What is Pilates?
Joseph Pilates developed his unique exercise framework in the early 20th century drawing on many disciplines including yoga, gymnastics and dance. It aims to restore natural, normal movement. As your self-awareness increases, your body is encouraged to adopt these easier / more efficient ways of moving into your everyday life.
The exercises concentrate on deep structural elements of the body, improving postural alignment and developing inner strength. They are gentle and precise and therefore extremely safe and effective.
The key elements can be characterised by the following 7 principles:
- Focus: Improving your body awareness;
- Breath: Promoting an efficient way of breathing;
- Release: Recognising & release undue tension;
- Core Stability: Identifying the “girdle of strength”, to help protect your lower back and other major joints within the body;
- Alignment: Promoting healthy joints & sound muscle recruitment patterns;
- Stamina: Improving the strength of deep stabilising muscles to increase endurance & help assist postural imbalances;
- Integration: Enabling you to co-ordinate breathing, core stability with increasingly challenging movement patterns.
Who Can Benefit From Pilates?
Pilates is an extremely flexible framework of exercises, allowing it to be tailored to any age and / or fitness level. It can also help those:
- Recovering from a specific injury (and assist in prevention of future episodes)
- Living with conditions such as backache, arthritis and osteoporosis or shoulder and neck, knee and hip problems.
- Seeking relief from stress through efficient breathing assisting muscle release & relaxation.
- Training for different forms of sport – many professional athletes use Pilates to improve their performance in such fields as tennis, rugby, football and cricket.
As this is a progressive framework, this means that although everyone starts by learning basic core principles they can then progress at their own rate in the knowledge that the repertoire contains exercises that are challenging for professional athletes.