petilates

Madison gave me an interesting tip recently. He suggested I sit on a squishy, half-deflated (or half-inflated depending on your perspective) ball while at work. The ball basically keeps you uneven and unbalanced, so your hips, butt and abs work both to balance and hold you in place -- while keeping you from crunching up in one position and sitting in it all day. Interesting. This could help with my increasingly tight hips. Good balls can be found at pet stores.

Interesting side note that I have no documentation for: apparently in the height of the dot com boom, some of the earliest successes were pet-related plays, i.e. pets.com. Remember this guy? Their success was based on the fact that obsessive pet owners would spend tons of money on toys. Nope, not food (to bulky to send), not medicine or even those little boots that lucky pups wear. Pet toys were running the economy there for a while, folks.

Notice that pilates started to hit the mainstream right at the peak of the dot com boom -- right? I mean, I had heard about it, but didn't find a teacher until 2000 (and by the following year I had lots of free time to dedicate to practicing because I was out of work... laid off from a failed startup like everyone else). Maybe all those online pet retailers were really successful -- for a while at least -- because they were selling pet toys to pilates teachers? I mean, how many classes have you taken that involve little balls or stuffed chew toys to use at props?