The Prestige of Reformer Pilates

For many people doing pilates on equipment, normally the reformer, is seen as better than doing “just mat” and there are reasons for this. Joseph Pilates invented the reformer to re-form the body and it absolutely does help you to learn Pilates faster.

However, there is also a “glamour” element to pilates on the equipment, the idea that somehow this is “doing the real stuff” and doing mat classes is a second rate option. This balances nervously on the truth that you will get more from an individualized program using all the apparatus under the trained eye of a good teacher than you can from large group mat classes with a teacher who doesn´t understand the pilates system in depth.

The Truth About Reformer Classes: Safety and Crowd-Control

However, simply using a reformer will not teach you pilates. The reformer is not a jelly mold - just being on it will not change your shape. In fact, many group equipment classes do little more to teach you pilates principles than a circuit class at the gym. 

The reason is that, as a teacher, it is impossible to watch so many bodies at the same time, especially when they are beginners who need showing the basic shape of the movement. The result is that precision goes out the window.

In a group reformer class most of the teacher’s attention is (or ought to be) on safety and making sure that people don’t hurt themselves: it is not for nothing that teacher insurance for working with equipment is much higher than mat. This is why group mat classes work: the safety aspects are significantly easier to control and so the teacher can spend most of their energy on teaching Pilates. 

Learn Good Quality Pilates Wherever You Can Find It

Doing pilates on a reformer will not automatically mean you are learning more or getting a deeper benefit. If your teacher is trying to keep 8 or even more people safe at the same time there is a very real possibility that your particular issues will not be addressed and, without the individualized corrections which make Pilates valuable, the class will be giving you much the same benefit as cardio circuits or “Stretch and Tone” at the gym.

There is nothing wrong with doing cardio circuits at the gym, but it does not give you the body-specific, targeted, corrective exercise which is the point of doing Pilates in the first place. You will find more of that in a decent, small mat class than you will in a reformer class of the same size.

You can do more pilates with dumbbells in the gym if you understand the principles of what you are doing than you can on a reformer if you don’t. 

It’s Not What You Do, It’s the Way That You Do It

Practice doesn’t make perfect: practice makes permanent, and if you practice doing something wrong, you do it wrong forever. To benefit from Pilates it’s not enough to go through the motions: you have to do it right.

There are, of course, different levels of precision which are appropriate at different times – it would be foolish to give someone in their first lesson an advanced correction. I recently was told to “drop the part of your mid right back which is below your shoulder blade, but not your wing, no, a bit to the left”. Some people have difficulty locating their back in the first class.

Precise Movement is Pilates Movement

Pilates is corrective exercise: it has as its goal to teach the body to move in an efficient and beneficial manner. For this to work we have to be precise. Some people can get this out of proportion and their focus on precision becomes obsessive, but Pilates can never be sloppy.

One of the things we are most picky about is alignment, because, unless the body is aligned in its movement, it won’t use the right muscles for the right jobs. It is important if you want to see real results that you do the real work of the exercise, not just an approximation

The Real Advantage of a Teacher Over a DVD

One of the advantages of having a trained human teacher over a DVD is that the human teacher can make sure that you are doing the exercise precisely. Of course there are other advantages, but a video, as good as it may be, can’t check that you are really pulling your stomach in, relaxing your legs and lifting your head properly.

This is the benefit of doing pilates over a general fitness or sculpting class at the gym. The precision, and, specifically, the precise corrections that you need as an individual are what makes good pilates stand out from other kinds of exercise.

Something that we are asked fairly regularly is whether we do pilates for pregnancy and whether we have a pregnancy certification. Naturally you want to make sure that your teacher knows what they are doing, but specialization in itself may not actually be what you are looking for.

Comprehensive, Classical Teacher-Training Means You Can Teach Everyone

The classical pilates system which the teachers at Kinetic Pilates studied with Romana’s Pilates does not break the knowledge of pilates down, as though you could be competent to teach mat exercises and people with foot problems, but not able to teach any of the equipment or people with shoulder problems. A classical teacher-training means you are comprehensively trained in the full pilates way of exercising and able to teach pretty much anyone who walks through the door.

This traditional “apprenticeship” style of learning takes much longer than the contemporary “modular” style with its certification in mat or pregnancy, injury or reformer. The traditional way is to learn the nuts and bolts of how to teach pilates across the different tools (mat, reformer, chairs etc) and adapt it to everyone.

Don’t Confuse Specialization With Depth

The hard work in learning to teach pilates is (1) to “read” (be able to analyze by sight) the body of the person you are teaching. This means the teacher can see what the student needs. (2) To understand the exercises in enough depth, and to have seen them on enough different bodies, to be able to adapt them to the person you are working with. This means that the teacher can give the student what they need.

Of course there are general “rules” we learn about, for example, foot positioning for people with knock knees, but these are always of secondary importance and are to be ignored if they don’t produce results for an individual. What matters is the trained eye and the skillful application of the principles to your body.

This takes a lot of time, effort and dedication, and cannot be learnt in a weekend workshop. It takes years of dedicated practice and many thousands of hours of training and teaching. Many people don’t have the commitment, patience or freedom to do it.

Are You Certified to Teach One Legged People?

When faced with a traditional training which can cost many thousands of pounds, take a full year out of your life and even mean moving country to study with the best person, it is tempting to conclude that hyper-specialization is a marketing gimmick, enabling the teacher trainers to keep adding new modules that you “need” to have and teachers to boast of more and more niche markets that they can service.

Training comprehensively in the first place means that, though there will always be skills to improve, there are not gaps to fill.

