Alex Gerrard with her Shake Weight dumbell
It's the new year and how many of you are still on your new diet and fitness plan?
It takes a lot of motivation to carry through with the resolutions that we wished we had never made. It doesn't help when your returning to the same workout that you quit three months ago because you were bored and sick of doing the same thing three or four times a week.
Don't brush the dust off the fitness DVD that managed to 'disappear' as soon as we entered December. 'It's Christmas, so I can enjoy myself'. Take a look at the guide to the new trends for 2011. Try something new and work muscles you haven't before.
The chances are your more likely to stick at something new and untried. Which will get you in perfect shape, ready to take off the layers and enter the summer with a little less of you.
Ten Pilates
The big question here is, what makes it so different from traditional pilates? This is performed with an equipment piece called the reformer.
As well as the normal workout of pilates which strengthens core waist and lower back muscles improving posture and preventing injury. This new workout delivers an innovative, intense and highly effective full body workout. With a little effort on your side, of course. It combines well known pilates moves with techniques from circuit and weight training, which isolates specific muscle groups and works them more intensely.
The workout is designed to give you a slimmer figure, with lean, toned muscles. It plans to do this fast. Something that we all like to hear and see.
The workout is centred on and around the reformer bed, which means that there is an unlimited amount of exercises to be performed. Some of the exercises have been proven to help lift breast muscles, for a firmer and fuller décolletage.
Ten Pilates is designed to be adaptable and flexible. The tailored workouts will allow you match your needs and abilities. Which means that you will see and feel the benefits more quickly.
Zero Gravity Yoga
This exercise takes you up into the air practising your yoga moves. Using a soft sling, you are held in the air whilst performing your normal routine.
Probably not best if you're afraid of heights, but this exercise promises to relieve compressed joints and align the body head-to-toe. The hammock is designed to change the body's dynamic relationship with the ground and allows the participant to better understand their body and realign the body without the compression from gravity.
The soft sling was invented in the New York in the nineties by Christopher Harrison, an aerial choreographer who co-founded the world famous acrobatic performance troupe, AntiGravity. After realising that the fabric swing gave them a hardcore upper body workout and rock hard abs, it was incorporated into their exercise routines.
This is an exercise to consider if you a little past the yoga-on-a-mat stage.
Powerboxing
This combines strength exercises with a very popular and tried vibration platform, the Power Plate. The Power Plate has been around for a while now, proving popular and effective.
Standing alone gives you a workout from the vibrations sent pulsing through your body. Combining the boxing moves which elevate the heart rate, meaning that you are burning more fat, and the vibrations of the plate to improve muscle strength and tone, which leads to a full body workout in one. Easy.
Gravity Classes
These time efficient classes provide you with a full body strength workout. The Gravity Training System (GTS) consists of a moving glide board which uses your own body weight as resistance. So the heavier you weigh, the harder the workout.
The American born resistance exercise can be adapted to cater for over 200 different exercises, it's low impact but promises to be intense. So not for you if you like to feel the sweat dripping off. Coleen Rooney is already a fan of this total muscle workout.
Leg Master Power
This small piece of equipment gives you leaner, more toned legs after use for just a couple of minutes a day. Yes, I have not mis-typed this, it is just a couple of minutes a day.
But don't expect not to be given a hardcore workout. The Leg Master Power uses a unique lateral gliding motion that works with gravity to tone muscles that squats and leg presses can't reach.
Scientists at Liverpool Hope University found that the Leg Master works better than the gym and after use, there was a 21 per cent reduction in body fat.
Shake Weight
The Shake Weight is a modified dumbell which creates a vibrating effect which works the muscles more intensely.
The vibrations from the weight increase the activity of the muscle, contracting them up to 240 times per minute. Which builds up more definition in less time.
Alex Gerrard endorses the product, she said: “I use the shake weight everyday and my arms have never looked so good. It really works”.
There you have all the information about the latest trends in fitness, after such the hard work of reading that information I think it's time you deserve a break, get back to the exercising tomorrow.
Femalefirst Taryn Davies