Downtown Pilates Studio
Get Moving Through Our Pilates Sessions!
Improve your overall strength and flexibility by joining us at Downtown Pilates Studio. Since April 2018, we have been offering class sessions and private sessions. Book your class session and/or private session today.
Welcome to Downtown Pilates
Welcome to Downtown Pilates
Our Mission
We strive to inspire people to move their bodies again and properly. We want to have a safe, inspiring, inviting, and comfortable place for someone to work out. This is where MOVEMENT meets COMMUNITY.
What Is Pilates?
Joseph Pilates called his method Contrology, which is the study of control. He believed it would help people develop the strength and fortitude in body and mind to accomplish daily tasks and live life to the fullest.
Pilates emphasizes alignment and body awareness as it is a non-impact exercise system. Done regularly, it can change people's bodies by helping them sculpt muscles and improve flexibility. It helps practitioners develop unmatched core strength and optimal posture. It also improves breathing and increases the efficiency of movement.
Pilates exercises focus on stabilizing the torso muscles or the “powerhouse,” which support the spine. True for exercises performed both on the mat and the apparatuses, every movement one does in a Pilates workout emanates from the core. It keeps practitioners honest by gently forcing them to symmetrically use both sides of the body.
Both sides have to participate equally to initiate and achieve a movement successfully. Through this, the dominant and overused muscles will take a break, and the weaker and underutilized muscles will be demanded to participate, which results in balancing the body.
Contrology exercises also guard against any unnecessary pounding or throbbing of the heart.
Who Is Joseph Pilates?
In 1880, Joseph H. Pilates was born near Dusseldorf, Germany. He suffered from asthma, rheumatic fever, and rickets as a child. He was determined to heal, so he studied Eastern and Western forms of exercise.
He spent a year being an intern in England when World War I broke out. While in the camp, he taught his fellow internees his physical fitness program. They rehabbed and became stronger during the imprisonment because of his program. Those who followed his routine resisted the influenza epidemic that killed many.
A compassionate and curious individual, Joseph devised machines using old hospital bed springs to facilitate the rehabilitation of incapacitated soldiers. Those machines, which utilize pulleys and springs as resistance to build strength and increase overall flexibility in the spine and limbs, later became the prototypes of the specialized equipment used in studios today.
One of these Pilates apparatuses is the reformer, which is used today to create a uniformly sculpted, biomechanically efficient, and powerful body.
