Recently, a couple of
people asked me why I chose Pilates. I
told the truth: by accident. I was already a personal trainer and one of
my colleagues asked if I wanted to do the training with her and some of our
other coworkers. I went for it. I’m not sorry.
I may get a visit from
the Pilates police for saying this (it’s okay; they don’t really exist or I’d
have been hauled off long before now…), but I think of Pilates as a great part of fitness, not as a means to
fitness all by itself. Pilates, as a
practice, creates abilities to do other things.
Some of us, for example,
struggle with flexibility and mobility.
Pilates, by moving the body through its range of motion, helps with both. Others need to build coordination to improve
performance in sports or activities (or daily life!). Coordination depends on proprioception, the
sense of where our bodies are in space.
The mindful movements of Pilates help us hone that sense. That same mindful movement can help us
retrain our motor pathways after injury.
These things can be ends in themselves, but they also enable us to run,
jump, and play with more abandon.
By nature, I tend toward
the holistic—I love mixing things up and seeing what happens. Pilates, as a practice, infiltrates my
approach to weight training and both are enriched as a result.
