What is Pilates?
I learned about Pilates from a client. “What have you been doing?” I asked. “You look incredible!” She was thinner, fitter, and even looked taller, though she had not lost weight! I decided to see for myself what Pilates was about and took a single class at the YMCA where I was working as a fitness trainer.
Twenty years earlier I had taken ballet 4-5 times a week. I loved how dancing made me feel – tall, ‘lifted’, graceful and strong. More recently, I had begun to feel compressed. While I was very strong, my stride was ‘down’ instead of ‘up’, and I sometimes felt (and looked) like a mix between a gorilla and a truck driver! After one Pilates class, I felt the same balance and ‘liftedness’ that I had experienced dancing. In March 2004 I took the Stott Pilates instructor program in NYC (mat) specifically to teach others and share the many benefits of Pilates.
Pilates is an effective adjunct to other fitness activities, but is also wonderful for beginners and new moms, as it is a very safe form of exercise. Stott Pilates was developed by contemporizing traditional Pilates exercises through integration with modern advanced expertise in physical therapy. Many sports professionals and teams now make Pilates exercises a part of their regular programs. My students include beginners, dancers, athletes, cancer survivors, and teens.
A Little About Joe
Joe Pilates called his exercise form, “the art of Control-ology,” and believed, “physical fitness the first requisite of happiness.” A gymnast and innovator who created and practiced strengthening and conditioning programs while being held in a British internment camp during W.W.I, he then went on to develop programs to help his fellow German inmates recover from many debilitating health problems found in the camps. Because of his passion and success, he was eventually given the task of rehabilitating injured British soldiers.
After the war, he and his wife (a nurse) continued to develop healing programs and eventually settled in NYC. There, his training system became popular with dancers who had become injured, and who wanted to regain strength while minimizing their risk of reinjury. Today, some form of Pilates is practiced and taught in nearly every US city.