Lose Weight with Pilates!

Written by Shoshana Pritzker Monday, 10 May 2010 21:12

By Selina Foreman

Losing weight is a relatively simple equation: expend more calories than you take in. Of course, anyone who has ever tried to lose weight can tell you that it’s clearly easier said than done. Finding an exercise program you can live with, nay— enjoy— can seem harder than quantum physics. True believers in the Pilates world know that Pilates is for life— a practice that mentally and physically sustains. But are all calories created equally?

They are, according to Michele Olson, PhD, CSCS (Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist), who is an exercise physiologist at Auburn University Montgomery. And she’s just the woman to prove that Pilates can aid a person in attaining her weight-loss goals.

Scientific studies on the links between Pilates and weight loss are few and far between. This is initially what interested Olson…she combined her affinity for Pilates with her scientific mind and her lab to produce some definitive results regarding how well Pilates performs in terms of overall fitness.

Olson looked at three levels of mat workouts: beginner, intermediate and advanced, and studied the metabolic and caloric cost of each. Participants performed basic, intermediate and advanced workouts in random order while the research team monitored heart rate, metabolic rate and rate of perceived exertion. We can extrapolate from her research how effective Pilates is in terms of losing weight, because she measures caloric cost. “If you’re trying to lose weight, burning calories is burning calories,” Olson points out.

Her findings, while not exactly revolutionary, do prove many of the claims that Pilates enthusiasts have touted for years. She also debunks a couple of myths, one of which has to do with claims that Pilates actually elongates your muscles. It doesn’t.

“I think Pilates is effective in improving flexibility, and so people experience feeling more elongated…better posture,” she says. “And that’s great— we can say all that.” However, once muscles reach maturity, they can’t increase in length. What does happen is that practitioners of Pilates find that adding lean muscle mass and losing fat results in leaner, longer looking limbs.

Her research also shows that the more advanced you are, the bigger the benefit, both in terms of caloric cost and cardiovascular activity. Beginners will burn only about five calories per minute, according to Olson’s study, comparable to dynamic stretching. The good news is that even though the benefit is small compared to, say, running, where you will typically burn eight to 10 calories per minute, you are still burning calories.

“If you do something that’s less intense, you’re going to have to do it longer,” Olson says simply. Intermediate workouts produced bigger benefits, burning almost six calories per minute and raising heart rates to around 110-115 beats per minute. This level of exertion is comparable to low-impact aerobic activity or leisure walking. Advanced workouts, predictably, produced the biggest benefits. Subjects burned 7.5 calories per minute and heart rates were measured at 120 + beats per minute. While this is still not comparable to high-intensity activities like running, there are definite cardiovascular benefits here.

“While running will give you, overall, a bigger improvement in cardio fitness, if you’re trying to lose weight, you’re better off picking an activity you can do and do it for a relatively long period of time,” says Olson.

So, if you’re one of those people who only wear flip-flops to the gym while carrying a mat, you can feel safe in the knowledge that Pilates can still give you a better looking body that is relatively healthy cardio-wise as well.

She recommends, for weight-loss purposes, adding Pilates to a fitness regimen that includes more traditional aerobic activity, or, if you’re going solo with Pilates, working out for 1 hour, four times a week. “You don’t have to pound, pound, pound,” says Olson. “Get into some Pilates.”

One of the other claims that Pilates instructors often espouse is how Pilates targets the deep abdominal muscles, like the transverse abdominus, which is the deepest muscle layer that wraps around the torso like a corset, and the internal obliques, which is the layer just above.

However, Olson found that, while certain exercises do tend to target the deeper abdominal muscles, others challenge the more superficial muscles like the rectus abdominus—and that’s not a bad thing. The rectus abdominus is the outermost abdominal muscle layer that’s responsible for the “six-pack.”

“Pilates is good at working all the different parts of your abdominal group and not just the deep, deep, deep muscles,” says Olson. Full-flexion exercises, where you have the full range of motion with your spine coming all the way up off the mat like the Teaser or the Roll-up, tend to challenge the more superficial muscles. Lower flexion exercises, such as the Hundred or the Double Leg Stretch, do challenge those deeper muscles.

She found that even the exercises that target the rectus abdominus do a better job of challenging the superficial muscles than traditional crunches, and points out that all four of the abdominal muscles play important roles in stabilizing the spine.

“You need to work them all,” she says. “They all have a stabilizing role.” Pilates purists sometimes shy away from scientific research such as Olson’s, preferring to follow Joseph Pilates’ tenants exactly as written and let the results stand on their own merits.

“[Research like] this should do nothing but help Pilates,” counters Olson. “We’ll have more information to consumers, good reasons to do it. There are benefits.” She feels Joe Pilates would have given research like hers his blessing. “I think Joseph Pilates studied all the time,” she points out. “If something wasn’t working, he’d build another piece of equipment.”

“I think he would be the first person to say, ‘How do they do this? Let’s go see this lab!’”

This article was originally published in February of 2009.