and strength, you can be confident no matter what time of year it is.
• Your attitude: When you focus on increasing your level of fitness instead of decreasing the numbers in your waistline, you combine a healthy dose of mental self-care along with your physical fitness regimen. You approach your workouts with excitement for the challenge ahead, not the despair of how far you have to go to get to that perfect, beach-ready body. With a fitness approach on a Pilates reformer, rather than a perfect body approach, you don’t feel chained to working out. Instead, the inward focus and use of breathing techniques help to relieve stress and allow you to enjoy the freedom of movement in your workouts.

Mixing Up Your Workouts for Ultimate Fitness

When working out for optimum fitness and strength, you keep your mindset positive and your workouts enjoyable by mixing them up. With a Pilates reformer from Frame Fitness, you can enjoy several different types of workouts and select the appropriate level so that you can

• Increase flexibility
• Gain mobility
• Strengthen muscles

With a Pilates reformer, you don’t have to do separate workouts for flexibility, mobility, and strength. Instead, a reformer efficiently and effectively offers a total-body workout that strengthens your core, stabilizing muscles as well as opposing muscles at the same time. Deceptively challenging, you receive a full-body workout by performing a range of movements.

You can increase the tension on your Frame reformer easily, by the push of a button, to increase the level of difficulty, and the Frame reformer has a swiveling LCD, Bluetooth-enabled screen, on which you can stream the workouts of your choice. You can select the muscle group, instructor, or fitness level of each workout, allowing you to enjoy a full range of workouts on just one machine.

Using a variety of workouts helps to give your body maximum exposure to a wider range of movement. Mobility requires strength and flexibility, so if you’re simply doing the same workout repeatedly, you’re not giving your body a chance to gain optimum mobility. Mixing up your workouts solves that issue, and the Frame reformer makes mixing it up easy.

You don’t have to guess at movement or workouts with a Frame reformer. With workouts streaming to your machine, you can work out at home with an instructor as if you’re doing a private studio session. However, if you decide to switch to a different workout, you get the same level of instruction and don’t have to worry about signing up and attending a set number of sessions like you would in a gym.

Staying Positive to Achieve Your Fittest Body

When ditching the summer body ready mindset, you’re replacing it with a fitness-focused approach. Even though you’re not zeroed in on your waist size or numbers on the scale, you may still become discouraged, especially if you feel like you’re getting into a rut or plateau, but the Pilates reformer by Frame Fitness helps alleviate that stress and counteract the discouragement:

• By working out at home: When you work out at home with a quality Pilates reformer, you eliminate all the external pressures you face in a gym setting. You don’t feel shy about trying a new workout because no one is watching you or even glancing your way. You don’t have to worry about what you wear or how you appear. You also avoid the discouraging practice of comparison. Instead of comparing yourself to everyone else around you, you can focus strictly on yourself and your body’s movement.
• By setting the right atmosphere: The Frame reformer’s sleek design suits any home’s style, so you can feel free to place it in the room that best encourages you to work out. With its slim profile, you can easily find the perfect spot without sacrificing space. You can also stream music to your reformer and create customizable settings to get the most comfortable workout experience.
• By tracking your progress: A lack of progress is discouraging, but sometimes you don’t realize that you’re actually making progress, even when focused on the right measures. So the Frame reformer tracks your progress for you, giving you built-in encouragement before every workout.

Instead of making goals for a specific body type that may or may not be attainable, let alone sustainable, for you, make the change to focus on optimum strength and fitness. With a Pilates reformer, you can receive the most efficient and effective workout, offering you the best opportunity for a lifetime of fitness. Be consistent with your workouts but be kind to yourself as well. Focus on body awareness, not what your body needs to look like in a mirror, and you can achieve a level of fitness you’ll be proud of.