Learn about Pilates for Dancers

Pilates exercises focus on posture, strength, and flexibility – all three are important components for any good dancer. The use of Pilates results in a strengthening of the upper body that enhances a dancer’s balance, alignment of body parts, better posture while still or turning, and other spinal muscle alignments. Pilates exercises are also good at lower body parts like the ankles and feet that play a key role in any form of dance.

What Pilates exercises does is increase the alertness level of the body to surrounding physical space and leave the mind in better control and hence more relaxed. The purpose of the Pilates exercise is to make sure that the mind is aware of all muscles involved in every moment and to take them into account while maintaining balance and agility. Because of this, Pilates can work on nearly every part of the body.

Dance teachers or coaches will often recommend Pilates exercises to dancers to help them improve their balance, muscles, movements, and body-parts coordination.

The body is a machine that can wear out if it is continually under stress. Dancing is a very stressful activity as far as the body and mind is concerned. The muscles are always overworked and the mind has to keep up with the maintenance of balance and general control. Pilates help to bring discipline, easier control and coordination while at the same time increasing muscle strength and also helping with relaxation.

Pilates can work on isolated muscles groups (like the shoulders) or it can work on complex muscle groups (abdomen and back). A different exercise works on all muscles in the body and helps to restore and rebuild muscle tissue that has broken down due to stress. Increase strength ensures that a similar muscle tissue breakdown is reduced in the future so that dancers do not get tired too easily and their body does not hurt once they stop dancing.

Pilates – A Brief History

The Pilates exercise method was invented by a German circus performer and boxer,, who designed a series of floor and mat exercises to help balance the body, improve motion and promote mental and physical harmony. This method was for many years the premiere exercise technique of the dance world. Joseph Pilates was born in Germany, in 1880. Pilates was skinny and sickly as a child. He suffered from asthma, rickets and rheumatic fever. He was so skinny that he could not fight back the older boys who taunted him. It was under these conditions that caused him to begin his life journey to fitness and health.

He studied both Eastern and Western forms of exercise. He came to believe that our modern life-style, bad posture, and inefficient breathing were the roots of poor health. His answer to these problems was to design a unique series of life enhancing physical exercises that help to correct muscular imbalances and improve posture, coordination, balance, strength, and flexibility, as well as to increase breathing capacity and organ function.

While working in England as a circus performer in 1914, at the start of WWI, he was placed in an internment camp. It was here that he developed the floor exercises that later evolved into what we now know as the Pilates mat work through the use of “Controlology”, the comprehensive integration of body, mind and spirit. He devised rehabilitation equipment from bedsprings and beer keg rings. These were the origins of the equipment used today. A terrible epidemic of influenza swept the world in 1918. The internment camps were the hardest hit. Under Pilates’ rehabilitation program no detainees succumbed to the disease.

Pilates returned to Germany after the war. In 1925 through the persuasion of Nat Fleischer and Max Schmelling he moved to New York. There with the help of his wife Clara, he established his gym, developed the Pilates method of exercise, invented the Pilates exercise equipment, and of course, trained students. In the same building as his gym there were several dance studios, which led to his being discovered by the dance community. Through the use of “Controlology” its dancers were sent to Pilates for rehab.

Joseph Pilates taught in New York from 1926 to 1966. He was a friend and teacher to many renowned dancers and choreographers. He trained a number of students who applied his work and became teachers of the Pilates method themselves. This first generation of teachers who trained directly with Joseph Pilates are often referred to as the Pilates Elders. Some committed themselves to passing along Joseph Pilates’ work exactly as he taught it. This approach is referred to as classical style Pilates. Other students went on to integrate what they learned with their own research in anatomy and exercise sciences.

Joseph Pilates died in 1967 at age 87. He had maintained a fit physique throughout his life. He was renowned for his flamboyant personality liking cigars, whiskey, and women. He would be seen running the streets of Manhattan, in the dead of winter, in his habitual bikini bottom training attire. His wife Clara continued to teach and run his studio for another 10 years after his death.