Pilates Evolution

The 21st Century

Joseph Pilates, Judd Robbins, Lin Van Heuit-Robbins

• Publisher: Presentation Dynamics
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781928564928
• Topic: Scienze biologiche
• Subtopic: Scienze motorie e sportive

This new Revision of the popular Pilates Primer contains all of the original Pilates Primer content and materials (copies of both of Joseph Pilates original two books: Contrology and Your Health) and another almost 100 pages with significant writings on the latest developments in the Pilates world of trainings and instruction in recent years. Much has changed in the 21st Century since 1934 when Joseph Pilates wrote his first book (Your Health) about fitness and health. His second book in 1945, Return to Life through Contrology, contains his detailed and definitive series of exercises. Both of these original books were copyrighted and republished by us, and are incorporated into this new Revised edition under the new and broader title, Pilates Evolution. This Revision has received dramatic and extensive updates for the 21st Century and is the natural evolution of his original writings, elucidating, expanding on, and demonstrating where Pilates' fitness is moving currently. Inside this new book, Pilates Evolution, you will find all the Pilates' Primer pages and much more: • Joe's original exercise photograph sequences, poses and instructions. • Joe's original words explaining his very personal Twentieth Century philosophies, principles, and theories about health and fitness. • The very latest in 21st Century enhancements to Pilates' exercises, using variations in body positioning, balancing, centering, and aligning, both with and without additional exercise props. Joseph Pilates based his work on the concept of a balanced body and mind espoused by the early Greeks. Learn in this book how current practitioners of Pilates in the 21st Century expand upon Joe's earlier work. Read and see photographic sequences about creative approaches involving circular movements, standing postures, and core strengthening exercises using props such as tubes, weights, poles, bands, magic circles, mini-balls, stability balls, foam rollers and more.

Part I

1934 Edition of
Joseph Pilates’ Your Health

Introducing Part I and Pilates’ View of Your Health

Joseph Pilates was a man with very strong opinions. In 1934, he published his first book, Your Health. In it, he expounded his astonishingly perceptive theories on disease prevention through healthy living, balancing muscles to prevent injury, and even startling bed designs for spinal alignment. His expositions on wellness, balance, and functional exercise were far ahead of his time and for many decades were only appreciated and experienced by a small number of fortunate people. Ongoing medical research since then has supported a great deal of what he had to say to those that listened. His premise, that functional exercise is the most effective exercise, has continued to develop adherents, and underlies the evolutionary expansion of Pilates’ exercises in the 21^st Century. Today’s awareness and practice can be traced directly back to many of Pilates’ very words in Your Health.

He was a forward thinking man who based many of his beliefs on the successful past premises in Greek culture. Many fitness gurus, trainers, and training programs continue his work. One can look everywhere at evidence of continuing adaptations and expansions of his fitness regimens and practice. Much of what you can read in Your Health has become incorporated into many different athletic endeavors, healthy living habits and everyday functional skill sets. All of this validates many of his thoughts and beliefs as expressed in the following pages found in his first 1934 publication of Your Health.

Pilates used bold phraseology, and colorful imagery, to highlight his physical fitness beliefs. In our adulthood, after years of studying and researching and teaching, we have come to realize the value of Pilates’ fitness philosophies. In Chapter 2, misunderstanding “really simple laws of nature” while “searching for normal health and happiness” eventually leads otherwise intelligent men and women to “meander through the valleys of quackery pointing ever downward to suffering, misery and death, instead of climbing to the very pinnacle of the mountain crests of common sense which lead to normal health, happiness and life.” Listen to what I am telling you, he says, about natural laws! Read Your Health and you will discover for yourself how to address, alleviate and cure many of the “ills of humanity”. You will gain the “understanding that really corrects causes rather than merely treats symptoms.”

