A feel-great Pilates sequence to support your strength training (in less than 30 minutes)

If a well-rounded exercise routine is an outfit, I think of Pilates as the undergarments and socks (or maybe it’s a really great pair of jeans??). It’s the foundation for everything else you do: an excellent way to improve your stability and mobility, and helps you move through the rest of your workouts (or your job, or just simply daily life) in a more comfortable, steady, and supported manner. I love working in a weekly Pilates session (when I can!) to complement the other workouts I do, which are mostly strength-focused.

This week, let’s try another short and sweet Pilates routine. If you did the one I shared a few weeks ago, you’ll notice they’re kind of similar! This is by design. Pilates exercises tend to be pretty standardized — in my teacher training programs they pretty much tell you to teach the exercises in the manual, exactly as described there, in exactly the same order, every time. I’m not that strict, but I do see a lot of value in consistency and repeating a lot of the same exercises in this modality. The more you do them, the more you understand them and can get out of them*. So I’ve switched a few things up, but know that the repetition you may notice is truly intentional.

If you were hoping you’d get a strength training workout designed for progressive overload this week, I knoooow. Honestly, it’s just driving me a little bonkers that I’m not giving you strength workouts on the first of the month! So I’m pushing it back a little at a time until we get there. You’ll get a new strength training workout next week, and then probably none in February, and then in March we’ll get on the right track for having the first workout of the month being your strength program. Sound good? (I’m guessing December might not have been the easiest time to stay consistent with a strength routine, so you get an extra week with that one!)

Now, this Pilates workout is, again, not set up like our traditional WOWs, with a warmup, cooldown, and repeated circuit, so there are fewer obvious spots to stop if you’re running low on time or energy. Just feel it out and stop when you need to. You literally always have my permission to do this, and it absolutely still “counts.”

Here we go!

*In fact, the main difference between “beginner” Pilates and “intermediate” Pilates, aside from a few additional exercises, is that the cueing gets more complex: In beginner, other than the basic how-to, you are only supposed to cue abdominal engagement. In intermediate, you can layer on additional cues about what your limbs are doing and such. And it’s basically because when you first start out, you have to focus so much on the basics that you don’t have brain space for much else; you make room for it as you get more confident in the exercises. I am not super strict about this and I like to add in non-abdominal cues even when I have beginners in the room; don’t tell the Joe disciples!