Priorities for Movement

Back in 1980 Philip Friedman and Gail Eisen, two students of Romana Kryzanowska, published the first modern book on Pilates, The Pilates Method of Physical and Mental Conditioning. This was, as far as I can tell, the first place that the "principles of Pilates" were set down in any formal way, though the ideas had certainly been circulating around Pilates studios for the previous 50 years. 

These principles are priorities for how the body should move, which is what Pilates is all about: Pilates is flowing movement from a controlled centre. 

Beyond “Core Strength” with Pilates

The term that is popular now is “core strength”, which is part of what we mean by “centre”, though there is more to it. The point is not simply that your “core” is strong or that you have abs, but that you move from the centre outwards. 

Two of our key concepts in Pilates are the “box” (which is really the rectangle of the torso from the two hips up to the two shoulders) and the powerhouse (the muscles at the core of the body: the abs, the back muscles, the back, inside and outside of the legs). Both "box" and "powerhouse" are included in what we mean by “centre” in pilates. 

Movement From the Centre Is Pilates Movement

Pilates movement comes from the centre, the strongest part of the body. The arms and legs (the “appendages”) are not the focus of attention, even though pilates has a noticeable effect on them. When we use the arms or legs they do not do the work, they enable the work which is to strengthen and deepen the powerhouse.

Learning to move from your centre will make a difference to your body. It is one of the ways that we work with people who have RSI, and it brings a totally different quality into all of your movement, whether that be dancing ballet, playing tennis, or lifting shopping bags and babies.

Movement from the centre is pilates movement.

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. 

Joe Pilates didn’t teach levels, he taught people. The division of the method into basic, intermediate and advanced levels is more recent and slightly artificial, but that’s not to say that it isn’t useful. 

The levels are a template or guide, not a competition. They are made up of developmental goals and a way of moving rather than exactly what exercises you do. 

The levels are most obvious in a mat class as in private sessions the work is customized to you. 

Basic Beginners, no matter how fit, need to attend Basic Mat classes. These classes teach you the basics of the method through a series of simple, challenging exercises. The goal for this level is to find your “power house”, to begin to find “lift” in the body and to even out the alignment of the torso. You will start to feel the benefits of Pilates.

Intermediate When your body has absorbed the basics of Pilates you are ready to take intermediate level sessions. The aim of this level is to strengthen and deepen the power house. Some new movement patterns are introduced for the first time (e.g. back bends), and other patterns already present in the basic level are deepened

What makes you intermediate is not how long you have studied, but how much your body has absorbed. 

Advanced At the advanced level the focus is on increasing the stamina of the power house. More upper body exercises are introduced with the aim of working the upper back and connecting it more deeply with the rest of the power house. The advanced level is where complete flow and synchronization with the breath take place.

There is nothing to be gained by trying to rush ahead in your progress. Impatience means that you will simply not get as much from your classes as you could. If you have an injury or illness it is advisable to have private sessions first before you join a mat class to ensure your needs are properly addressed.

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. 

Not all cars are the same and not all pilates is the same. At Kinetic Pilates we teach classical pilates, as passed down by Romana Kryzanowska, but what is classical Pilates?

Classical Pilates is a Method

Classical pilates, or simply Pilates, is a method for training the body. We have specific goals of body development in Pilates that we are working towards and use the exercises to bring your body towards balance.

This means that we have to use different exercises with different people: a very flexible female dancer with weak wrists cannot do the same training as a very stiff male office worker with a bad back if they are both to get the best results. 

Classical pilates is a sophisticated method of physical training, not a series of floor exercises that you learn to teach in a month.

Classical Pilates is a System

Classical pilates is not just mat exercises, it is an entire system of exercise, using many different apparatuses. 

Because every body is different, everybody needs different treatment and to work with different apparatus. Some people mostly need stretching, others mostly need strengthening. 

A full classical pilates studio has a wide range of options for working with everyone who walks through the door.

Classical Pilates is Alive

Although classical Pilates is in direct continuity with the work of Joe Pilates, trying to maintain the rich and varied system that he developed, we are not so concerned with the past that we become rigid.

Pilates is about movement, it is dynamic and vigorous and it changes bodies.  

The marketing of some pilates groups claims that classical pilates is too difficult for normal people. Here is a typical example:

“The ´classical´ Pilates exercises that he [Joe Pilates] developed may take many years to perfect and may well be beyond the capability of the average person”. 

It is certainly true that the exercises DO take many years to perfect: if you could do them perfectly in a month there would be little point in doing them at all and little motivation to continue. But is it true that the system that Joseph Pilates developed (“Pilates”) is beyond the average person’s ability and that most people can do no more than “base” their training on his work? 

I’ve seen classical pilates taught usefully to a 76 year old with a recent knee surgery, a client with Multiple Sclerosis, and another who had broken their spine. All competent teachers modify the exercises to work with injured people. This is part of the “classical” system, not a contemporary improvement. 

Classical pilates starts where you are and gives you progressively more demanding exercises as your body strengthens. We don’t throw you in at the deep end and hope that you somehow manage to float rather than drown, but we do make you work hard. Pilates should never be 'easy': your body won’t improve while you are still in your comfort zone. 

In fact, as you improve Pilates keeps getting harder and harder because you are able to work deeper and deeper. You will always feel that you are getting a workout no matter what your ability or limitations are. This means that classical Pilates holds the attention and continues to challenge year after year, giving even the most experienced person a challenging workout. 

Joe Pilates worked with “average” bodies. Not everyone will be doing advanced training and we won´t be standing on anyone´s stomach, but the idea that only certain people have the potential to do the classical work is a sales pitch which sells you short.