What Pilates meant by complete coordination of body, mind and spirit

In 1945 Joseph Pilates published Return to Life Through Contrology, a slim book written with William John Miller. Early in it he gives a one-line definition of his method: "Contrology is complete coordination of body, mind, and spirit." The sentence now hangs on studio walls, opens teacher training manuals and decorates more tote bags than he could ever have imagined.

Read on its own, it can sound like any wellness slogan. Read in its setting, it is more specific and a good deal more demanding. This piece looks at what Pilates seems to have meant by each of the three words, how the method's principles were later drawn out of his writing, and how teachers in the classical tradition put the phrase to work.

The book around the sentence

Return to Life is short. A brief argument comes first, followed by the 34 mat exercises, each photographed with Pilates himself, then in his early sixties, demonstrating. His earlier book, Your Health (1934), had made the case at greater length and with more indignation.

The argument runs roughly like this. Modern life, with its desks, slumped posture and shallow breathing, leaves most people with unevenly developed bodies: some muscles overworked, many barely used, and a spine that has forgotten how to bend in all its directions. Contrology sets out to develop the whole body evenly, to restore the spine's mobility and to teach full breathing. The reward is energy for ordinary life. He promised that a few sessions a week, kept up faithfully for a few months, would bring visible change and a clearer mind.

Coordination, in this scheme, is the point. It is not a pleasant side effect of getting stronger.

Body, mind, spirit

Body

The body Pilates wanted was evenly developed, supple through the spine and able to get through daily tasks easily and with some pleasure. That rules out a lot of what passes for exercise: isolating one muscle, chasing high repetitions, building the parts that show in a mirror. Nearly every exercise in the mat order uses the whole body at once, which is why a well-done Hundred tires the arms and the backs of the legs as well as the abdominals.

Mind

The name of the method gives the mind its job. Contrology is about control, and control comes from attention. Pilates wanted every movement directed, not merely performed, which is why the repetitions are so low. Five done with full concentration are worth more than fifty done while planning dinner. The fixed order helps here too, because once you no longer have to decide what comes next, your attention is free for how you do it.

Spirit

This is the word most often misread. Pilates was not founding a religion, and Contrology has no spiritual practice attached to it. In the everyday English of the 1940s, spirit often meant something nearer to zest, morale or vigour, the quality we mean when we say someone is in good spirits. Read that way, the definition hangs together neatly: a body that works evenly, a mind directing it, and the energy and good humour that follow. That is my reading, not a documented gloss, but it fits his writing, which keeps returning to vitality and to the pleasure of doing ordinary things well.

The idea that training the body trains the whole person was common currency in the German body culture he grew up in, as traced in our piece on Kneipp, Mensendieck and Steiner. Pilates simply put it in one sentence.

The principles, as later teachers drew them out

Pilates never published a numbered list of principles. The six that most students now learn (concentration, control, centring, flow, precision and breathing) were drawn out of his writing and teaching by later generations, and the list is usually traced to a 1980 book, The Pilates Method of Physical and Mental Conditioning. Schools add and rename items: some include whole-body movement, relaxation or stamina, and some prefer to speak of the powerhouse instead of centring.

As a summary of what he wanted, the six principles hold up well. As a reading of his definition, they miss something. Each principle names a part, and the definition is about the parts working together. You can be focused, controlled and precise in a single exercise and still not be coordinated in his sense, if that exercise is cut off from the one before and the one after.

How classical teachers use the phrase

In the classical lineages, most of which run back through Romana Kryzanowska, coordination is usually understood as something that happens across a whole session. The exercises come in a set order, the transitions between them are taught as carefully as the exercises themselves, and the pace is brisk enough that there is no time to drift. The aim is that once the sequence is learnt, attention can stop managing the parts and start sensing the whole. Teachers who have spent decades with the original repertoire, such as Michael Miller, who has taught the classical work in Boulder, Colorado for many years, tend to come back to the 1945 book again and again for exactly this.

This is also why classical teachers are slow to add exercises before the basics flow. A client who can do a beautiful Roll Up but stops to fidget before every Single Leg Circle is not yet coordinated, and good teachers judge progression by the transitions as much as by the exercises.

Contemporary teachers often read the phrase more loosely, as a general statement that Pilates is a mind and body practice. That is a fair reading too, as long as the word complete is taken seriously.

A checklist for one Roll Up

The simplest way to test the definition is on a single exercise, done slowly, with this list in mind:

• Set up: lie long on the mat with the legs together and the arms reaching overhead (or by your sides if your shoulders are stiff), and take one full breath before you move.
• Body: as the arms come forward, let the head and shoulders follow, then peel the spine off the mat one section at a time while the legs stay long and heavy.
• Mind: find the point where the spine wants to jerk up in one piece, and slow down there instead of speeding up.
• Breath: breathe out steadily through the curl and the reach forward, breathe in to begin the return, and breathe out as you lower.
• Spirit: after five repetitions, notice if you feel more alert than when you started, or less. If less, you were probably working too hard in the wrong places.
• Coordination: on the last repetition, roll down and move straight into your next exercise without resetting.

If you have a back injury or osteoporosis, ask a qualified teacher or physiotherapist before practising rolling exercises, since repeated forward bending of the spine is not suitable for everyone.

Five Roll Ups done this way take less than two minutes. Done with that much attention, they are as good a working definition of the method as the sentence on the studio wall.