It’s that time of year, and many of us are looking at what we’ll do in the coming days, weeks, and months to level-up our health. So… Is this a demotivational book?

Quite the opposite! It’s rather a case of an often much-needed reminder to ensure that our plans are really our own, and really are what’s best for us. Why wouldn’t they be, you ask?

Much of diet culture (ubiquitous! From magazine covers to movie stars to the models advertising anything from health insurance to water filters) has us reaching for “body goals” that are not possible without a different skeleton and genes and compromises and post-production edits.

Alex Light—herself having moved from the fashion and beauty industry into health education—sets out in a clear, easy-reading manner, how we can look after ourselves, not be neglectful of our bodies, and/but also not get distracted into unhelpful, impossible, castles-in-the-air.

Bottom line: you cannot self-hate your way into good health, and good health will always be much more attainable than a body that’s just not yours. This book can help you sort out which is which.

Click here to check out You Are Not A Before Picture, and appreciate all you and your body can (and do) do for each other!

While the cover illustration makes this look a little too simple, in fact there’s a lot of value in this book, with exercises ranging from things like that on the cover, to the “wall downward dog”. But the actual exercises (of which there are 29) themselves are only a part of the book (taking about 70 pages of it with clear illustrations).

There’s also a lot about important Pilates principles to apply, such as breathing, correct body alignment (if you don’t already do Pilates, you will not have this, as Pilates alignment is quite specific), flexibility, balance, stability, coordination, range of motion, isometric exercise considerations, endurance, and more.

Unlike a lot of “…for seniors” books, this is not a watered down barely-does-anything version of the “real” exercises, but rather, would present most the same challenges to a 20-year-old reader; it’s just that the focus here is more on matters that tend to concern an older rather than younger demographic. That 20-something may be busy building their butt, for instance, while the 80-year-old is building their bones. No reason both shouldn’t do both, of course, but the focus is age-specific.

The author guides us through working up from easy things to hard, breaking stuff down so that we can progress at our own pace, such that even the most cautious or enthusiastic reader can start at an appropriate point and proceed accordingly.

She also talks us through a 28-day program (as promised by the subtitle), and advice on how to keep it going without plateauing, how to set realistic goals, how to tailor it to our abilities as we go, track our progress, and so forth.

The style is clear and instructional, and one thing that sets this apart from a lot of Pilates books is that the education comes from an angle not of “trust me”, but rather from well-sourced claims with bibliography whose list spans 5 pages at the end.

Bottom line: if you’d like to progressively increase your strength, stability, and more—with no gym equipment, just a wall—then this book will have you see improvements in the 28 days it promises, and thereafter.

Click here to check out Simple Wall Pilates For Seniors, and experience the difference!