JOSEPH PILATES

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?

Americans! They want to go 600 miles an hour, and they don't know how to walk! Look at them in the street. Bent over. Coughing! Young men with gray faces! Why can't they look at the animals? Look at a cat. Look at any animal. The only animal that doesn't hold its stomach in is the pig.

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 is the first requisite of happiness. Our interpretation of physical fitness is the attainment and maintenance of a uniformly developed body with a sound mind fully capable of naturally, easily, and satisfactorily performing our many and varied daily tasks with spontaneous zest and pleasure.

I'm fifty years ahead of my time.

Contrology is not a system of haphazard exercises designed to produce only bulging muscles. ... Nor does Contrology err either by over-developed a few muscles at the expense of all others with resulting loss of grace and suppleness, or a sacrifice of the heart or lungs. Rather, it was conceived to limber and stretch muscles and ligaments so that your body will be as supple as that of a cat and not muscular like that of the body of a brewery-truck horse, or the muscle-bound body of the professional weight lifter you so much admire at the circus.

Above all, learn to breathe correctly.

Lazy breathing converts the lungs, literally and figuratively speaking, into a cemetery for the deposition of diseased, dying and dead germs as well as supplying an ideal haven for the multiplication of other harmful germs.

By all means never fail to get all the sunshine and fresh air you can.

True flexibility can be achieved only when all muscles are uniformly developed

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.

Normal muscles should function naturally in much the same manner as do the muscles of animals.

Never slouch as doing so compresses the lungs, overcrowds other vital organs, rounds the back, and throws you off balance.

Man should develop his physical condition simultaneously with that of his mind.

With body, mind, and spirit functioning perfectly as a coordinated whole, what else could reasonably be expected other than an active, alert, disciplined person?

Contrology is designed to give you suppleness, natural grace, and skill that will be unmistakably reflected in the way you walk, in the way you play, and in the way you work.

Moreover, such a body freed from nervous tension and over-fatigue is the ideal shelter provided by nature for housing a well-balanced mind that is always fully capable of successfully meeting all of the complex problems of modern living.

Ideally, our muscles should obey our will. Reasonably, our will should not be dominated by the reflex actions of our muscles.

Above all, learn how to breathe correctly.

You must squeeze every atom of impure air from lungs until they are almost as free of air as a vacuum.

Civilization impairs physical fitness.

Breathing is the first act of life, and the last.

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

Daily, from sunrise to sunset, the radio, newspapers and magazines broadcast to the world how to maintain health, how to regain health... the conflicting information, expressive of the different opinions of these various health authorities, has proved to be nothing less than confusion.

Time and progress are synonymous terms--nothing can stop either. Truth will prevail and that is why I know that my teachings will reach the masses and finally be adopted as universal.