Intensive weight training for 12 years made Brenda Moore feel musclebound.
“I got so boxy and bulky, I didn’t feel feminine anymore,” she said.
Then she discovered the Pilates Method, a conditioning program that gently stretches and strengthens muscles while improving posture and flexibility.
After taking Pilates classes at Denver’s Phoenix Center for Health Excellence, Moore was so impressed with her newly streamlined body that she became a Pilates instructor.
Since 1996, she has been offering Pilates classes to the general public at the Garden of the Gods Club in Colorado Springs, where she works as fitness director. The cost ranges from $25 for a semiprivate 45-minute lesson to $875 for a series of 25 lessons.
“Pilates tightens, tones, stretches, aligns, balances and increases flexibility,” Moore said. “It’s everything but aerobic.”
Unlike programs that emphasize biceps and other “glamor” muscles, Pilates first develops the body’s core abdominal and pelvic muscles. With a strong center, students are able to carry themselves regally and move with greater fluidity.
“Once the core muscles are solid, stable and balanced, then everything else will follow,” said Moore, who credits Pilates for straightening her rotated hip, eliminating carpal tunnel symptoms and helping her stand an inch taller.
Students exercise on mats and on machines such as a $3,500 Universal Reformer, which resembles a medieval torture device. But the movements they make are easy and natural. Standing, sitting or lying down, they gently glide back and forth on a carriage, sometimes with their arms and feet working ropes and pulleys. They rely on the machine’s metal springs and their body weight for resistance.
Although Pilates is mushrooming in popularity nationwide, it’s nothing new. Developed more than 70 years ago in New York by Joseph Pilates, a German athlete and physical therapy pioneer, it was first used to rehabilitate injured soldiers, then to rehabilitate injured dancers.
Without benefit of franchising or advertising, Pilates gradually caught on among non-dancers as a general fitness regimen. It began to go mainstream in the late 1980s, when many fitness buffs abandoned traditional muscle-tearing, joint-pounding exercises such as high-impact aerobics and embraced low-impact workouts.
Since 1995, the number of Pilates studios nationwide has increased from 150 to more than 400.
Since Pilates is a mind-body method in which proper form, breathing and concentration are essential, it’s recommended that students take at least three or four classes before practicing Pilates on their own.
Writer tries an introductory session
I knew I had a big knot in my neck from years of working on computers and telephones. But only after an introductory Pilates session did I learn it was a monster.
“It’s bigger than a half-dollar,” said Brenda Moore, who teaches Pilates at the Garden of the Gods Club.
As if that weren’t bad enough, I also found that I walk with my pelvis tilted forward, my feet splayed and my weight unevenly distributed–all of which can throw the body out of alignment.
Ouch. No longer could I think of myself as an unrealized Mikhail Baryshnikov. A fully realized Fred Flintstone was more like it.
To loosen my muscles and increase my flexibility, Moore ran me through a series of Pilates exercises, starting with a rolldown on a machine called “The Trap.”
Seated on a platform with my chin on my chest, I grasped a trapeze bar and gently lowered myself down, attempting to unroll my spine one vertebra at a time. Then I peeled myself off the platform like a piece of tape and rolled back up.
That felt good. But it wasn’t until I switched to the Universal Reformer machine–sometimes known as “the rack”–that I actually felt elongated.
I started with some footwork, pushing myself back and forth on the machine’s spring-loaded carriage with my toes.
Moore then had me push with my instep.
Eeeoww! That hurt–but in a good way. Since I walk crookedly, my instep muscles are shorter than they should be.
Next I tried some leg exercises. Placing my feet into loops of rope attached to pulleys, I lifted my legs, then split them apart and made a circle.
Eeeoww again! This maneuver stretched muscles I never knew I had, especially in an area I would rather not name.
During these exercises, my form was a bit wobbly. I can’t imagine how wobbly it would have been if Moore had attached all five of the machine’s springs instead of just one.
But it wasn’t laughable enough to land me a spot on “America’s Funniest Home Videos.” In fact, I’m proud to say that I have unusually flexible ankles, although I’m not sure what good it would do me unless I moved to Texas to become a professional, er, tire-kicker.
By the end of the 45-minute session, I had resolved to follow Moore’s advice on how to stand, walk and hold the telephone.
As I left the Garden of the Gods Club, I felt as if the knot in my neck had shrank, that some of my other kinks were gone, and that I was actually standing taller.
Having read a dozen articles about Pilates, I knew it could have been the power of suggestion.
But I doubted it.
As Moore put it, I had been “Pilaticized.”
