I often get asked, "When will I finally get this?" I used to answer: "Pilates gets harder as you get better." I don’t say that anymore. I say: "There is no done." I don't mean they'll never get there. I mean every time we think we've figured something out; there's another way to understand it. The exercise hasn't changed. The understanding has.
Years into my practice, that happened during the Hundred. A teacher told me to relax my legs. I remember thinking she must have misspoken.
I was proud of my Hundred. Everything was working. My seat, my legs, my arms. My head was lifted, I was scooping hard, my legs were fully engaged, and I was pumping like mad. It was the Hundred I'd thought I'd mastered years before.
Then I let my legs just hang off my hips and softened my upper body. Suddenly my abs were on fire. My legs felt lighter. Breathing became easier. Instead of sprinting through the exercise all out, I felt like I could have kept going like a marathon.
The exercise didn't get easier. The effort shifted. The shape didn’t change. Where it came from did.
That day I realized Pilates isn't about brute force. It's about distributing the load throughout the body, so no one area does more than its share. When my legs stopped trying to do everything, my abdominals finally had the opportunity to do their job.
That's what the best Pilates is to me; less brute force and better organization. That lesson taught me something I hadn't expected. The better I understood an exercise, the more I realized it still had something to teach me.
This is why I still take lessons after nearly thirty years. There is always more to learn. I study with four teachers and get something different from each of them.
Karen Winselman taught me every moment matters, especially the transitions. Nicole Smith can make a small adjustment that completely changes what I feel. I call her a body whisperer. Siri Galliano loves to change the tension to get my attention. Sometimes changing the gear or the springs is all it takes for an aha moment. More than anyone, Alycea Ungaro has challenged the way I think about teaching.
One phrase of hers stays with me:
"Don't go wider. Go deeper."
If money were no object, I'd take a lesson every day. Alas, my salary is that of a Pilates instructor, so I must also practice on my own. And maybe that's the point.
Everything I have learned about Joseph Pilates suggests he believed people should own their practice. The teacher isn't there to perform the exercises with the client. Rather, we’re there to observe, guide and help clients develop an understanding they can take with them long after the lesson is over. I love when I see a client spend a few minutes on the Swedish Bars or the Ladder Barrel before a lesson because they're beginning to think for themselves.
I believe that Joseph Pilates didn't create different pieces of apparatus because he needed more exercises. He created different ways to teach the same concepts. First, clients think they're learning a collection of random exercises, then one day something changes. They begin to recognize the same concepts showing up again. The exercise or apparatus may change, but the concept doesn't.
Footwork is a perfect example.
I've been told Romana Kryzanowska would say "Work from the knee up, not the knee down.” I understood the words long before I felt them. Then one day I heard a cue that completely changed Footwork. “Think about pushing the backs of your thighs toward the springs to send the carriage out and try not to let your feet move." What? It’s FOOTWORK so I was always pushing from my feet. This sounded impossible, but after a few misfires I got it, and everything felt completely different.
That's when Pilates stops feeling like a collection of exercises and starts revealing itself as a system, and I’ve come to think of the apparatus as concept translators. Once the connection is made, an exercise practiced for years suddenly feels different.
When I attended Weekends with Jay Grimes, I wasn't looking for a different method. I was curious to hear from someone who had worked directly with Joseph Pilates. Listening to Jay talk about the work, hearing his stories, and watching him see the same exercises through a slightly different lens reminded me that Pilates isn’t static because Joseph Pilates wasn’t static. He spent a lifetime refining his work. Why wouldn’t our understanding continue to deepen as well?
Those weekends changed the way I think about the apparatus. Jay talked about working with Balanced Body to develop the Contrology line. I had the opportunity to work on that equipment and to meet Ken Endelman during one of the seminars. The beauty of the Contrology line is that it isn't trying to recreate the past for the sake of history. It's preserving the conversations between the body and the apparatus that inspired the line.
Take the unpadded footbar for example and our beloved footwork. If I'm driving the carriage with my feet instead of from my powerhouse, I'm going to feel that in my feet. The discomfort isn't the problem. It’s the feedback. As soon as I reorganize, working from the knee up instead of the knee down, the pressure in my feet almost disappears.
The apparatus didn't correct me. It guided me toward a better solution. Thoughtful apparatus doesn't hide inefficient movement from us. It lets us feel it. If we're willing to pay attention, it usually points us toward a better way of organizing the body.
Joseph Pilates described his work as body conditioning, and I've always liked that description because conditioning isn't something we do after we need it. We condition the body beforehand, so it's prepared for whatever life asks of it.
To me, that's what Return to Life has always meant. When your body is well conditioned, you stop thinking about it. You don't think about movement, you just do it. That's the gift Pilates has given me, and it's the gift I hope to pass on to every person who walks through my doors. Not a perfect Teaser, but a better relationship with movement. When that happens, Pilates stops being something you do for an hour. It becomes something you carry with you for the rest of your life. It’s why I’m still taking lessons, still changing my mind, still looking for another way to think about the exercises I already know. That is the beauty of Pilates.
There is no done.
Mo Wolfe
Mo Wolfe, NCPT is the owner of Evolution Pilates in Port Washington, New York, where she has been teaching classical Pilates for more than two decades. A host studio for the Real Pilates® Teacher Training Program, Evolution Pilates emphasizes private instruction, teacher training, and helping clients develop an independent, lifelong relationship with movement. Mo continues to study with teachers across the country and believes the greatest lessons often come from looking at familiar exercises in new ways.
