Pilates' Return to Life Through Contrology

Judicious selection of special contrology exercises will accomplish more for your health and bodily condition in conjunction with the foregoing advice than all else.

From Joseph H. Pilates in Return to Life, 1945.

Then the caption, not Joseph Plotty's quotes, it says, when I'm asked, how many of these should I do? I like the age old reply of how many can you do? Capitalize really well.

Romana would tell us that our goal was to do each exercise so precisely that we only needed to do one each.

However, that's only going to take you so far.

Um, and it's gonna highlight a certain aspect of fitness, which might be like your kinesthetic awareness, but it's not going to, to bias other, other aspects of fitness as well as if you did more, you know, to like muscular fatigue.

So within this, uh, if I were to summarize this, I like the Joseph Pilates quoted saying essentially like only do the exercises, the amount of times that he prescribes in return to life through control.

It's a quote from the book.

And he had reasons, kind of, that we, some we know more about than others of why he put them in the order that he did.

And our biggest reference point for that is Return to Life, which is the mat work, which, you know, most people read it in their teacher training.

And, you know, Joe didn't even call Pilates Pilates.

So that's a whole other rabbit hole we could go down.

He called it Contrology.

And if you read Return to Life, how he describes Contrology and what it is, is essentially what he called the coordination, complete, I think it was complete coordination of body, mind, and spirit.

And this is the quote you'll see all over the internet when people are like, this is the true capital T Pilates.

I think what he meant was, when he said that is that he viewed Contrology as a system of physical and mental conditioning that he ultimately designed to develop what he thought were healthy, capable and efficient functioning bodies because he had this whole spiel in Return to Life about how he thought people were sick and the industrialization complex and all of that.

Yeah.

Um, we had to find our own way, you know? We didn't create anything new, but I at least very personally had to t- determine for myself, what is this thing? What is it? How does it work? What's it for? Why do I like teaching it? What am I teaching, you know? Like, I had to kinda do a big soul-searching, if I'm gonna keep doing this, and also teach or train other people, I, I need to know for myself what it is, you know? And so, I used, used mostly Return to Life, 'cause that's, it's pretty clear in there-

Mm-hmm

... what the purpose was.

... and their integration of the Pilates history?

Yeah.

We are, we are pretty vigilant about that in our program in terms of keeping the history, making sure people read Return to Life, and then talking about it to the degree that I know to talk about it.

You know, having been around long enough, having met a lot of the original players, I, I feel a l- a little more confidence in being able to speak to it.