The birth of Pilates coincides with the advent of Physical Therapy. Wait....what?

The profession of physical therapy was first developed in the early 1900s.

Physical therapists helped patients recover from polio and assisted in rehabilitating soldiers returning from the First World War.

Wait, this sounds an awful lot like the description of the history of Pilates!

Joe Pilates developed his “Contrology” method as a rehabilitative exercise after the flu epidemic and WWI. He designed to create a balance of the body and mind through a method that keeps itself revelatory (very revelatory, to the prognosticative people in your book group who want you "just to TRY IT!"

Pilates, a true believer in his method, knew it as revelatory. ( And like believers today, he was most likely quite annoying at cocktail parties).

“All new ideas are revolutionary,” he wrote in a promotional pamphlet in 1934. “When the theory responsible for them is proved through practical application, it requires only time for them to develop and to flourish.”

Many consider physical therapy hard science, while Pilates is often recognized as something at the strip mall or, worse, trending on Instagram. Physical therapy and Pilates can be an art form, a natural healing practice, and/or straightforward or prescriptive workout regimens, or often, let us be honest, a chore. In contrast to Pilates, PT is legitimized by regulatory bodies and PhDs, while Pilates certifications can be achieved in a single weekend. A gift from, Capitalism! Or it can be comprehensively studied over a minimum of 750 hours or through 2.5+ year apprenticeships.

Pilates is missing regulatory agencies as the movement had historically been passed on from mentor to mentor/person to person. Regulation is so young in our industry that I taught Pilates through UW Madison Continuing Education Department without a Pilates certification (more than 20 years ago, when certification not being required was pretty standard. Today there is fervently active work on regulation within the industry. Still, I'd argue that the lack of a trademark has created beautiful inventions and creativity within the pedagogy...things most easily found outside of regulatory bodies. Humans are unique and can often require a unique approach. So much of medicine is drawn from averages.

We are not average.

A T-score for bone density is an average bone density taken of primarily white women from a particular socio-economic background. (Evidence is mounting that the T-score is not the optimal diagnostic parameter for clinical decision-making. Ask your doctor about this!)

My average temperature of 97.6 is expected; 98.6 is just an average.

"That original study in the 1860s was done before antibiotics were available. Therefore, many people had infections that couldn’t be treated, which would have affected temperatures if chronically sick,” says Heidi Zapata, MD, PhD, a Yale Medicine infectious disease specialist.

Pilates Instructors are not allowed to "diagnose or treat," but we DO get to address the why of an injury of repetition or chronic pain instead of handling the simple fact of an injury. Excellent PTs also manage the why, and I collect a list of those that practice in Madison, but addressing the why is not easily billable. Have you ever wondered why you and your PT only work on one side of the body when healing a muscle or joint issue? Most often, your insurance does not cover time spent on the other side. One problem with how we look at healthcare is that we are not taught to see our bodies as our lifelong responsibilities. (Though an endlessly confounding and adventure-filled responsibility, where good and bad luck is real.) Instead, a man or a woman in a building is the expert of this organism I've experienced my entire life through? Why do we not see cognitive dissonance? How can we have unique fingerprints and tongues (yes!) but all go after the same T-score? Well, because we have so much to learn. Medicine is working hard. So must we.

In life, we take our bodies on an experiential journey and are rewarded with a place to live and endless sensations. With Pilates or any mind-body practice, you can begin a relationship with your body outside of simple good and bad sensations and soon care for and help aches and pains on your own. Empowerment!

I thought I knew my body as a lifelong dancer, and that assumption held back my practice for years. I completed choreography and felt advanced, and then two things happened. My mentor Michelle Larson told me that in her time as a teacher trainer, she had never seen Pilates faked so beautifully (honestly, my favorite aha moment- from total confusion to an explosive truth bomb filled with forward momentum. And then, a few years later, I taught at a primarily Peak Pilates studio in the D.C. area with beautiful apparatus/equipment... (please do not say 'machine': a machine is something that does something for you on its own). Please invite me to your next party! (But you LAY things down, and people LIE down- everyone in my industry miscues this, but it's fine, rocks back and forth...

I'm waiting for those party invites... and while I wait, have you tried Pilates? My final point. Just like PT exercises, HOW you do Pilates matters. Who you do Pilates or PT with matters.

You matter.

Do your research, have fun, and you need not marry a specific studio or single instructor.

Learn far and wide.

However, please look for instructors who are comprehensively trained. And ask them how often they practice on their own.

Check in with your unique human being every day. Please reach out or stop by the studio to learn more!

Love,

Caroline and Zoey