Pilates For Dummies

Part I

Pilates Basics

In this part . . .

Part I gives you the information you need to know before getting serious about Pilates. Are you curious about what clothing or equipment you need before getting started? Do you want to know the practical benefits of doing Pilates? This part is for you. I also cover everything from the evolution of Pilates to the key concepts of Pilates to the Pilates alphabet, which is a learning tool I came up with that introduces you to the key movements that you perform again and again in the exercises.

Chapter 1

A Pilates Primer

In This Chapter

bullet Getting familiar with Pilates

bullet Understanding how the method evolved

bullet Introducing the eight principles of Pilates

bullet Gearing up for Pilates

W hat is Pilates? In a word, magic.

But first things first. Pilates does not rhyme with pirates. It’s puh-LAH-teez. If you were to look in on a busy Pilates studio, you might think, Hey, this just looks like glorified sit-ups, or What are these people doing, torturing themselves with springs and pulleys? or Gee, this looks really fun and is just what I need! And all these thoughts would be true.

Pilates is full of contradictions: It’s strangely mundane and yet ethereal, simultaneously simple and complex. Some people understand and deeply appreciate the benefits of Pilates the first time they try it. Others may feel that Pilates exercises are repetitive and silly, but after three months of doing the same exercise, they suddenly gain access to a new layer of information about their bodies. Some people may initially find an exercise completely out of their reach, but after a few weeks of training, they find it to be completely natural. Whatever your experience of Pilates, the bottom line is always the same: You will be transformed.

My boyfriend, a serious freestyle snowboarder and skateboarder, informed me after his sixth session that Pilates is boring. He prefers the thrill of danger and the reckless abandon that he finds on the slopes or on his skateboard. But he did grudgingly admit that his short brush with Pilates drastically improved his snowboarding and allowed him to quit wearing his knee braces while snowboarding, after needing them for ten years.

His story is but one of the many testimonials I’ve received. A 35-year-old man who had back pain that nothing could help for 15 years, an elderly woman who had never enjoyed exercise and found herself losing flexibility and strength, and people who just wanted to tone up and have a gorgeous belly — all found what they needed in Pilates.

I myself am living proof of the Pilates magic. I seriously injured my knee 13 years ago during my short-lived career as a professional wrestler (a side job that I took when I was trying to support myself as a professional dancer). I was diagnosed as having a torn ligament, and the doctors recommended surgery if I wanted to continue dancing professionally. After six months of rehabilitation-based Pilates exercises and no surgery, I was up and dancing with more strength and technique than ever before. I was a convert.

I have had students come to Pilates without any prior movement experience. For some, it is the first form of exercise that appeals to them, either because they can’t stand the gym scene — the loud music of aerobics, the grunting guys lifting weights — or they don’t want to risk the potential injury or embarrassment that can come from not having any body knowledge. Pilates teaches fundamental movements; Pilates exercises are easy to learn and are completely safe for the average Joe.

If you already know a lot about Pilates or just want to get to the exercises, feel free to skip to Chapter 4, although I recommend that you check out the Pilates alphabet in Chapter 3 before attempting any of the exercises in this book.

As in starting any new exercise program, consult your doctor before starting Pilates, especially if you suffer from heart conditions, hypertension, or any other serious illness. If you have back pain or any other serious injury, please get a diagnosis from a doctor and your doctor’s okay before embarking on your Pilates journey.

The Basics on Pilates

Pilates exercises borrow from yoga, dance, and gymnastics, but also include lots of original movements that distinguish them from these other techniques. The Pilates method consists of a repertoire of over 500 exercises to be done on a mat or on one of the many pieces of equipment Joseph Pilates invented. Don’t worry about having to use complicated equipment — you can get a terrific workout at home with just a simple exercise mat. If you’re interested in using special Pilates equipment, I give you the rundown in Chapter 15.

The Pilates method works to strengthen the center (see the section Centering in this chapter), lengthen the spine, build muscle tone, and increase body awareness and flexibility.

The Pilates method is also an excellent rehabilitation system for back, knee, hip, shoulder, and repetitive-stress injuries. Pilates addresses the body as a whole, correcting the body’s asymmetries and chronic weaknesses to prevent reinjury and to bring the body back into balance.

Joe Pilates: A short history of the man

Born in Germany in 1880 with a sunken chest and asthma, Joseph Hubertus Pilates spent his life obsessed with restoring his health and body condition. Over time, he overcame his frailty and became an accomplished skier, diver, gymnast, yogi, and boxer, maintaining top physical form well into his seventies. While in an English internment camp during World War I, Pilates rigged springs above hospital beds to allow patients to rehabilitate while lying on their backs. This setup later evolved into the cadillac, one of the main pieces of equipment in the Pilates method.

