We Speak Pilates

(Musings From A Student of Contrology )

‘Strengthen your core’ is lazy rhetoric that has survived beyond the theory it was built on.¹ Lazy because it is incomplete and opaque. If the prescriber is competent, they will recommend how to strengthen your core. Sometimes, they will even get the how right by sending the patient to a practitioner of Joe Pilates’ method for body conditioning he called Contrology.

An avid practitioner of the method, I question everything and soldier on happily incomplete, each session a mere morsel in layering on a richness to the fabric of my body. A richness that feels like strength, peace, coordination and tolerance for an enormous amount of physical friction. A rich awareness that I’ve accumulated over 22 years. Along the way, Joe Pilates’ work has revealed to me the absurdity of stringing together the words ‘strengthen your core.’

Just as we have dissected bodies for centuries, draining the fluid matrix and cutting away an integral part of the fabric, we have dissected the body’s health and named the core a thing to strengthen.² Mostly fluid, we live a fate of taking the paths of least resistance and this gets reflected back to us by the business models and physical culture of our time. We haven’t always seen and studied the fabric of the body as the foundation and the bones as apparatus. Joe Pilates developed his method for the whole body. I think he’d laugh you out of the room if you called his method “core work.” Though, let’s be honest…it’s the best core work out there!

Compartmentalizing “the core” within the fitness industry looks like a physical culture that skews to entertain and remove friction to maximize specific muscle groups for maximum profits. Through this lens, I would say that strengthening the core means mechanically and/or progressively loading muscles of the trunk. I think training this way generally leads people to brace and recruit toward imbalance. Bracing and recruiting are necessary trunk muscle activities. These 6 exercises for a stronger core is possible. And incomplete.

Working muscles to achieve definition is an aesthetic. Working toward a specific exercise is incomplete. Telling people they need a strong core without education opens the door to training an aesthetic or training to an exercise at the risk of missing the whole body. The core is a trash concept if you do not understand that the muscle strength you’re training is the result of rather than the cause of the pressure systems that move fluids through the fabric of the whole body.

I’ve seen this happen in the Pilates realm…trying to break the exercise down by muscle group, trying to progressively load an exercise for muscle development rather than pump development. One of the most important pumps we have is breath. Joe writes, “above all, learn how to breathe correctly.”³

Spending 30 minutes of your day with 5 new ways to do a lunge on a reformer in order to train an aesthetic or train a specific muscle group is abandoning the method. We’re even dissecting the equipment this way. I’ve seen people on social media passing images of the colored springs some manufacturers make and giving weights that coincide with the color. Thinking about the mechanics of the apparatus this way is like studying a cadaver. It names in isolation the engineered mechanics of the body. It tells you nothing of what this body’s life was like.

This is why I tell people you can’t try Pilates. You have to do Pilates. And you’re incomplete if you ever say you’ve done Pilates. It’s work that is never done…you can do and you can stop, but you’re never done. What a cadaver can’t show you is time.

Being a biped is hard work, partly because we have made pumping more of an uphill battle and partly because we are more fluid than solid. A healthy adult (male) is about 62 percent fluid. They say water always flows downhill, read: it’s our nature to remove friction. Removing friction in the fitness industry has led to all manner of wonderful machines and devices! The way I’ve heard it, Joe Pilates would be incredulous if you called his equipment a machine. He called it an apparatus because machines do something for you. An apparatus is an extension of you. The equipment he designed is an extension of you.

Dissecting Joe’s equipment away from his method has led to a booming core strength industry full of Pilates adjacent equipment designed to remove friction and make core work fun. And it’s led to a super bloom of VC-backed core strength factories where the lights are dim (don’t worry about what it looks like), the music is loud (don’t think too hard, just enjoy this and time will pass faster), the teacher is filling every second with amplified counting and motor cues (if we could crawl inside you and do this for you we would. Just let us in). This is a way to strengthen your core, but it’s incomplete.

