You got about four minutes in.
The woman on the screen said to roll up through your spine, one vertebra at a time. Your body didn’t do it. Maybe nothing moved at all — maybe you got halfway and something low in your back sent up a flare and you came back down.
So you paused the video. Rolled the mat up. Stood it behind the bedroom door, where it has been ever since.
And you drew a conclusion, quietly, without saying it out loud. My core is gone.
I want to take that conclusion apart. The move that stopped you is the one move in that video you had good reason to leave out.
What Pilates is doing that other exercise isn’t
Pilates gets sold on flat stomachs, which is a shame, because that’s the least interesting thing it does.
The muscles it trains are the ones wrapped deep around your middle and low into your pelvis — the layer underneath the ones you can see. They don’t move you. They hold you steady while something else moves you. They fire a fraction of a second before you reach for the top s…