There has never been more interest in Pilates, and I think that’s a wonderful thing.
Reformer studios are everywhere. Classes are being heated, intensified and reinvented in ways Joseph Pilates could never have imagined. Some are excellent workouts. Some are a lot of fun. And if you love your class, I’m not here to tell you to stop.
But there is a distinction worth making:
A Reformer or Mat workout isn’t necessarily the Pilates system.
The Reformer and Mat are important pieces of a much larger system of exercises and apparatus. At Evolution Pilates, we teach the entire classical Pilates system because each piece has something different to teach us.
You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know
If you’ve only ever experienced Pilates on a Reformer or Mat, you may have no idea what the Chair could teach you. Or the Cadillac. Or the Barrels.
Joseph Pilates didn’t create all of that equipment because he needed more ways to keep people busy. Each apparatus gives us a different way to experience and understand the same fundamental concepts.
I think of the apparatus as concept translators.
The exercise may change. The apparatus may change. The concept doesn’t.
Something that feels almost impossible on one piece of equipment can suddenly make sense on another. A connection you couldn’t find on the Reformer might become obvious on the Chair. The Cadillac might give you the support you need to understand a movement before you have to find that support yourself. The Barrel might change your relationship to your spine.
That is why the whole Pilates system matters.
What the Apparatus Can Teach You
There’s another piece of the Pilates experience that can get lost when the Reformer becomes the entire workout: the feedback from the apparatus itself.
I think about it the way I think about driving a car.
Learning to drive a manual transmission requires you to understand what the car is doing. You feel the engine, the gears and the relationship between the clutch and the accelerator. An automatic transmission takes some of that work away. A self-driving car takes away even more.
That doesn’t make one better or worse. It simply means you are getting a different amount of information and having to make different decisions.
Pilates equipment can work the same way.
Classical apparatus wasn’t designed simply to make the exercises look good or feel comfortable. It gives you information.
An unpadded footbar is a good example. If you’re powering the carriage out through your feet instead of organizing the movement from your powerhouse, you’re likely to feel that pressure immediately. That’s not the apparatus being uncomfortable for the sake of being uncomfortable.
It’s feedback.
Reorganize the movement and the sensation changes. Your feet are still on the bar, but they’re no longer doing the job.
The equipment can expose a compensation that a more forgiving surface might allow you to ignore. It tells you something about how you are moving and gives you the opportunity to respond.
The more the equipment does for you, the less information you may have to work with.
That’s one reason I value classical Pilates apparatus. It doesn’t do the thinking for you. It gives you information and asks you to respond.
More Repetitions Don’t Necessarily Mean More Pilates
And then there’s the question of how much.
Pilates has never been about doing as many repetitions as possible. One of the things I value most about the classical system is its economy.
You don’t need endless repetitions, pulsing or a movement taken to complete fatigue to know that something is working.
Three correct repetitions can and should wipe you out.
That’s very different from creating the feeling of a hard workout through repetition. If you do something over and over until the muscle is exhausted, you will certainly feel tired. But fatigue alone doesn’t tell you that you were using the right muscles, organizing the movement well or actually accomplishing what the exercise was designed to teach.
In Pilates, I’m less interested in how many you can do than in how well you can do them.
The goal isn’t to make an exercise harder by adding more. The goal is to understand the exercise deeply enough that the right muscles are doing the right job.
Less can be more. Sometimes, three really good repetitions are plenty.
Pilates Is a System, Not a Collection of Exercises
This is also why I don’t think of Pilates as something that needs to be constantly reinvented to keep getting better. We already have an enormous amount to explore.
After nearly 30 years of practicing Pilates, I’m still finding things I didn’t understand before. I’m still taking lessons. I’m still changing my mind about exercises I thought I knew.
That’s not because I need more exercises. It’s because I need to go deeper into the ones I already have.
That may be the biggest difference between experiencing Pilates as a workout and experiencing Pilates as a system. A workout asks you to show up and do the thing; the system asks you to understand it.
Once you begin to understand it, you start seeing the same ideas everywhere. You recognize the connection between the Reformer and the Chair, between the Mat and the Cadillac, between something you struggled with years ago and something that suddenly makes sense today.
The exercises aren’t really separate exercises at all. They are different ways of teaching you how to move.
That is why I want people to experience more than one piece of equipment. Not because one apparatus is better than another, and certainly not because there is anything wrong with enjoying a Reformer or Mat workout. It’s because each part of the system gives you another opportunity to understand your body, your movement and the concepts that connect everything together.
If you’ve found Pilates through the Reformer or Mat, that’s a great place to start. But I hope you don’t stop there. There is a whole system waiting to show you something you may not even know you’re missing.
You don’t know what you don’t know. Our job as teachers is to give you the opportunity to find out.
