Gaby
Hooray! Friends, hooray! I’ve just added Pilates to my fitness routine. Today I completed my training at the Fitness Academy, and I can now proudly call myself an instructor of Pilates. I can’t wait for the workweek to start so I can get back to practicing. I absolutely loved the course. It threw me back to my school days—we were pushed to our limits: four hours of practice, including two hours of masterclasses with leading experts, two hours of partner training, lectures, homework. In short, I finally know what overtraining feels like and how quickly you can lose weight in just three days. But I also found something else—a kind of thirst that the more you drink, the more you want to drink; the more you listen, the more you want to hear. It’s crucial to choose what matters to YOU, what genuinely interests you.
For those who don’t know, here’s a bit about what Pilates is. Joseph Pilates was born in the late 19th century. Like many great trainers, he started life weak and sickly—he had rickets and asthma. He worked tirelessly on his own fitness, and during World War I he developed a series of exercises to help rehabilitate bedridden patients at a military hospital in England, where he worked as a nurse (hence the name of the apparatus called the “Reformer,” which originally used ropes attached to patients’ beds). He later survived a concentration camp, where he taught exercises to other prisoners and kept practicing himself.
In 1926 Joseph opened his first Pilates studio. His clients included dancers and athletes recovering from injuries. As the Pilates method evolved and began to require less special equipment, many celebrities and actors—Madonna, Sharon Stone, Julia Roberts—also took it up. There are countless styles of Pilates; it really is a treasure trove for self-improvement. From the very first class I fell in love with the method, and for good reason. Its goal is the harmonious collaboration of body and mind (it even falls under the fitness category of “Body and Mind”). There’s a distinct philosophy, clear principles, and specific focal points.
Pilates is a system of exercises designed to strengthen and lengthen muscles, improve posture, and develop balance, equilibrium, and coordination through the combined use of body and mind. It’s an incredibly harmonious practice, with a beautiful fluidity that tired, beaten-by-life bodies immediately recognize as natural. You sink into a blissful state and then have to pull yourself out at the end of the session. It’s VERY exciting! Each exercise has countless modifications and difficulty levels, so it feels like a lifetime wouldn’t be enough to try them all. Even the beginner level showed me I was only at the START of my development. Despite what I thought were strong muscles, I had no idea what a strong core truly felt like, what my abdominal muscles could do, and I couldn’t perform many exercises correctly simply because I lacked the specific strength. So there’s a long road ahead to work on myself first and foremost. Pilates is definitely worth trying. It’s similar to yoga, bodyflex, Qigong, and Callanetics, but it’s its own SPECIAL system—independent, wise, fascinating, and endless.
