When it comes to working out, it’s important to give your body the attention it needs to recover so that you can prepare yourself for your next workout. YouTube fitness star, Cassey Ho, founder of Blogilates and inventor of Pop Pilates, believes that stretching and recovery are essential to getting in shape, she shared with HollywoodLife EXCLUSIVELY. “What I’m seeing is a trend towards recovery, because I think over the past few years, HIIT workouts, that’s high-intensity interval training, have been super popular. People really pushing themselves hard for a minute straight, taking a 30-second break, and then going hard for another minute. It is good, but I think people are beginning to see their bodies breaking down from that, and we need to pay more attention to stretching, recovery, and relaxation. So I think the trend is towards more training your flexibility and training yourself so that you’re not being injured when you’re doing intense workouts like that,” Cassey revealed.
As for the actual workout Cassey recommends, “It depends on what the person is into, but obviously there are so many options. There’s pilates, yoga, weightlifting, running, dancing, rowing, high-intensity circuit training. You can find a lot of home workouts for beginners on YouTube, not even just for beginners, but say for someone who is afraid of working out in front of other people, you can do a lot of workouts at home to find your confidence first.”
In order to stick to your fitness goals and actually make sure you get your workouts in, Cassey suggests, “You need to find a workout that actually brings you joy, something that you truly do look forward to because one of the main reasons why people give up is because they are bored out of their minds doing something. They really hate it. They dread it. So why do something that you hate when you could do something you love? I do believe there is ‘the one’ in terms of workouts. For every single person out there, it’s going to be different for everyone. Take some time to discover what that is, and when you find it, you’ll find that working out feels like a hobby and something that you really just want to do all the time instead of feeling like it’s drudgery.”
Cassey continued, “I think that if people are feeling intimidated or scared to work out, they just need to get a partner to do it with, like a friend. Just ask someone to do a quick little challenge with them or something. I just launched the 2020 challenge on my Instagram, and basically, it encourages you to do 20 reps of an ab exercise and 20 reps of another exercise every day for 20 days, just to get you moving. So many people have started doing it and tagging their friends because it’s been something quick that you can get done in the day and it inspires you to just do even more. So I think just get started because even a little bit is good. It’s better than nothing at all, and eventually, you’ll find the workout that is for you, that really brings you joy, and that would be the goal, to make it your lifestyle.”
If you want to work out but don’t want to splurge on a gym membership, have no fear, because Cassey told us about FitOn, which is a free app that features some of the top trainers. “I have all my exclusive pilates workouts in there,” Cassey admitted. “There are dance videos, there are strength training videos, yoga videos, stretching videos. Basically, it’s amazing because the content is free and it’s premium quality content. I just love the way that it’s put together.” For those of you who don’t want to download the app, Cassey has got you covered. “I have a lot of free YouTube videos on Pilates on my Youtube channel that people can do. Or you can do FitOn workouts, and those are free as well. So they have strength training, dance, cardio, pilates, yoga, all that kind of stuff,” she revealed.