Mat or reformer: where a Pilates beginner should start
Mat or reformer for your first Pilates classes: what each teaches, rough UK costs, class formats, a side-by-side table and who is better off starting where.
Imogen Hale
Imogen came to Pilates through a stubborn lower back and stayed for the apparatus. She writes about the classical repertoire, the history of the method and the teachers who carried it from one studio in New York to the rest of the world.
Stories by Imogen
What changes when an experienced teacher learns the classical order
Experienced teachers who study the classical Pilates order from the start often find familiar exercises make new sense. What changes, and how to study it.
The craft of cueing, and how Pilates teachers find words that land
Anatomical cues, imagery and outcome cues, minimal versus wordy teaching, and a practical way for Pilates teachers to build cues that really change movement.
Second-generation Pilates teachers and the elders they learned from
Who the Pilates elders were, what it means to call a teacher second generation, and how lineage still shapes the way an exercise is taught in a studio.
What staying close to Joseph Pilates's original work means in practice
Classical and contemporary Pilates differ on order, springs, spine position and transitions. What each tradition keeps, what it changed, and the reasons why.
What Pilates meant by complete coordination of body, mind and spirit
Joseph Pilates defined Contrology as complete coordination of body, mind and spirit, and the phrase means more, and asks more, than a wellness slogan.
Bess Mensendieck's Body Culture for Women, read more than a century on
A reader's guide to Bess Mensendieck's 1906 book Body Culture for Women: what it argued, how its exercises and photographs work, and where its ideas went.
The German body culture that shaped Joseph Pilates
Kneipp's water cures, Mensendieck's exercises for women and Steiner's eurythmy are often linked to Joseph Pilates, but only one link really holds up.
Was Joseph Pilates a sickly child? The story and the record
Studio biographies say Joseph Pilates beat asthma and rickets as a boy, but the story comes from later interviews and the evidence behind it is thin.
Romana Kryzanowska and the survival of the classical method
Romana Kryzanowska learnt from Joseph Pilates as a teenage dancer and kept his studio and classical system going for decades after his death in 1967.