It’s all thanks to a man called Joe*
*Fascinating fact for Pilates freaks: we pronounce Pilates phonetically but there is strong evidence to suggest the name of this eponymous athlete was pronounced like the pronunciation of “pilots”. Get used to that!
Joseph Pilates was self-educated in anatomy, bodybuilding, boxing, wrestling, yoga, gymnastics, and martial arts. At the outbreak of World War I, he was interned as an enemy alien in England and became a nurse-physiotherapist to his fellow internees who were sick or injured. He took bedsprings and rigged them to posts, headboards, and footboards of the bed frames, transforming them into resistance-type equipment for disabled patients. These designs were the early models of his universal Reformer and trapeze table (the Cadillac), and are the benchmark apparatuses in every Pilates studio today.
Joseph Pilates published 2 books, the first in 1934 and the second in 1945, in which he passionately described his overall philosophy on holistic health and balanced well-being but not his method of exercise. Pilates believed that his method, called contrology, would activate brain cells to stimulate the mind and affect the body. Recently, science has substantiated that exercise improves cognition—specifically, executive function.
Pilates’s method centred on each individual’s needs “at that time.” Pilates believed that mastering exercises using the least and, ultimately, no resistance or assistance was the pinnacle of performance. He invented his apparatus as an aid to learning movement patterns; mastering the mat program was the method’s goal, with the final outcome being transference to more functional and integrative movement (including the machines).
There were 6 founding principles to the method:
The focus is on doing one precise and perfect movement rather than many half-hearted ones.
Pilates saw forced exhalation as the key to full inhalation.
He called the core of the body the “powerhouse”; where all energy begins and then radiates outward to the extremities.
It is the mind that guides the body; hence, focused concentration on one’s entire body with every exercise is necessary when executing Pilates’s exercises.
When the work of the exercise is done from the centre with concentration, then one will be in control of the movements preformed.
There are no static, isolated movements because our bodies do not naturally function that way. Each exercise flows with graceful succession and a “minimum of motion” into the next to achieve purposeful and economic movement, which then carries over into everyday life.
Joseph Pilates’s work has been passed down in an almost folklore fashion: upheld and preserved by very few. Essentially, classical Pilates has not changed since its inception. There has not been an accreditation or even documentation of the original Pilates principles, methods, techniques, logic, or reasoning. This lack of standardisation has resulted in the term Pilates being applied to the wide variation of exercises and techniques now in practice.
Regular practice of Pilates, as was claimed by its creator and continues to be proven, can gift the participant with relaxation, control of the mind, enhanced body and self-awareness, improved core stability, coordination and posture, uniform muscle development and decreased stress.