In Chapter 4, Pilates claims that society was racing helter-skelter downward in so far as attaining a balance of mind and body. Not simply wordplay, he believed that civilized society paid more attention to business and mental development at the expense of fitness, health, happiness through natural and normal physical conditioning and activity. Pilates’ insight into the causes of unnatural conditions in people led him to many observations about our children. We saw, in the mid Twentieth Century, John F. Kennedy’s emphasis on physical fitness and education, decades after Pilates wrote these words. Today, we see a literal explosion of awareness and emphasis on fitness education and practice. Pilates’ advice then resonates with the latest educational emphases, both for children and adults:

My system develops the body and mind simultaneously and normally in the home, beginning from infancy and gradually and progressively through school and college days to maturity.

In particular, the 21^st Century evolution of the Pilates’ methods challenges both the brain and the body to learn and to grow.

Ahead of his time, Pilates’ Chapter 5 prescription of functional exercise offered common sense remedies for common human ills. In the 21^st Century, therapists and medical personnel jointly realize that functional training has direct applicability to activities performed in daily life, with the purposeful goal of performing these daily activities more easily and with less likelihood of injury. The key is to use the mind to control the muscles of the body and to lead them harmoniously to work together effectively.

Chapters 6 and 7 put a name to Pilates’ philosophy of fitness --- Contrology. He introduces his Greek-based, yet scientific, approach to “supreme physical health, supreme mental happiness and supreme achievements”. In the 21^st Century, we have seen a wealth of Pilates-inspired practitioners emphasize slow and progressive use of breath work, core muscles, shoulder girdle, and leg/arm control in the many new variations on Pilates exercise themes. The fundamental thread in all of these new developments is the involvement of multiple muscles and joints working together to enhance balance and coordination, endurance and agility, and overall mental and physical strength.

Pilates continues to clarify the aspects of his science of Contrology in Chapter 8, emphasizing the importance and value of forming good habits to children “habits are easily formed - good and bad”. His ultimate, and first, lesson is that of correct breathing:

Children must be taught how to take long, deep breaths, sufficient to expand the upper chest to capacity. They must be properly instructed how to draw the abdomen in and out at the same time holding their breath for a short time. Then they should also learn how properly to fully deflate the lungs in exhaling.

Researchers in the 21^st Century know full well the extraordinary benefits of proper and effective breathing patterns. They also understand much more about the real value of muscle balancing in order to both prevent injuries and rehabilitate athletes (professional and the weekend varieties). Pilates speaks to the “law of natural exercise” in Chapter 8, in which he addresses good posture as well as balance and symmetry in exercise design. This is exactly what has become commonplace in recent exercise research facilities and in the latest certification programs in Pilates’ inspired trainings.

Pilates wrote decades ago, and in Chapters 8 and 9, that “the law of natural exercises recognizes “companion” or reciprocal movements in the normal development of the body.” He also was very specific in emphasizing the great daily benefits of good posture, and he offered his science of Contrology (now simply Pilates’ exercises) as the true answer to the damages wrought by slouching, obesity, and other “violations of the simplest laws of body mechanics.”

After decades of experiencing the benefits of Pilates’ exercises, understanding his century-old admonitions, and teaching both his original exercises and the 21^st Century modifications discussed in this book, we are even more completely in his camp and more firmly impressed with his prescience than ever!

Your Health – Table of Contents

Chapter 1: A Grave Situation

Chapter 2: Health — A Normal-Natural Condition

Chapter 3: Dreadful Conditions

Chapter 4: Heading Downward

Chapter 5: Common Sense Remedies for Common Human Ills!

Chapter 6: "Contrology"

Chapter 7: "Balance of Body and Mind"

Chapter 8: First Educate the Child!

Chapter 9: Proved Facts!

Chapter 10: New Style Beds and Chairs

Your Health

Originally Published in 1934 by Joseph H. Pilates

Prof. Pilates’ Health Studios

Where flat feet, curvature of the spine, protruding stomach, stooped-shoulders, hollow chest, hollow back, bow legs, and knocked-kneed conditions are cured through corrective exercises.