In 1923, Pilates emigrated to the United States. He settled in New York City, where he opened a studio on Eighth Avenue in Manhattan and started training and rehabilitating professional dancers. Ballet master George Balanchine and modern dance diva Martha Graham were two of his students.

Originally, Pilates developed a series of mat exercises designed to build abdominal strength and body control. He then built various pieces of equipment to enhance the results of his expanding repertoire of exercises. His motivation for building the equipment was to replace himself as a spotter for his clients. He developed 20-odd contraptions, some of which look a little like medieval torture devices. They were constructed of wood and metal piping, and used combinations of pulleys, straps, bars, boxes, and springs. His philosophy led him to develop a regimen that develops the body uniformly, corrects wrong postures, restores physical vitality, invigorates the mind, and elevates the spirit. Way ahead of his time, he viewed fitness holistically, emphasizing the body working as a whole unit.

Over the decades, Pilates developed over 500 exercises, which he originally called Contrology but which have since come to be known as the Pilates method.

Pilates mat work uses series of exercises

Pilates mat exercises are usually done in a series. Series are organized by levels. This book contains pre-Pilates, beginning, intermediate, and advanced series.

I recommend starting with pre-Pilates (Chapter 4). The pre-Pilates exercises give you a deep understanding of the concepts that make up all Pilates exercises. After you understand these concepts, you can apply them to the beginning series. After you have mastered the beginning series, move on to the intermediate series, and so on. As you progress in the method, the series get longer and harder. An intermediate workout includes exercises from the beginning series, plus new and harder intermediate exercises. Sometimes you will just do a more difficult version of the same exercise when you advance in levels.

Going through a series in order and trying to complete the whole series when you work out is important. Joseph Pilates was a genius when it comes to understanding muscle balance in the body. The series he developed make sense to the body when the exercises are done in the correct order. Usually, you start a series with an exercise that warms up the spine, then you do a few exercises that bend the spine in one direction, followed by an exercise that reverses that movement, and so on. You don’t have to understand the science behind why these exercises are in the order that they’re in (you would need a Ph.D. in kinesiology to fully understand the reasons). Just trust in the method and in the order of the exercises. The longer I study and practice Pilates, the more I appreciate the intelligence of the man who created it.

Pilates builds the powerhouse

Pilates exercises, as a whole, develop strong abdominal, back, butt, and deep-postural muscles. Pilates focuses on the muscles that support the skeletal system and act as the powerhouse of the body.

Powerhouse is a term that comes from Joe Pilates himself. (See the sidebar Joe Pilates: A short history of the man in this chapter for information about the man who developed Pilates exercises.) The abdominals, butt, back, and sometimes the inner thigh muscles, when working together, constitute the powerhouse. This is where many of the Pilates exercises can be initiated or the area that is being challenged in many exercises. These muscles are the main stabilizing muscles of the torso and are very important for preventing injury to the back.

Why should you care about your powerhouse?

bullet The powerhouse muscles protect your back from potential injury, and if you already have a weak or problematic back, then strengthening the powerhouse will probably alleviate your problems.

bullet Working from the center of the body when doing any movement takes the load off of the joints and the spine and helps your body work more efficiently.

bullet A strong powerhouse is a sexy thing. Who doesn’t enjoy a toned belly, butt, back, and inner thigh?

The Evolution of Pilates

The original Eighth Avenue Pilates studio is where the first generation of teachers were trained: Romana Kyranowska, Kathy Grant, Ron Fletcher, Eve Gentry, Carola Trier, Mary Bowen, and Bruce King. Pilates’ protégés soon branched out and opened studios around the country, changing the method based on their own individual backgrounds and philosophies, and sometimes on the needs of their clients. For the following fifty years or so, the Pilates method has been passed down through generations of teachers and has transformed a great deal along the way. New York teachers claim to hold truest to the original Pilates method, but many creative individuals have brought their insights about the body to improve upon some of the views of posture that were built into the original Pilates method and that now seem antiquated.

My approach to the Pilates method is a combination of New York and California styles. I was originally trained in New York by Romana, who holds the closest to Joe’s original method. There I learned the more classic repertoire of exercises and the traditional New York posture cues. New York Pilates tends to focus on flattening the low back, tucking the pelvis, and using the butt muscles a whole lot in the work. California and West Coast Pilates teachers, in contrast, talk a lot about Neutral Spine or neutral pelvis, which is more the way a person naturally stands — with a curve in the low back, not a flattened low back (see Chapter 3 for a detailed description of Neutral Spine).

