Benefits of Pilates – What Pilates Can Do for Your Body

What is Pilates good for?

The short answer is ‘absolutely everything.’

Your Pilates exercises can assist and enhance all your varied endeavors. Simply put, Pilates helps you do life better. Pilates elevates the performance, skill, and stamina of any sport, activity, or pastime, including the pedestrian everyday movements of daily living. Whatever you’ve got to do, rest assured your Pilates exercises are there to help out. Even as I type this, my Pilates exercises allow me to purposefully plant my feet on the floor and easily hold myself upright while seated. Priceless!

The Pilates exercises are the ultimate Owner’s Manual for the body. Work your exercises well, and over time, you’ll develop an intimate understanding of your most precious asset and how it functions: its strengths, inconsistencies, imbalances, tendencies, likes, dislikes, and more. This feature of Pilates is often described as ‘body awareness,’ but this phrase falls short of the mark. You’ll not only become ‘aware’ of your body using the Pilates Method, but you’ll also learn it with profound depth.

The most appealing benefit of the Pilates exercises (and often the least talked-about one) resides in Joseph Pilates’ original name for his method: ‘Contrology.’ The word Contrology is defined as ‘the study of control.’

Control.

What a precious commodity.

While control is elusive in many aspects of life, the power of your movement declines sharply with age and is, therefore, truly worth cultivating. Control affords you the luxury to get up and down from the floor with relative ease, bend over to pick things up, and navigate your environment as well as unfamiliar terrain. Control can extend the quality of your life immeasurably.

Control fosters coordination of your whole body to participate in everyday movements, reducing strain and wear and tear on the joints.

Romana Kryzanowska tells us: “You can say what Pilates is in three words: stretch with strength and control. And the control part is the most important because that makes you use your mind.”

Yes, it’s true!

As brilliant as the Pilates exercises serve to condition your body, they are even better for developing and enlivening your brain. Your brain is a vital organ that needs tending to, just like the ones in your gut. Keep it sharp and agile for life by learning and practicing your Pilates exercises. Your Pilates workout demands considerable focus and attention. To embody the Pilates exercises is to be fully alive in the present moment. And most importantly, with control and focus, you can move!

Sir Isaac Newton says, “A body in motion tends to stay in motion…”

According to the CDC, physical activity “can improve your brain health, reduce the risk of disease, strengthen bones and muscles, and improve your ability to do everyday activities.”

It also has been shown to lift your mood and ensure better sleep.

So, to recap how Pilates benefits you:

• Brain Health
• Longevity
• Daily activities
• Concentration
• Perform tasks,
• Quickly move around
• So much more!

That’s a pretty impressive list. And according to the internet, it also makes you look good naked.

Sign me up!

Originally published on The Core by Balanced Body.