About Pilates
The Pilates Method offers both mind and body conditioning. By helping to rebalance your body, you will achieve the perfect balance of strength and flexibility. Pilates will help you to find, understand and maintain better posture, you will learn how to breathe more efficiently and improve your core stability. By targeting the deep postural muscles of your body, you are literally building strength from the inside out, creating a natural girdle of strength around your torso. Every movement is performed mindfully, with precision and control making it a very safe and effective way to exercise. This mindful approach can also help your mental well-being and can help you better cope with unwanted stress and tension.
Pilates can work for everyone regardless of fitness level, at Jayne Beasley Pilates, I teach good movement skills, step by step, which ultimately gives you strength and flexibility. My class sizes are limited to ensure personal attention
The 8 Principles of Pilates
Control (Coordination)
When performing pilates exercises we encourage movement with precision and control. The complexity of movement patterns increases as we progress.
Relaxation
People are sometimes stressed when they start a Pilates class creating tension in their muscles overused during the day. As the mind relaxes tension is released as a result of a conscious focus on the aligned and balanced exercises.
Breathe
The breathing patterns of each exercise facilitate stability, encouraging fluidity and ease of movement whilst allowing the mind to relax and recharge.
Concentration
Pilates is both mental and physical conditioning. Clients are encouraged to be mindful of their body’s movements to become consciously aware of what they are doing.
Flow
A focus on controlled, graceful and dynamic movement is at the core of each exercise.
Centering
Core stability is the ability to maintain control of the position of your pelvis, spine, shoulders and head creating a stable base of support for exercises to be performed well.
Alignment
Pilates encourages us to recognise our alignment throughout our whole body. The correct starting alignment creates effective smooth-flowing movements.
Stamina
Pilates builds endurance as clients become more proficient through repetition of the exercises their muscles begin to work more functionally and energy is not wasted, developing stamina.
History of Pilates
The Pilates Method of exercise originates in the work of the late Joseph Pilates, who was born in 1880 near Düsseldorf, Germany. He was a frail child and turned to physical fitness programmes to improve his body image, becoming a keen sportsman, developing talents in sports as varied as diving, gymnastics and boxing.
Interned in the war years because of his nationality, he developed a fitness programme for his fellow internees in order to maintain their health and fitness levels whilst being held in confinement – he always claimed that his regime was the reason why not one of these internees died from the influenza epidemic that killed thousands in 1918!
Returning to Germany, he came into contact with the world of dance, particularly through contact with Rudoph von Laban, the originator of ‘Labanotation’, the most widely used form of dance notation. Hanya Holm included many of his exercises in her programme and, to this day, they are still part of the celebrated ‘Holm Technique’. At the same time as working with dancers, Joseph Pilates was also instructing the Hamburg police force in self-defence!
He was, in fact, asked to train the new German army, but he declined and decided to emigrate to the United States of America. On the boat trip, he met a nursery teacher, Clara, whom he later married – and with whom he set up his first fitness studio in New York, at an address he shared with the New York City Ballet.
His studio soon began to attract the ‘elite’ of New York with leading ballet dancers coming to him because his exercises perfected and complemented their traditional exercise programme. Actors and actresses, sportspersons, the rich and the famous were all attracted to a workout that built strength without adding bulk, balancing that strength with flexibility, and achieving the perfect harmony between mind and muscle
In the past, screen legends such as Gregory Peck and Katharine Hepburn used the Pilates Method and, today, it is the preferred workout regime for leading personalities from the worlds of entertainment and sport. Yet, until the late 1990s, Pilates remained essentially unknown to the general public – how things have changed in that short time as an estimated 25 million people now take regular Pilates classes in the USA and some one million in the UK.
Pilates today is taught in several forms, directly reflecting the legacy of Joseph Pilates, who developed the method some 80 years ago. He did not lay down a formal training programme, with the result that, on his death, his ‘disciples’ continued teaching by adding their own variations to the core philosophy and exercises. This flexibility in approach is one of the reasons why Pilates has been so successful over this time period.
