Issue #334 – May 5, 2021
Every Breath You Take…Pilates Paradigm Shifts and Going Against the Grain
by Ivan Zagorsky
I find that Pilates is similar to Kung Fu – every school teaches their own style, even though the basic movements look similar on the surface and humans with the same two arms, legs, head and body are the ones doing them. I was always fascinated by the different approaches taken by different instructors, and my time at Polestar Pilates has resulted in major paradigm shifts about contemporary Pilates.
My first introduction to Pilates in Russia happened over 10 years ago, when I started taking classes at a local gym. I remember finding it extremely hard to “pull in the abdominals” and “imprint lower back into the mat” for the entire hour and generally had the grace of a drunken bear who woke up from hibernation a month early. As the years passed, I continued training with a variety of YouTube videos, Pilates Anytime, and I even purchased “Return to Life Through Contrology” so I could do the exercises exactly as instructed by Joseph Pilates himself. I taught my friends as a hobby, but then I enrolled in Polestar Pilates to become an officially trained Mat instructor.
I went in there thinking I’ll have a leg up on everybody else, having trained using the “original manuscripts” of Joe himself and with videos of top level instructors giving me cues from my screen. However, what happened next was humbling, and shifted my perspective in a major way.
The entire philosophy at Polestar is derived from taking the best of the original Pilates method and mixing it with the latest advancements in Physical Therapy, Bioenergetics and Human Kinetics. That means a stronger focus on proper alignment and not “the center”, smoother and slower movements and…gasp…breathing however you want! At first, that sounded like a form of Pilates blasphemy!
The motto that the mentors drilled into us on the first day was that breath is “a tool and not a rule.” I was used to being told when to inhale and when to exhale on each exercise, but then they had us try some basic Mat moves on both the inhale and the exhale and see which one benefited me most. The idea is that breath can either assist movement or make it more difficult – while typically an inhale generally makes spinal extension easier, while an exhale helps with flexion – but some people may find counter-intuitive breathing patterns help them more. It was quite a departure from my previous experience, where I was given a rigid script on “inhale…and on the exhale do this” or the other way around. Some of my clients later enjoyed this newfound freedom of breathing however they want, but others thought that an instructor ought to be precise and give specific commands. One client even said, “Are we training a specific discipline here or doing some new-age Californian hipster stuff? Tell me exactly how to breathe!”
Gone forever were “belly button to the spine”, “pull in the abs”, “move through the center” – all replaced with the idea of axial elongation. Axial Elongation, they explained, is finding the longest axis of the body so that the “core” can activate without conscious effort. We were taught that pulling in the abdominals prevents the diaphragm from moving freely and increases the intra-abdominal pressure, limiting the finer muscle firing patterns – and that could result in increased tension in other areas. In technical terms, some studies showed that the Transversus Abdominus does not create the greatest core stability independently, and a guide-wire model of lumbar stability is not the most practical strategy for daily tasks that require movement of the spine. That took me some time to accept, especially since earlier on they showed a presentation picture of Joseph Pilates…with his stomach pulled in!
At a later course called “Principles of Movement”, the teacher had us stand against a wall to line up our spinal curves and find our proper anatomical alignment, which they defined with a quote from Eric Franklin, whose methods are widely incorporated into the overall training philosophy: “Putting all body parts approximating toward the central axis, as much as structure permits.”. And then they had us doing various moves with the stomach pulled in and without. My impression was that the movements without purposely activating the stomach muscles felt freer and less rigid, and even provided more balance. The muscles needed for the movement were activating “as little as possible but as much as needed” – another principle of that particular “school of Kung Fu”.
Now the actual “Kung Fu” part was that the Beginner to Intermediate classes were focused on relaxed movements – where the range of some moves very limited compared to how the “classical” schools did it. To me personally, it was a bit lacking in the “athletic” department – more of a Jackie Chan “Drunken Master” style, to continue with this analogy. As a former basketball player, I wasn’t necessarily looking for “pulled in abs all day” but could use a stronger overall practice. The explanation, of course, was that people were generally much healthier during the Joseph Pilates era. They didn’t have “smartphone necks” tilted way forward and also didn’t spend as much time sitting and forgetting proper movement patterns – meaning our Pilates predecessors could perform the more complex moves more easily. Another idea was that while Joseph Pilates himself intuitively knew what he was doing – he still had some outdated beliefs, like trying to get people to have their spine be as flat as a newborn child.
However, having previously worked as journalist for 14 years, I asked tough questions like: “how come so many other teachers are still working with their stomach pulled in, and they seem to know their anatomy too?” and “How come other schools aren’t all losing business and getting sued for supposedly damaging their clients over the long run by not applying these principles?” The only answers I received were to try different things and see what works for myself.
Of course, any training philosophy will be full of absolutes in order to drive home its main points and give students a concrete set of operating principles, and Polestar certainly provided a fantastic overall foundation for me to teach from. But at the end of the day, I realized that I need to continue learning with an open mind and finding what works best for every individual. That’s why I remain eager to continue my education and perhaps pick up another style of Kung Fu – maybe adding a little “Iron Fist” and “Southern Dragon” to the relaxed “Drunken Master” lacking those pesky tight abs.
Ivan Zagorsky is a Moscow-based Pilates instructor. After spending 14 years in the media business (and surviving the physical and mental stress of it only thanks to Pilates), I realized that my calling in life is helping people avoid stress to live deeply inspiring energetic lives through healthy, functional movement – and became a Pilates instructor. I enjoy exploring both Classical and Contemporary work, and the different styles and methods which have evolved over the years. I currently run online and in-person classes in Russian and English for people all over the world – and add stress-reduction elements of meditation and other disciplines to enhance the students’ experience.