H
ave you ever wondered about the differences of yoga and pilates?
The two practices share many similarities including developing and honing a better mind, body, soul connection. They both are low impact and will build long, lean muscles with great core strength and mental focus.
Yoga is at least 5,000 years old with some experts thinking it’s closer to 10,000 years old. Dictionary.com offers two possible definitions of yoga. One is “a school of Hindu philosophy advocating and prescribing a course of physical and mental disciplines for attaining liberation from the material world and union of the self with the Supreme Being or ultimate principle.” And, the other says yoga is “any of the methods or disciplines prescribed, especially a series of postures and breathing exercises practiced to achieve control of the body and mind, tranquillity, etc.”
Pilates was developed in the 1920s by Joseph Pilates while he was in an internment camp during World War I. Dictionary.com defines it as “an exercise regimen that is typically performed on a floor mat or with the use of specialized apparatus (a reformer) and aims to improve flexibility and stability by strengthening the muscles and especially the torso-stabilizing muscles of the abdomen and lower back.”
Benefits of both include strength, flexibility, mind-body awareness, breathing techniques, stress reduction and improved mood.
The biggest difference seems to be that yoga has a large spiritual component while pilates does not.
Amanda Dilbeck with Yoga & Wellness of Blue Ridge said, “There are so many benefits of yoga. Some people come to it specifically to get fitness but when you really go into what yoga is about, and the eight limbs of yoga, and what it truly draws from, it’s a more in depth practice of learning yourself.”
The eight limbs refer to, according to Dilbeck, “being mindful and about how you interact with the world and about how you interact with yourself and the people around you.” She said, “Yoga stands for the union of the whole body of how we all interact in the world, it’s so much bigger than what people think it is.”
Dilbeck said when she meets herself on the mat she can let her stresses melt away, stepping away from life to focus on herself.”
Tess Nagel of Pulse Pilates, a gym that specializes in reformer pilates, said she loves pilates because it allows her to do life better. “A well designed and properly used reformer pilates machine is completely transformative to ones overall quality of life and ones ability to be able to smoothly and injury free enjoy all the fun things life has to offer,” she said. “The reformer is quite complex and has several different tension loaded springs, which deliver constant and consistent assistance or resistance at all times during each and every exercise we perform.”
Both yoga and pilates can offer great workouts, but, as you can see, for all their similarities, they’re also very different.
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Lauren Bearden is assistant editor at The News Observer. She can be reached at 706-632-2019 or by email at lauren@thenewsobserver.com.