Walk through or browse online the DVD section of entertainment retailers and you cannot help but become engulfed by a seemingly ever-growing selection of celebrity-fitness 'gurus' flogging their soul with a Pilates programme that promises you a better body. If you, perhaps not literally, cut away all the celebrities endorsing the discipline is one with a pretty serious medical grounding.
With figures estimating over 11 million people practicing the discipline and more than 14,000 instructors in, unsurprisingly, America alone, one cannot help but wonder where the idea started. One would also be forgiven for assuming that the majority of those lycra-clad, celebrity-obsessed 'devotees' would be unaware that the regime has its origins in First World War Germany.
Developed in Germany by Joseph Pilates, the aim of the fitness sysetem was to improve the rehabilitation program that was in place for the many returning veterans in the belief that physical and mental health are essential to one another. Pilates strongly believed that the mind controls the muscles and he recommended a some precise movements emphasizing control and form to help aid injured soldiers.
Pilates had strong grounding in his methods having spend most his life trying to improve his physical health. As a child, Joseph suffered from asthma, rickets and rheumatic fever and would go on to study body-building, gymnastics and yoga. When he was 14 he was in such physical prime that he would pose for anatomical charts and would develop the belief that bad health had it's roots in the modern life style, poor breathing and bad posture. Having earned a living as a boxer and a self-defense trainer, Pilates was interned by the British authorities during The First World War and he would train other inmates in fitness and exercise.
Contrology, as Pilates named his method, took it's name from 'control' and the Greek 'logia' and would publish two books on the method: Return to Life Through Contrology (1928) and Your Health: A Corrective System of Exercising That Revolutionizes the Entire Field of Physical Education (1934). The aim of his method is to create a fusion of mind and body so that the body will move with economy, grace and balance without thinking about it. Odd, then, that so many of its Hollywood practitioners still lack basic grace.
Pilates held the belief that circulating the blood allows the cells in the body to awaken and carry away fatigue-related waste. Accordingly, blood must be charged with oxygen and and freed of waste gas via proper breathing. If you stop breathing during your exercise your practice is flawed so deep and thorough breathing is a part of every correct Pilates exercise. Effective breathing will mean that muscles become oxygenated an gives the added benefit of reduced tension in the upper neck and shoulders.
There are many elements in Joseph Pilates' exercise programme and each requires a concerted effort and level of discipline if it is to work. The exercises are aimed at giving an increased awareness of breath and alignment of the spine with a strengthening of the deep torso muscles.
Joseph Pilates himself died in New York in 1967 and wasn't alive when a US federal court ruled that the term "Pilates" was generic and free for unrestricted use, thus allowing anybody to use it and for many an untrained and under-qualified practitioner to set up shop, or dress in lycra and push out celebrity fitness DVDs.
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