A friend asked me recently about how to maintain his level of fitness.

He has a good level of fitness and spends an hour or so, three days a week running or cycling, plus visits to the gym to work on muscular strength.

I have a very different approach to taking care of my fitness, walking, cycling and short runs to keep my heart healthy, and daily Pilates practice to build strength and flexibility, Advanced level Pilates is a great full body workout that gets you a bit puffed it’s good for the heart.

If you do the same old routine day in day out the body systems will plateau and will no longer make fitness gains.

Maybe you walk to work, or cycle. Maybe the journey is a bit further than you would normally do, or there are hills.

The first time you do it, it’s a challenge, after a month you find you’ve toned up and lost some weight. By the time you’ve been doing it for six months the weight loss has levelled out and you’re not getting puffed at all. You’ve reached the fitness plateau.

The heart has become strong enough to meet the challenge placed on it and deliver oxygen to the working muscles. The muscles are able to more efficiently utilise that oxygen to create energy and keep powering along without needing a rest.

Although me and my friend like to workout in different ways the key to maintaining your level of fitness is the same: mix it up.

So, rather than having to run/walk more often or for longer and further each time, put some sprints in to the mix. Recent research has shown that adding high intensity training (HIT) into your weekly activities improves heart health, helps protect against type 2 diabetes and helps reduce body fat.

If you like to run or cycle, then add a 30 second, hard as you can, sprint during the workout. If walking is your thing, make sure you push yourself to get properly puffed for that 30 seconds. You only need to do this a couple of times a week to get improvements.

Then, change your route. Seek out some hills and charge up them.

When it comes to maintaining body strength, don’t stick with the same set of exercises or the same old weights in the gym.

Learning body weight exercise systems such as Pilates will give you the ability to mix up your strength training and combine it with improved flexibility all at the same time.

Advanced Pilates exercises are complex and involve constant movement on all planes, mimicking and intensifying natural functional movement. The Pilates push-up is a great example.

You begin standing, do a forward bend and walk out with your hands into a plank. But you don’t stay there, (contrary to popular belief there are no planks in proper Pilates!) you do one fantastic slow push-up and reverse back up to standing.

Strength, flexibility and a bit puffed out.

Patricia Issitt is a movement therapist and Pilates instructor based in York. 

Find out more at yorkpilates.com