Piggy Pins Perish at Pilates Plié Peril

AINE O’CONNOR

Ilove high heels, but when I wear them when I’m fat I think I look like Miss Piggy – little shoes on the end of chunky legs and a huge body mass. So, feeling that the pins were going Piggy I decided I would up my exercise game. Over the years I have tried most forms of exercise, one of which was a kind of turbo Pilates class where this lady tortured (...oops I mean taught us) for over an hour a few times a week. When I started with her it was after an exercise hiatus so the post pilates pain was to be expected.

One of the delights of Pilates is squatting, from plié to a million reps of tiny little bouncy ones, no ‘Rectus Femoris’ or ‘Vastus Lateralis’ is left untormented. And it does pay off quite fast. So I decided that upping my Piggy pin game should involve some squats. I’m definitely fitter at this outset, so how hard was it going to be? To do the squats, not hard at all. To walk in the days afterwards, exceedingly. I woke up to discover my legs were not keen to do my bidding and the only way to get them out of bed was to lift them. I had to go down the stairs sideways to minimise the agony. Getting back upstairs, putting my jeans on, coming back down and getting into the car all proved eye-wateringly challenging. Plain walking was not simple at all, I looked like a cross between Thunderbirds and someone who had just had every joint replaced... with a stick. I had never before been so acutely aware of the Lighthouse Cinema’s approximately 97 flights of stairs, and every time I sat down getting up again got harder. By mid-afternoon my thighs were actually sore to the touch. Two days it took to recover, and the bloody pins are still Piggy.