Out here in California, we like to be free and open to new ideas. Over the years, I and many of the teachers who work in my studio have developed new exercises based on Pilates concepts, or have modified old exercises to make them more effective and to apply what we now know about the body. Basically, flattening your back and tucking your pelvis under all the time is not great for most people and may exacerbate back problems.

The Eight Great Principles of Pilates

Joseph Pilates wrote a book called Return to Life in which he mapped out the eight principles that inspired the Pilates method. Understanding these principles helps you gain a deeper understanding of the philosophy underlying Pilates. Pilates, more than other exercise programs, requires mental focus. If you don’t understand the concepts behind Pilates, it ends up being merely a series of fancy sit-ups and stretches.

What drives people to continue doing Pilates for years and years is the tremendous transformation they see in their bodies when they delve deeper into the work. You could do Pilates for ten years and still find some revelation about your body or about how to deepen the effects of an exercise. This aspect distinguishes Pilates from other exercise forms.

When you do Pilates exercises with the eight key concepts in mind, you gain many more levels of meaning and effectiveness. The following eight concepts give you an idea of just what to think about when doing the exercises.

What’s in a name?

In 1992, a physical therapist from New York named Sean Gallagher acquired the trademark for the Pilates studio and exercise instruction services. Shortly thereafter, he began taking legal action against Pilates instructors, suing everyone he could find who was using the Pilates name and claiming that he alone had the right to use Pilates. Many Pilates trainers and studio owners settled out of court or paid this man a fee for use of the Pilates name. Others merely changed the name of what they were doing to things like Cor Fitness, the Method, or PhysicalMind. In 1996, Gallagher met his match when he sued Balanced Body, the world’s largest manufacturer of Pilates equipment. Balanced Body’s owner, Ken Edelman, found it ludicrous that longtime teachers of Pilates could no longer use the name. He countersued. After four years of litigation and an 11-day trial, a U.S. District Court ruled that Pilates is the name of a method of exercise and that the name cannot be owned by Gallagher or anyone else.

Control

Joseph Pilates originally called his method Contrology (it wasn’t until his students took over teaching for him that people started referring to the method as Pilates ). So one of the most fundamental rules when doing Pilates is to control your body’s every movement. This rule applies not only to the exercises themselves but also to transitions between exercises, how you get on and off the equipment, and your overall attention to detail while working out.

When doing mat exercises, control comes into play with the initiation and ending of each movement. When you put on the brakes in a controlled manner, you train the muscles to hold in a lengthened state. Over time, the muscles grow long as well as strong. Long and strong muscles — isn’t that what we all want? When training clients, I try to encourage smooth and even movements. In my mind, I think of getting the muscles to cooperate with each other.

Also, when focusing on control of a movement, the body is forced to recruit helper muscles (called synergists ), which are usually smaller than the main muscles. When many muscles work together to do one movement, or when muscles work synergistically, the body as a whole develops greater balance and coordination. Also, the big muscles won’t get too big and bulky because they don’t have to do all the work by themselves. Thus you become a long and lean machine. Once your body learns to move with control, you’ll feel more confident doing all kinds of things, from climbing a ladder to swing dancing to diving off a cliff.

Inner control allows you outer freedom without fear of injury.

Breath

People often hold their breath when performing a new and difficult task. When you hold your breath, you tense muscles that can ultimately exacerbate improper posture and reinforce tension habits. That is why consistent breathing is essential to flowing movement and proper muscle balance. Every Pilates exercise has a specific breathing pattern assigned to it.

Most people breathe at half of their lung capacity. Shallow breathing is an unfortunate side effect of a sedentary and stressful life. Deep inhalation and full exhalation exercises the lungs and increases lung capacity, bringing deep relaxation as a pleasant side effect. Breathing while moving is not always an easy assignment; but when you do it, beautiful things can happen. Focused breath can help maximize the body’s ability to stretch, and through this release of tension, you’ll gain optimal body control.

Breathing is an essential aspect of Pilates and distinguishes it from other exercise forms. Like yoga, Pilates has specific breathing cues to go with every exercise.

My general rule of Pilates breathing: Exhale on the work!

