Joseph Pilates Exercise Quotations

Before any real benefit can be derived from physical exercises, one must first learn how to breath properly. Our very life depends on it.

By exercising your stomach muscles, you wring out the body, you don't catch colds, you don't get cancer, you don't get hernias. Do animals get hernias? Do animals go on diets?

The man who uses intelligence with respect to his diet, his sleeping habits and who exercises properly, is beyond any question of doubt taking the very best preventive medicines provided so freely and abundantly by nature

Contrology is not a fatiguing system of dull, boring, abhorred exercises repeated daily "ad-nauseam." Neither does it demand you joining a gymnasium nor the purchasing of expensive apparatus. You may derive all the benefits of Contrology in your own home.

Concentrate on the correct movement each time you exercise, lest you do them improperly and thus lose all the vital benefits. Correctly executed and mastered to the point of subconscious reaction, these exercises will reflect grace and balance in your routine activities.

This is the equivalent of an “internal shower”. As the spring freshness born of the heavy rains and vast masses of melting snows on mountains in the hinterlands cause rivers to swell and rush turbulently onward to the sea, so too will your blood flow with renewed vigor as the direct result of your faithfully performing the Contrology exercises.

I must be right. Never an aspirin. Never injured a day in my life. The whole country, the whole world, should be doing my exercises. They'd be happier.

Concentrate on the correct movements each time you exercise, lest you do them improperly and thus lose all the vital benefits of their value.

Contrology (Pilates) is complete coordination of body, mind, and spirit. Through Contrology you first purposefully acquire complete control of your own body and then through proper repetition of its exercises you gradually and progressively acquire that natural rhythm and coordination associated with all your subconscious activities.

Physical fitness can neither be achieved by wishful thinking nor outright purchase.