Pilates

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Pilates is an exercise group that at first brush looks much like the very similar yoga. Like yoga, it involves careful posturing, measured breathing, and using stretches to strengthen and tone the body. While this first glance shows many similarities, there are nearly as many differences as similarities. For one, Pilates is a much younger form of exercise than yoga.

Yoga has a history that stretches back into antiquity, it is rich in story and folk lore, and it encompasses mind, body, and spirit as a unified whole. Pilates on the other hand is only about 70 years old, and it all started with one man, Joseph Pilates. Joseph was a German gymnast who thought that he could help with the training and rehabilitation of athletes, police, and even soldiers. He had poor health growing up, which played into his lifelong obsession with fitness. He actually built his system of exercises borrowing from other disciplines, and one of his primary influences was yoga.

Joseph named his new system of exercises “Contrology” because he believed that the entire system began and ended with the mind. In his method, the mind consciously controls the body’s core muscles and breathing. In fact, breathing properly was a key tenant of his philosophy of health. Everything else flowed naturally from proper breathing.

Sadly for Joseph, his handpicked name for the exercises he created did not stick. By the end of his life he had founded a school of exercises known throughout the ballet world simply as Pilates. For most of his lifetime that was the only place where his ideas flourished. This is largely because he set up a dance studio in New York after immigrating there prior to World War II. The studio became a famous place for the ballet elite to come for strength and conditioning training, and as his students eventually branched off to form their own studios, they took his ideas with them to teach their students.

After his death, a legal battle broke out over the right to use the term Pilates for your exercise program. The United States court system ruled that the name was free for public use, and subsequently the market has exploded and experienced a period of amazing growth. Every major college; and even some high schools offer classes in a variety of Pilates routines, from beginner to advanced. Private studios opened up around the nation, and it is estimated that more than 11 million people practice it today.

The original exercises were designed to be done under supervision, but otherwise unassisted. The practitioner’s balance, resistance, and pace all came from within. As advances in sports fitness were made, the concept of variable resistance was introduced, and eventually made its way into Pilates in the form of machinery designed to increase the resistance of your movements. The first, and still most common piece of Pilates equipment is the reformer, which uses a spring system to increase the resistance to your poses. For example, if you are doing a lunge and simply sliding your foot forward, you only meet the limited resistance of friction. If you put that foot on a reformer connected to the springs, you can create a much greater level of resistance to the motion. This allows the same movements to have a greater toning, sculpting, and muscle building effect.

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