Why are there so many similarities between Pilates and yoga? Historically the answer is not found, as sometimes claimed, in the idea that Pilates “learned yoga”, but in the development of modern yoga and the relationship that both yoga and pilates have with physical culture.

Physical Practices In Classical and Modern Yoga

Classical Indian yoga unquestionably had physical practices, though they were by no means the most important thing about it. Even the medieval Hatha Yoga Pradipika (one of the most important pre-modern books on hatha yoga) only lists a handful of asana and has a lot more to say about breathing and other subjects no longer considered “hatha yoga”.

The yoga which was exported to the West by Vivekananda and others at the end of the C19 was almost totally lacking any physical component, probably in part as a reaction to Western stereotypes about “performing yogins” (yoga contortionists who performed in the streets or shows),

Yet yoga in the west went from being almost 100% philosophical at the end of the C19 to mostly physical in its late C20 and early C21 incarnation. How did this change happen in Western Yoga?

Nationalistic Physical Culture in India

The answer is, surprisingly, found in the influence of western physical culture in India, where the exercises taught by Pehr Henrik Ling, Eugen Sandow and the methods used by the Indian YMCA under H.C. Buck all had an impact on modern yoga. 

These European systems were absorbed by Indians and combined with the native yoga traditions, to create a nationalistic fitness programme from a fusion of European physical culture and traditional hatha yoga. It is this which forms the base of much modern posture practice as found in the west. 

This is not the case with all yoga, but certainly the various styles of yoga which grew out of the teaching of Krishnamacharya (such as Iyengar and Astanga) and Bikram yoga reflect this influence (Bikram Choudhury´s guru, Bishnu Ghosh co-authored a book called “Muscle Control and Barbell Exercises”). 

Pilates and Modern Yoga: A Family Resemblance 

The similarities between Pilates and yoga are due primarily to the independent influence of physical culture on Pilates and modern hatha yoga and only incidentally, if at all, due to the influence of modern hatha yoga on Joseph Pilates. Pilates developed his system before the physical practices were part of Western yoga: he simply had no access to them. Pilates and yoga are half brothers. 

The similarities between the two disciplines are real, not accidental, but superficially similar looking exercises are used in the two systems in different ways and have different goals. The more deeply Pilates and modern hatha yoga are understood in their own terms, the more aware we become of how different they are in the way they work the human body. 

The research behind this is found in Yoga Body. The Origins of Modern Posture Practice by Mark Singleton. Oxford University Press, USA, 2010. I was a member of the Cambridge University Modern Yoga Reading Group run by Mark and his then supervisor Elizabeth de Michelis in 2004

The traditional Pilates method, still taught by groups associated with Romana Kryzanowska, Jay Grimes and other first generation “classical” teachers, is part of the C19 and 20 physical culture movement. Physical culture had as its aim the development of strong, healthy bodies, and it used gymnastic and stretching exercises to do this.

Mr. Pilates´ method for Body Control, or Contrology as he called it, is recognisably related to the many fitness systems which sprang up in Europe and the USA in the C19 and the first half of the C20.

Many of the actual exercises in Pilates are found in other systems: leg raises, crunches, sit ups, push ups and pull ups were ubiquitous. There is nothing surprising in this: Joseph Pilates was a German who trained in Europe and came into contact with many different physical culture systems which were current in the last decade of the C19 and the first decades of the C20.

What makes something Pilates is not the outward form of the exercise, but how it is done and with what goal.

Pilates was relative indifferent to the aesthetic of the movement and his goal was for a supple body, not a bulky one. He found inspiration in the Greco-Roman exercise tradition more from their fusion of body and mind than from their statues.

This contrasts with Sandow who measured the proportions of statues in museums and consciously worked to imitate it his own development. Pilates is more in the tradition of medical gymnastics because of his preoccupation with the “hygienic” (i.e. health) benefits of bodily movement. 

Pilates fused all the available resources of his time: his use of apparatus fits comes out of the German “heavy gymnastics” (with apparatus) tradition, his mat work looks like “light gymnastics” (without apparatus). The idea that you train on apparatus to be able to train without it is also found in other systems of the period. 

Echoes of this old fashioned physical culture survive in other places, but they are most obvious in Pilates and yoga. Physical culture has a lot to offer 21st century people, and pilates gives us the best experience of it that can be found in the modern world. 

Eugen Sandow: The Father of Modern Body Building

Sandow was a showman and a very successful businessman and he set up many gyms in the UK, patented his own specially designed spring weights to be used with his patented exercises, published a magazine (“Physical Culture”) as well as touring extensively in the UK and USA. 

He first came to prominence as a strongman doing the sort of “feats of strength” as circus strongmen, though his shows acquired a certain notoriety because he did not have the typical strongman build (very overweight) and he wore very few clothes for his scandalous posing displays. 

He actually marks a pivot point in many ways, combining in his writing the interests of medical gymnastics and physical culture as well as fusing the feats of strength and the more aesthetically focussed discipline which would soon become the sport of body building. Physical culture became part of western culture. 

Old school physical culture is not easy to find nowadays, but one of the places that it survives is in classical Pilates.