Patricia Issitt

WHEN my personal training students ask me for a Pilates exercise to help strengthen a particular muscle area, or a stretch to help with a muscle restriction, they might be surprised when we begin our session with movements that seem to be for a completely different part of the body. The same when someone comes for Bowen treatment with chronic neck pain, they wonder why I start their treatment on the back of their legs. But here’s the thing: our body is interconnected by mean of the entire musc

JUST like any movement method, in Pilates we work with a set of principles and the eight principles of Pilates are all an important part of how we learn to move. Yes, for sure, they are part of developing a stable core, but the core muscles are not really what Pilates is about. ‘The Core’ is an expression first used by physiotherapists back in the 1980s but Pilates as a movement form had been around for decades before then. Before the word ‘core' was invented Joe Pilates called the muscles

A PILATES pupil of mine asked me about weight training. She was over 50, post menopause, and had been advised to start exercising using weights. What was my opinion? My answer in short was: if you’d like to go to the gym and train with weights, then do it! In fact that is my answer to any form of exercise and movement, do it if you’d like to do it but if the thought of spending a morning going to a gym to workout bores you to death, then find another way. Believe me, I spent 12 years working

“If you can sense it and feel it, then you can change it”. So said a man called Thomas Hanna, a 20th-century philosopher and movement therapist. Hanna was the one who coined the term ‘somatics,’ something you might have come across at your yoga or Pilates classes, but he was by no means the first to work in this particular way. The history of ‘somatics’ reaches back into the 19th century. So, what on earth is it, you’re asking? And why isn’t it on the timetable at the gym?

BRINGING strength, flexibility and function into our body is not as simple as just beefing up the muscles.

PILATES is a movement method which draws on a set of principles which we apply to our ‘exercises. Precision, centring, breath, control, concentration, flowing movement, isolation and coordination are all foundational to Pilates.

PEOPLE often ask me about how Pilates differs from Yoga. Now, I’m not a Yoga teacher or even a Yoga practitioner, although I have been to quite a few Yoga classes in my time.

Planks - love them or hate them? No I’m not talking about floor boards or scaffolding, I mean that exercise where you position yourself face down, with legs straight, supporting your body weight on your arms. And then you stay there. For quite a long time.

Joe Pilates said: ”If your spine is stiff at 30, you are old: if it is completely flexible at 60, you are young” He had a very good point, and sadly it is frequently the case that younger people start to lose their flexibilty as soon as they go to school. Our children have to sit on their chair for the greater part of the day, leaning over their work and who doesn’t want to slump in front of a screen and play a video game, or spend a few hours on Snapchat after a tough day at school? By the time we are young adults the damage is done, although not undo-able.

I’m starting off with a few facts simply to illustrate how complex our anatomy is. Did you know there are 206 bones in our body, and approximately 360 joints and 640 muscles? Our muscles are classified into three types: skeletal muscle- the ones that attach to bones and move us around, visceral muscle, the stuff of our guts and internal organs and cardiac muscle, the heart muscle. Of these three types of muscle, the visceral and cardiac muscle act involuntarily to keep our organism working without us having to think about it which is a good thing.