Kathy Grant, a first-generation Pilates master, has developed three catagories of Pilates breathing (for more on Kathy Grant, see the sidebar in Chapter 21):

bullet Accordion breathing: Put your hands on either side of your rib cage, as if holding on to an accordion. Take a deep breath in, expanding the space between your hands. Imagine expanding the rib cage sideways. On the exhale, feel the rib cage decrease in size, squeezing your accordion together. This is a way to breathe laterally into your ribs and maintain stability in the front, instead of lifting and dropping the rib cage, which can destabilize the torso.

bullet Percussive breathing: This breathing is exemplified in the Hundred exercise that recurs in Chapters 5, 6, and 7. The inhale can be like an accordion — smooth and deep — while the exhale should be percussive. You can even make a shh sound on every beat to increase the percussive quality. You should be able to feel the abdominals forcing the air out of your lungs, called forced expiration.

bullet Hide-and-seek breathing: What would your breathing be like if you were hiding underneath a sheet and someone came looking for you? This is hide-and-seek breathing. It is essential to maintain breath control in Pilates or any other high-performance sport where balance and stability are paramount. If you were a gymnast about to do a back flip on a balance beam, you wouldn’t want your breathing to displace any part of your body. Basically, it is possible to inhale and exhale without a whole lot of movement in the rib cage or the belly.

Flowing movement

If you were to glance quickly at someone doing Pilates, you might think the person was doing yoga. But when doing yoga, you generally hold your position for at least a moment (if not for what seems like an eternity) before moving to the next posture. And although Pilates borrows some of its movements from yoga, rarely do you hold a position for a long time in Pilates. In this way, Pilates is more like dance, in that the flow of the body is essential. The essence of Pilates movements is to allow your body to move freely and, at the end of each movement, to finish with control and precision. This way of moving brings flexibility to the joints and muscles and teaches the body to elongate and move with even rhythm. Flowing movement integrates the nervous system, the muscles, and the joints and trains the body to move smoothly and evenly.

Precision

Precision is a lot like control but has the added element of spatial awareness. When initiating any movement, you must know exactly where that movement starts and where it will end. All Pilates exercises have precise definitions of where the body should be at all times. The little things count in Pilates.

Many people develop exercise habits that contribute to injury or painful conditions. For instance, some people constantly tighten their shoulders when performing any difficult or challenging exercise. Engaging your upper trapezius (those muscles at the top of your shoulder which run up the back of the neck that most people are constantly rubbing) certainly won’t help you do a leg exercise, but you’d be surprised how many people try to use them! This is a bad habit that any good Pilates trainer will correct.

A goal of Pilates is to focus on the specific muscles that should be working and relaxing all the muscles that may want to help out but shouldn’t. It all comes back to being fully present when working out and being specific about what muscles you use and what muscles you don’t use. The whole body must be in agreement when moving the Pilates way. This kind of precision in movement will resonate in the rest of your life. For example, suppose that you suffer from pain because of faulty postural habits that you aren’t even aware of. After a few good sessions of Pilates, you may be pleasantly surprised by how fast a newfound awareness can effect positive change in the body. This change can happen only when you begin to notice yourself in your body and increase the precision in your movements.

Centering

Again and again, I need to remind my clients to pull the navel to the spine — in other words, suck in that gut! This is the first and ultimate Pilates cue. Pulling the navel in toward your spine is how you bring your deep abdominal muscles into action, and all Pilates exercises are done with the deep abdominals engaged to ensure proper centering. Most Pilates exercises focus on developing abdominal strength either directly or indirectly. Never forget to pull the belly in, or you’ll be reprimanded by the Pilates gods!

Even when you’re performing an exercise that focuses on strengthening the arm muscles, the instructor will ask you to pull your navel in, keep your shoulders pulling down the back, and perhaps even squeeze your butt. All these actions promote centering and core muscle strength. No exercise should be done to the detriment of center control. In other words, if the center is not totally and completely engaged and stabilized, you may not progress to the next level of an exercise. Furthermore, until absolute centering can be maintained, you must modify an exercise so it can be done with this essential concept in mind. Sound tough? They don’t call me the abdominatrix for nothing.

Stability

The focus on stability when performing the exercises is part of the beauty of Pilates and what makes it such a perfect rehabilitation system. In fact, many Pilates mat exercises are meant to focus primarily on torso stability. Stability is the ability to not move a part of the body while another part is challenging it. For instance, when raising your arm up as high as you can in front of you, try not to arch your back. In order to accomplish this, you must use your abdominal muscles so that the rib cage doesn’t rise up as the arm rises above the shoulder level. Maintaining stillness in the spine as you move the arms and legs requires torso stability that is accomplished mainly by the abdominal muscles.

The lion’s share of Pilates exercises utilize this concept of torso stability, which is one of the keys to the health and longevity of your spine. After an injury, there is generally instability in the injured area. The first thing you want to do is learn to stabilize the injured part so as not to reinjure and to allow the healing process to begin. Thus, Pilates is one of the safest forms of exercise to do after an injury. Also, Pilates will prevent injury because you’re much less likely to injure yourself in the first place if you have excellent stability in your torso and joints.

If you’ve ever been to the circus or an advanced yoga, dance, or stretch class, you’ve probably seen a superflexible person. You know the