Pilates

They say there is nothing new under the sun, and when it comes to an exercise program that is often truer than ever. A fancy new name for an old practice is often all the rage. So well examine here the key similarities and important differences between the enormously popular Pilates and Yoga exercise disciplines. Hopefully by the end of the article youll be in a better place to know which discipline is more useful for you considering your individual tastes and needs.

Lets first examine Pilates. Deriving its name from Joseph Pilates, this modern exercise phenomenon has gained incredible popularity from initially an avid celebrity and professional dancer base to wider popular appeal in the last twenty years or so. Designed around the core strengthening priorities laid out by its founder, Pilates shares with Yoga a simple aesthetic with stretches and resistance training, focused on the elongation of the body form and an emphasis on flexibility and stamina. While it is perfectly possible to perform rigorous and more than pressing routines with nothing more than a mat and the will to be fit, Pilates is famous also for its use of the exercise ball and embracing resistance training. Pilates approves of the use of additional equipment in the pursuit of the most efficient exercise experience.

Yoga stems originally from ancient Hindu meditation practices and thus can trace a long history of 5,000 years. However it was introduced to America only relatively recently. Yoga found itself promoted in the late 1800s by Swami Vivekananda (the founder of the Vedanta Society ) as a way of helping the materialist society achieve spiritual wellbeing. For much of modern Yoga practice today however the spiritual aspects are not much of an issue, although staunch orthodox Hatha Yoga practitioners defy that Yoga can truly be practiced without accounting for the spiritual nature of the forms. Your average class though will simply teach you the exercise forms and ensure your practice is correct. Should you wish to practice Yoga in the more traditional sense nowadays you would have to make the serious pursuit of Yoga as a spiritual discipline part.

While it can be passionately argued that all exercise can be termed spiritual in the larger sense of enlarging our sense of our bodies in the world, Yoga does at the end of the day carry a far weightier spiritual connotation. For some though the notion of a spiritual practice that may not accord with their own spiritual choices or upbringing may make the pursuit of a Yoga lite approach to exercise. Such an approach seeks out the biomechanical benefits of the exercise without finding it necessary to embrace the more spiritual higher-consciousness awareness aspects of the Yoga discipline. To each their own, but for those who prefer their exercise dogma free, the more modern Pilates programs fill this role admirably.

Pilates |