Edited, Reformatted and Reprinted

in a New and Easy-to-Read Edition

by Presentation Dynamics

http://www.JosephPilates.org

949-666-5030

Updated with a new introduction by Judd Robbins and Lin Van Heuit-Robbins Copyright © 1998-2012 Presentation Dynamics Inc. First Published in 1934 by Joseph H. Pilates

Foreword

All new ideas are revolutionary and when the theory responsible for them is proved, through practical application, it requires only time for them to develop and to flourish. Such revolutionary ideas simply cannot be ignored. They cannot be kept in the background.

Time and progress are synonymous terms - nothing can stop either.

Truth will prevail and that is why I know that my teachings will reach the masses and finally be adopted as universal.

Introduction

PERFECT Balance of Body and Mind, is that quality in civilized man, which not only gives him superiority over the savage and animal kingdom, but furnishes him with all the physical and mental powers that are indispensable for attaining the goal of Mankind - HEALTH and HAPPINESS.

The purpose of this booklet is to transmit in a simple form, the causes of present day ill-health and immoral conditions, and the resultant effects which prevent the average human being from attaining this physical perfection - man’s inherited birthright.

The author in this booklet tries to teach the reader in simple words the way to correct our present deplorable system of physical and moral education, and to enable each, through a proper understanding of his body, to become fit for the daily tasks ahead of him.

JOSEPH HUBERTUS PILATES

Dedication

TO:

The Next Generation of Physicians

and

The Association of Medico-Physical Research

by Joseph Hubertus Pilates

I take this means to thank my dear friend, Nat Fleischer, a leading American authority of sports and physical education, for his kind help and suggestions. He has given me added impetus to carry on my work for the betterment of mankind in the construction of corrective apparatus for proper body development. Also my sincere thanks to William J. Miller.

Joseph Hubertus Pilates: This photograph was taken on his 54th birthday. He has devoted over thirty years to the scientific study, experimentation and research of disturbing troubles which upset Balance of Body and Mind.

Chapter 1: A Grave Situation

Daily, from sunrise to sunset, the radio, newspapers and magazines broadcast to the world how to maintain health, how to regain health - what to eat, what to drink, and even about what to think.

The conflicting information, expressive of the different opinions of these various health authorities, has proved to be nothing less than “confusion worse confounded” to the millions of radio listeners, readers of newspapers and magazines, who are so unfortunate as to hear or read the diametrically opposed viewpoints of our so-called guardians of our health, since it is rather the exception than the rule, that these instructions are in agreement in their ideas and methods.

To one who has devoted the major portion of his life to the scientific study of the body and practical application of nature’s laws of life as pertaining to the natural development of coordinated physical and mental (normal) health and the prevention, rather than the cure of disease, the misinformation he has so often listened to on the air or read, borders closely on the criminal. Why? Because the acceptance of the theories so advanced, not only results in the squandering of untold millions of dollars, but, what is more serious, results in actually shortening, instead of lengthening, the lives of uncounted millions who fall for this bunk.

How many hundreds of thousands die prematurely between the age range of 35 and 59 years, who should rightfully live from 20 to 40 years longer if they but understood and applied the natural laws of life to normal living? Daily we hear the cry for more hospitals, more sanitariums, more homes for the crippled, more lunatic asylums, more reformatories and more prisons!

Who is responsible for this sad, abominable condition? Our so-called health authorities, whose remarks are accepted as law; our so-called scientists, whose statements are religiously accepted - they primarily are to blame because they fail in their mission to civilization!

In the practical universal world, ignorance of the little-understood and much less practiced natural laws of life as applied to normal living is the main cause for the condition referred to. I blame those in control of our health systems for not correcting the evil.

Figures may or may not lie, but the statistics compiled by the United States Army, Navy and Marine Service in the World War, point the way to trut...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dediction
• Introduction
• Table of Contents
• Part I – Your Health (Original Edition)
• Part II – Contrology (Original Edition)
• Part III – 21st Century Pilates Evolution
• Appendix A: Glossary of Pilates’ terms
• Appendix B: Index