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| what is pilates ?
The basic idea is to « re-teach » you how to hold yourself and move freely in order to get rid of « scars » left at the core of your muscles and nervous system by physical and emotional tensions of all sorts. To reach that goal, Pilates requires that all movements originate from your body's gravity base, situated in the abdominal cavity below your navel. This zone is considered the body's « powerhouse », the place where all the stability necessary to any movement comes from. Therefore Pilates' aim is to re-educate your body to achieve a permanent state of well-being, on both physical and psychic levels.
For example, thanks to specific exercises which tone the abdominal and dorsal muscles, Pilates allows you to actively reduce back pain mainly due to bad posture. If you suffer from articulation problems such as arthritis, Pilates can help you reinforce the muscles that protect the articulations holding your body's weight, in particular the hips and knees. And if on an everyday basis you accomplish repetitive gestures which utilise the same muscles, the Pilates method allows you to correct that imbalance by targeting exclusively those muscles which are underused. Pilates is also a marvellous tool to remodel your body by toning the muscles of the buttocks, the thighs and the stomach and helps you obtain a more streamlined silhouette, unless, of course, the answer to your problem is to burn excess fat.
In Pilates, controlling your breathing is a key element and each movement must be executed with the greatest precision, in a coordinated manner, with ease, flexibility and lightness. Through concentration, Pilates also aims to have you gain full conscience of your body in order to single out the ties that bind it inextricably to your mind. By practicing Pilates, you are not only redefining your silhouette but also modifying, in a positive way, your relationship to your self and to your environment. That is why adepts of Pilates consider the psychic well-being produced by this method truly comparable to the benefits of meditation.
Pilates can help athletes effectively prepare their body for training and « repair » it after strenuous efforts. Today more and more professionals use it, especially at highly competitive levels. Mothers-to-be and young mothers find it a precious help to tone their abdominal muscles and their perineum, while people having suffered from physical trauma use it to re-train their body and regain strength and mobility. For older usually less athletic people, Pilates is a gentle way of maintaining the body's flexibility.
With machines, whether the Reformer, the Cadillac or the Chair , you benefit from a kind of assistance thanks to the resistance of the springs, the cylinders' rolling motion and the straps, while on the mat you are left to your own devices and it is up to your body to give all the efforts of traction. In theory, machine practice allows beginners who are not toned enough to start practicing Pilates until they reach a sufficient level to practice on mat. In fact there are no rules, and the choice of technique depends most of all on your ability and the goals you set for yourself. If mat work is considered more difficult, machines offer, for example, a very effective way to focus on certain muscles, ease the task of muscle re-education following a wound, or enable the most advanced students to increase the difficulty of some exercises. As a conclusion, one can say that both techniques have their strengths, and in an ideal world, one would follow one machine and two mat classes per week.
During his childhood, Joseph Pilates suffered from severe bouts of asthma, rheumatism and rickets. This is the reason why he quickly gained a passion for the study of anatomy and movement, yoga and martial arts, and became an accomplished athlete practicing numerous sport, thanks to which he modeled himself a perfect body. Nevertheless, Joseph Pilates remained haunted by the memories of health problems he encountered as a child. Constantly searching for new ways to improve his physical condition, he took inspiration from the writings of Greek philosophers, teachings of eastern wisdom and study of animal motion to fashion a method, made up of five hundred exercises, which he named « contrology ». Joseph Pilates taught this method, for the first time in Great Britain during World War I where he was working as a self-defence teacher for the British police. He then put it into practice in Germany in the early 20's amongst some of the most famous dancers of the era. In 1926, Pilates decided to leave for the United States and opened his first school in New York where his method quickly became famous amongst dancers, actors, athletes and wealthy matrons. Until his death in 1967, he trained numerous students, several of which opened their own schools. Finally, in the 90's, Hollywood rediscovers this method thus allowing the benefits of Pilates to be officially recognized and adopted throughout the world.
Working your gravity-bound body on a mobile ball requires balance, and balancing requires many of the body’s deep, stabilizing muscles. Benefits included increase muscle strength and flexibility, improved balance and posture, and greater body awareness. Exercising on the ball has the unusual advantage of being fun as well as challenging.
Semi collective classes (3 or 4 clients), the Open Studio® allows you to have a complete workout on the equipment (cadillac, reformer, chair, barrel…) and to develop more autonomy. Programs are personalized by our professors and make you evolve according to your needs. This class enables you to have a session on machines at a lower cost.
Semi collective classes (3 or 4 clients), the Reformer class allows you to work on a specific machine, complete all by itself… the Reformer! This class enables you to have a session on machines at a lower cost.
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