We do not begin as bones. When bones are considered the foundation…or the things that the fabric relies on for support, we forget to take responsibility for the fabric. We begin to train for the bone. To understand Contrology, one must look at the bones as the result of, the charge, the apprentice of the fabric of the body. In the process of human formation, our first shape is a layered quilt: the ectoderm, mesoderm and endoderm. The mesoderm is the batting of life…it is the stuff of this quilt that forms the structures of life. A web of genesis, this is the fabric of the body. The first structure to appear within the mesoderm is the notochord. “Structurally, the notochord acts as a hydrostatic skeleton for the embryo before bone formation.”⁴ Stiffness comes from fluid-filled vacuoles pushing outward against a fiber-wound sheath that holds them in. It signals the tissues forming around it, patterning the neural tube and the somites. In humans it ends as the nucleus pulposus, the fluid center of every intervertebral disc.⁵

The notochord is the seam in the layers of our embryonic fabric, signaling and orienting the tissues that form around it. Bones are an artifact of every pressure and load they’ve encountered.

Pressure creates life, our lives should revolve around maintaining pressure. I believe our bodies are a webbing, a volume of liquid, an animate artifact of then, and only for now. Our bodies are alive right now! The animation taking place somewhere between the self and the brain. Hence, Joe saying in 1945 that his method is for the body, mind, and spirit. I think our spirit is the gap between the body and the mind where the will to animate lives. We work our muscles mechanically to load our bones not realizing we can actively shape them.⁶

The fabric has a mind of its own and can contract without moving a bone.⁷ We work to achieve aesthetics without understanding what those aesthetics are meant to animate. We choose work to remedy specific problems or because the work is linked to longevity or because the work helps us achieve a shape. None of these are wrong. Wrong would be choosing to train the core without the explicit understanding that pressure maintenance is the business of life.

If you determine that someone’s back pain is back pain because their muscles aren’t developed properly, you’re probably not totally wrong. What you tell the person to do to fix it probably is, if the goal is to strengthen muscle groups. When people show up in my studio needing “core strength,” my first guess is they need breath support and better pressurization. So the real prescription is pressurize, mobilize, stabilize and enliven the pressure systems of the trunk. Joe knew. The goal is really to restore function to the pumps that move fluid through the body. We’re fluid. The fabric of the body moves fluid through contract & relax. I think a strong core is the ability to fully contract and the ability to fully relax the muscles that make the pumps in the trunk. The thorax, the pelvic bowl and everything that connects to them. Our comfortable lifestyles make reaching homeostasis a real challenge! Hydrate the tissues. I think how much fluid you take in tips the hydration scale less than how you move the fluid you take in through the fabric of your body.⁸

Joe Pilates developed a gold standard method for maintaining the fabric of the body. Contrology is a brilliant, intentional corrective method of body conditioning.

A corrective method (corrective, not therapeutic) is like the resistance dyeing of the fabric of the body. On first pass through the indigo the cloth is a pale blue. On the hundredth pass the fabric is azure, on the thousandth you get a dark denim. There is no expedient means which is why I say good Pilates cannot scale. You have to think about it. You have to do it until it’s in there and then continue. It is a soaking to your edges a wringing of your depths and a mapping of the center batiked into the fabric of the body. With function in mind, we work to restore and strengthen many pressure systems that enliven the body.

Notes

1. Lederman E. “The Myth of Core Stability.” Journal of Bodywork and Movement Therapies. 2010;14(1):84-98.
2. Loosely based on the writings of van der Wal JC. “The Architecture of the Connective Tissue in the Musculoskeletal System.” International Journal of Therapeutic Massage and Bodywork. 2009;2(4):9-23.
3. Pilates JH. Return to Life Through Contrology. 1945, p. 23.
4. Ellis K, Bagwell J, Bagnat M. “Notochord vacuoles are lysosome-related organelles that function in axis and spine morphogenesis.” Journal of Cell Biology. 2013;200(5):667-679.
5. Sorochanu et al. “Notochord: morphogenesis, structure, and functional significance.” Morphology. 2026.
6. Frost HM. “Wolff’s Law and bone’s structural adaptations to mechanical usage: an overview for clinicians.” Angle Orthodontist. 1994;64(3):175-188.
7. Schleip R, Gabbiani G, Wilke J, et al. “Fascia Is Able to Actively Contract and May Thereby Influence Musculoskeletal Dynamics.” Frontiers in Physiology. 2019;10:336.
8. Loosely based on the writings of Davis MJ, Bertram CD. “Control of lymphatic pacemaking and pumping by mechanobiological signals.” Journal of Physiology. 2025.