Ed Thompson

“I’m very active with golf, swimming, and spinning. Pilates makes all of these activities more enjoyable. I feel better even on a simple walk in the woods or while keeping up with the grandkids.”

“I have worked out for years, doing traditional workouts for athletes with weights etc. The idea behind the workouts was big muscle strength and flexibility. Back when I played sports in  college, the idea was repetitive practice. Just do it over and over again. That did a lot of damage. Before there was the word “cross-training” I used to do other forms of exercise to balance me out. I migrated to doing more running, swimming and stretching workouts. 

I had many sports injuries to the right side of my body so I have been compensating for years. Despite my dedication to regular workouts my right side had become even weaker and less functional. With Pilates, I wanted to explore how to regain symmetry and balanced strength in the right and left sides of my body. That was my main motivation for starting Pilates. I wanted to learn something new and different to reverse the imbalance.

Pilates is a very different approach to movement. I used to work only on big muscle movement and big muscle flexibility. I worked under the motto “If you’re not crawling out of the gym, then you didn’t work out hard enough.”

The only type of core work I used to do was sit-ups and other ballistic types of movements. Pilates is a very fine work, not something athletes are used to. I appreciate the instruction of the fine movements. Because of the Pilates work my movement is more balanced, comfortable and I feel more confident in how I move about.

I definitely feel progress, but it’s slow. It’s a process that requires patience. It’s a different way of doing things. It’s a good challenge to learn to be different than you were. It requires you to be mentally open. It requires a very different mindset. I have to take a moment to make sure I’m focused on what I’m doing. If I don’t keep up with my Pilates practice, my old patterns come back, and I have to remind my body of what I’ve learned, like using my obliques, for example. The core strength I’ve gained is really beneficial to all the activities I love.

I’m very active with golf, swimming, and spinning. Pilates makes all of these activities more enjoyable. I feel better even on a simple walk in the woods or while keeping up with the grandkids. After doing Pilates for two years I even run with far less pain because of improved core strength.