YOU MIGHT WANT TO TRY PILATES; WHAT HAVE YOU GOT TO LOOSEN?
By John Bogert

Daily Breeze – March 2006

This is a short treatise on how a new-agey, celebrity-driven exercise program, might just not be a fad. It could actually be good for you. Imagine that.

Pilates isn't new, just new to me. In fact, I've been actively ignoring the famous exercise routines devised by German immigrant Joseph Pilates for at least a decade. That being around the time celebrities started talk-show gushing about this revolutionary new pre-World War I body rejuvenation regimen. Which was pretty much all the reason I needed to avoid them.

That and how a club I visited had a Pilates table, a collection of straps and springs, sitting there like an S&M threat. But events do conspire. I'd be at the Coffee Cartel in Riviera Village with my writer friend Rebecca Forster and we'd be involved in our usual subject-free conversation while watching a steady flow of people heading up the outside stairs without ever once walking out to see where they were going.

Then Carole Maggio, who operates a lovely day spa across the way, asked if I had met Nancy Coleman, who runs the Shape Shift Pilates Studio above the Coffee Cartel at 1820 S. Catalina Ave. One thing led swiftly to another and there I was in the airy studio with its founder and owner.

Coleman, an early Pilates convert, is a blond, luminescent mom to a 12-year-old son, which might account for the soft-spoken but firm way she has of encouraging deadbeats who come in knowing absolutely nothing about this flexibility and strength building system that really is unlike any other. I am, of course, talking strictly about me, a guy who has dedicated his life to ruining his body with manly exercise.

A trained psychologist, Coleman wanted to first know about those injuries. So I told her about the elbow, hamstrings, back and I quit there because I was beginning to sound like the hypochondriac that I am. "I need to work around those," she explained.

Here's the weird thing. By working around that sore elbow she managed to improve it in an hour. But that's getting ahead of the story. Coleman is obviously someone who cares deeply. That's why she went into psychology, stopping short of clinical training because she wanted to help people -- you'd believe her if you heard her say it -- in what she calls a mind/body way.

So she studied massage in China and finally took a certification in Pilates back in the 1980s, setting up a Westside studio before establishing the South Bay's first studio in 1993. This was well before the fashionable took to using this unusual collection of machines with names like Gyrotonic, Wonder Chair and, my favorite, the inquisition-like Universal Reformer.

This isn't, I found, either pump-and-thump aerobics or lift and grunt weights. Fact is, lying on the bedlike reformer and pulling against springs or pushing against bars actually does work all the muscles missed in normal routines as advertised. Call them the underlying muscles, the muscles that we rarely use while pumping big muscle groups.

Pilates designed this for dancers. And the machines work the body in an unavoidably elegant dancer-like way, elongating and stretching while supplying sufficient push-back for a good strength workout. Only the one-hour routine warmed me up so well I went home and did another.

Fact is, I haven't felt so loose in years. And that's the point.

When Pilates brought his method to America in 1923, it became an immediate hit with Martha Graham and George Balanchine. The graceful bending -- a combination of animal movements and yoga -- still reflects the appeal the dance legends must have felt. But it's the overall improvement that drew Coleman, who saw that moving the body in these ways improves mental and physical health.

"It's an opening up," she said. "Move your body and your life will change." Only this system can be used by old wrecks probably because the man who devised it did so because he was a wreck himself.

So I had to get past the off-putting celebrity thing first. But you know that I wouldn't say any of this if it didn't make me feel so frighteningly good.

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