We Speak Pilates

Regarding our exercises, action is often a distraction, because we seek something paradoxical: stability within movement. Dynamic stability, for me, means moving the part that is to remain still just enough to keep it still against the force caused by the moving part. This is close to what motor-control literature calls proximal stability for distal mobility. Our foundation is our center, the powerhouse from which all movement originates and returns.

Why this matters: Most people begin their understanding of Pilates as a series of shapes to achieve. Pilates exercises can be effective this way, to a point, but one would be remiss to stop there. Looking for the stillness, searching for the connections and the stability within the moving shapes, levels up the practice.

Development happens in the quality of connection you maintain throughout. You set the action and find the stillness within it. Your body is never truly still; even in moments of apparent stillness there is micro-movement, breath, and engagement. The mastery comes in finding that elusive balance between control and flow. This is the heart of Pilates: dynamic stability.

The equipment is a teacher. As we work with the springs, stretching them outward, they create resistance that demands deeper engagement with our center. And when we control their return, that is when the real challenge begins: maintaining the connection we have just cultivated.

One of my favorite instructions in Return to Life sits inside the Side Kick, where Joe writes “attempt to better your first trial,” and then, a few poses later, writes it again. My shorthand for it: best your effort. Every rep is an opportunity to tune your concentration and connect deeper than the rep before.

Why this matters: Acquiring skill in Pilates is the price of attention paid. To learn from the springs requires a conversation, a back and forth, if I may. Springs teach us many things. One important lesson is that the reach is constant action. If you stop reaching through the springs, you crash.

Read more: “Attempt to better your first trial” appears in the Side Kick instructions in Return to Life Through Contrology (1945), where Joe repeats it within the same exercise. He put the philosophy inside the reps, not in a preface.

Closing the Circuit

Tales from the Studio

A few months ago I was at the Bay Area Discovery Museum with my young son, in an exhibit of household objects taken apart so children can see how they work. On the wall was a huge circuit board. If the kids connect the circuit from point A to point B, something turns on: a light, a fan, a doorbell.

It got me thinking about our connection to the equipment. Just as you connect wires to a circuit board in order to connect them to each other through the board, you connect your body parts to the apparatus in order to connect each part to the other through the apparatus.

I’ve been told Joe would get angry if you called the equipment a machine. A machine does the work for you. The apparatus is an extension of you.