Add Pilates to a Successful Diet and Nutrition Regime ?

Answer 1

To have a well-rounded and balanced attention to your diet and nutrition regime, there must also be a healthy component of physical activity. One of the best forms of physical activity is Pilates, a means of body building without developing bulky muscles while increasing flexibility, control, coordination and strength of muscles and body.

Early in the 20th century in Germany, Joseph Pilates, the son of an award-winning gymnast father and a naturopath mother, developed this physical fitness system. Having been a sickly child, Joseph devoted himself to learning how to become physically fit, studying body-building, yoga, qigong and gymnastics. By the age of fourteen he had turned his health around to such an extent that he posed for anatomical charts.

He believed that bad posture and poor breathing habits were the essential cause for poor health. He invented the equipment and the specifications for his training and series of exercises, which he originally named -Contrology.' His idea was to unite mind and body to establish the best possible health.

After World War I Joseph Pilates immigrated to the US. He met his wife, Clara, on the ship during his passage and together they set up a studio in New York City to teach Contrology. It caught on with the dance community and they taught such famed dancers as George Balanchine and Martha Graham, among many other famous people.

In 2005 there were approximately eleven million students and 14,000 instructors of Pilates, as it became known in honor of its creator, in the US.

The central idea of Pilates is to establish a strong core through resistance training. Joseph Pilates initially developed many apparati to develop the core through resistance training. However, in contemporary Pilates classes one will generally only find foam rollers, exercise balls, disks and resistance bands, with the floor mat the base of the workout.

Gail Eisen and Philip Friedman, two students of Romana Kryzanowska who was a student of Joseph Pilates himself, wrote The Pilates Method of Physical and Mental Conditioning in 1980, defining six principles of Pilates, which have been generally accepted into the current Pilates community. These principles are: 1.) concentration 2.) control 3.) center 4.) flow 5.) precision 6.) breathing

Core strength and core stabilization are the emphasis of Pilates, referred to as one's -powerhouse' by Joseph Pilates. It is this powerhouse in the center of the body that provides the foundation for all movement.