Piloxing is a fitness workout that has been around for a while but has been making a comeback this past year. Piloxing is an aerobic exercise that combines the power, speed and agility of pilates, boxing and dance. It can be a fun high-intensity activity that gets the whole body working and sweating, often done in a group/class setting, but possible to do it from home with a guided instructor. It has many benefits for people of all ages and fitness levels. If you’re looking to burn fat, tone muscles, strengthen your core and become more flexible, piloxing can be a fun way to achieve that.
What are some of the health benefits you can gain from Piloxing?
(source gify.com)
1. It strengthens your core
Piloxing is core intensive - a strong core can enhance your body’s stability and balance. Strengthening your core is necessary because we use those muscles all the time, it serves as the centre of gravity where all body movements begin. Core strength plays a big role in the ability to produce force in relation to the body’s stability but also showing control over the force we produce.
But the core not only assists with stability and posture but also decreases chances of injury to your spine and makes everyday physical activity easier. A weak or inflexible core can impair how well your arms, legs and other parts of your body function. Also, remember that having a strong core isn't really about attaining a six-pack around your stomach area - it is about toning your midsection and all your muscles in that area including the front, back and sides. Piloxing will strengthen surrounding muscles so that they can support your pelvis, neck, lower back, hips, and abdomen for everything to work better together.
Keep in mind that there are a variety of ways you can attain core strength, most individuals see core exercises like sit-ups/crunches as the only effective way to increase core strength - but a workout like piloxing provides a fun way to improve core strength. You get to reap most of the health benefits you’d generally get from pilates and boxing, all in one workout.
2. Cardio that gets your heart pumping
Cardio, short for cardiovascular, is any activity that speeds up your heart rate and increases your blood circulation.
When you're huffing, puffing and working up a sweat on the treadmill or on a run, it can seem like a lot of effort to burn just a couple of hundred calories. But a cardio workout like piloxing offers much more than only burning energy. By getting your heart pumping faster you can feel better because your blood pumps quickly throughout your body and your lungs take in more oxygen - this can lead to improved health, protect yourself against chronic disease, reduce stress and increase your life expectancy. Since piloxing combines a variety of different workouts into one session, it can be a lot more fun and challenging than other traditional cardio workouts. You might even forget that you’re working out while you rhythmically sweat away in a group class or in the safety of your living room.
Also, piloxing can be included as one of your weekly cardio sessions, allowing you to do other aerobic exercises like swimming on other days, but keeping in mind that the total amount of cardio you need in a week will depend on your fitness goals. If you’re trying to lose weight, it's important to include more than one session a week. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Trusted Source, you should get at least 150 to 300 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise or 75 to 150 minutes a week of vigorous-intensity aerobic exercise each week to see substantial changes - this should be accompanied by a balanced diet, as required by your nutrigenetic needs.
If you're looking for a breakdown of more benefits you can get from cardio training, see our article, “health benefits of regular cardio training”.
3. It can tone and strengthen your muscles
Piloxing is a great strength training exercise because it offers an array of benefits that tone up different parts of the body. Toning your body and strengthening your muscles will enable them to perform their full range of motion. Due to the combination of pilates, boxing, and dance into one total HIIT body workout, piloxing makes the body sweat. This can burn calories, lead to weight loss, increase bone density, improve metabolic rate and result in leaner muscles for a more toned body.
Not sure what constitutes strength training? This is when we use resistance to stimulate the muscles, resulting in increased strength, anaerobic endurance, and the size of your skeletal muscles. Strength training is commonly viewed as a form of exercise that makes use of weights but it can also be done using a person’s own body weight, as you do with piloxing. The way your body is composed will be determined by the type of strength training that you do and your genetic makeup.
So if your DNA test results stipulate that you need to place a higher priority on strength training, piloxing can help you tone up and increase your muscle volume and strength. Check out our Health Fit test if you want to find out what your genes say about your fitness needs - the test reveals your body’s response to key genes associated with your response to strength, power and endurance, as well as indicating your injury predisposition, risks for specific injury areas, ability to build muscle mass, recovery rate, and many other factors. We test these traits to understand how best to improve things like your strength and increase your muscle mass.
4. It can improve your quality of sleep
Sleep is vital for good health–in fact, whether you know it or not, sleep can affect everything from mental health, to training and nutrition and digestion. Optimising your sleep can help you improve your overall well-being because sleep gives us the ability to recover from stressful events. It also ensures that our bodies get the chance to reset the chemical balance that’s created during the day.
Being active and working out regularly can play a very important role in our ability to sleep well by calming the mind, reducing stress levels and improving concentration. Piloxing works and tires out a lot of muscles in our body because it includes a lot of cardio, essentially knocking you out when it’s time to sleep. Just make sure you complete the workout at least two hours before bedtime.
5. It can reduce your stress levels
Exercise is well known to stimulate the production of endorphins and enkephalins - the body’s natural feel-good hormones which can help us to manage our problems more effectively. In light of this pandemic, a greater focus is being placed on health and it is forcing everyone to prioritise their mental health, as everyday life is taking unusually challenging turns that leave us feeling out of control. So proactively taking control of this physical health aspect of your life will empower you to have a better sense of your holistic health.
Incorporating exercise more often into your schedule can help reduce stress and boost overall wellbeing. Regular exercise can improve blood flow to the parts of your brain involved in rational decision making and can lead to improved mood, mental flexibility and enable you to better manage stressful situations. So taking up piloxing can be a nice way to achieve this since it's not a rigid workout routine that you quickly get bored with, it will force you to get out of your comfort zone and enable your body to move differently.
More than anything, piloxing is a great way to add variety as well as intensity to your regular workouts. If you haven’t yet taken a DNAfit test to understand which workout programme your genes respond better to, then don’t wait any longer. A whole new world of personalised health and fitness awaits you. You can unlock insights that will empower you to optimise your training plan to genetic makeup, goals and fitness levels.
