12 Benefits of Pilates To Keep You Fit in 2024

Embarking on your fitness journey is possible with any range of exercise activities, including the increasingly popular Pilates. This mind-body exercise is perfect for a full-body workout, and while you’ve probably heard of Pilates, you might not know precisely what the exercise entails or how it can benefit your health. 

Partaking in Pilates is an exciting, relaxing, and essential experience that can completely transform your fitness routine. But what is Pilates, and what are the specific benefits of practicing Pilates to keep you fit? Read more to find out! 

What is Pilates? 

Created by Joseph Pilates in the 20th century, Pilates is an exercise technique that includes around 50 exercises designed to boost endurance and exercise your muscles.

While Pilates was primarily created as a type of injury recovery for dancers, it’s now known as a form of strength training that focuses on enhancing muscle tone rather than building muscles. 

Principles guiding Pilates exercises include using lower back muscles and the abdomen, controlled breathing, precise movements, and concentration with each movement the body makes. The exercise also improves posture, balance, and flexibility for a well-rounded workout to build a lean, strong frame.

Pilates can reduce the risk of injury during exercise and is an excellent workout to build a foundation for muscle-building. 

What are the Benefits of Pilates? 

Pilates can help you achieve your ideal fitness level. It is an amazing exercise to connect your mind and body and promote a healthier lifestyle. But what are the specific benefits of Pilates practice for your health? Below are 12 advantages of practicing Pilates to stay in shape.

1. Pilates Promotes Body Awareness 

One of the main reasons people love Pilates is its ability to promote a mind-body connection, enhancing body awareness and providing a workout that’s equally about body and mind fitness.

Pilates encourages you to listen to your body and work within what your body is capable of, and because Pilates focuses heavily on breath work, it also allows you to relieve your mind.

Pilates allows you to focus on bodily sensations and heightens your awareness of your emotions and any discomfort you feel. By practicing Pilates, you become in tune with your body and understand its unique needs, allowing you to stay healthy in everything you do.  

2. Pilates Improves Your Posture 

A healthy posture is crucial to any health journey, allowing you to keep your body in alignment and reduce back and shoulder pain. One of the many reasons Pilates is a great exercise for improving your overall well-being is its focus on posture.

Pilates aligns the full body, balancing opposing muscles and promoting a healthy range of motion at your joints. By focusing on aligning your body perfectly, Pilates targets core postural muscles that strengthen your posture and help you stand taller.

3. Pilates Improves Your Range of Motion 

Increasing flexibility and your range of motion is crucial to safe workouts. Beyond building a strong core, Pilates contributes to your health journey by improving your range of motion and engaging you in smooth activities that transition between precise, controlled movements.

Pilates typically involves a lot of stretching as part of relaxing and strengthening the body, and this stretching encourages increased flexibility.

Keeping a healthy range of motion is important for numerous reasons. Keeping your body flexible reduces the risk of injury during workouts and maintains mobility as you age – two things crucial to an overall healthy fitness journey.

4. Pilates Enhances Mental Health and Well-Being 

Pilates isn’t only valuable as a way of exercising your core muscles – it’s also crucial to keeping your mind healthy and maintaining positive mental health. 

Studies have found that regular Pilates sessions with a trained Pilates instructor have a positive impact on depression, anxiety, and overall quality of life. Pilates is a fantastic complement to your mental health journey, and because it promotes body awareness, the exercise helps you maintain mental balance and harmony.

5. Pilates Increases Your Balance 

A strong core is essential for nearly every part of healthy living, from posture to balance and coordination. Without a strong core, people are more prone to injury and imbalance.

People rely on balance for various activities that require coordination, including walking and reaching for objects – and by engaging in Pilates exercises, your balance naturally improves.

Beyond its core strengthening abilities, Pilates is crucial to improving balance because of its focus on whole-body alignment. It improves your coordination and spatial awareness, helping reduce the risk of accidents during and outside exercise.

6. Pilates Boosts Your Ability to Burn Fat 

While Pilates isn’t the fastest way to burn calories, it helps promote your body’s natural ability to burn fat.

Because Pilates focuses on toning your muscles, it can increase your body’s metabolic rate, improving its ability to burn calories while you rest. Pilates is one of the best exercises you can choose if your fitness goal is all about building a lean frame.

7. Pilates Helps With Pain Relief 

The controlled movements present in Pilates exercises are critical to helping you manage pain and relieving you of bodily pain resulting from exercise, injury, or chronic musculoskeletal issues. This exercise is essential for treating these conditions and reducing your pain levels to help you return to normal life faster.

Beyond its ability to help you recover from pain, Pilates helps establish a healthy tolerance and recoverability, allowing your body to recover faster in the future if you experience any injuries.

It’s the perfect exercise to improve your current health while addressing future health concerns that could occur without preventative measures.

8. Pilates Decreases Back Pain

One common reason why people experience severe back pain is an improper fitness level – those who aren’t physically fit have weaker back and stomach muscles that make it difficult for the body to support the spine.

Pilates is perfect to combat this issue because it focuses on abdominal muscles and the pelvic floor muscles, allowing you to strengthen your back and reduce frequent back pain.

Pilates doesn’t only protect you against experiencing back pain during workouts. The exercise also reduces pain during standard activities, like bending over or lifting heavy objects.

By practicing Pilates, you strengthen the core muscles, contributing to back soreness and helping you get rid of a painful back in no time.

9. Pilates Reduces Stress

Chronic stress has several negative impacts on your mind and body and can lead to numerous health concerns if not treated. If you’re experiencing high levels of stress, you need to try to combat this issue – and Pilates is one of the best ways to achieve your objective.

Engaging in Pilates workouts increases your levels of endorphins, providing a perfect, natural, stress-relieving solution. Because Pilates also focuses heavily on breath control, it gives you ample resources to reduce feelings of stress and treat symptoms of stress-related disorders.

Pilates is an incredible mood booster, giving you the resources to bounce back from feeling overwhelmed and take charge of your fitness.

10. Pilates Increases Your Energy 

Low energy levels make daily life a massive challenge and make you reluctant to engage in other fitness activities to stabilize your health. One of the lesser-known health benefits of Pilates is its ability to increase your energy levels, helping you remain motivated and on track with your fitness goals.

Pilates focuses heavily on breathing, improving respiratory capacity, and stimulating oxygen flow and blood circulation.

Because Pilates helps your body release endorphins, it contributes even more to your overall energy levels, providing a much-needed energy boost and helping you go through your day with high energy levels. 

11. Pilates Promotes a Strong Core

By now, you know that Pilates exercises are crucial to maintaining a strong core – but you might not know how Pilates strengthens the core. The primary focus of Pilates is building core strength beyond your abdominal muscles.

Along with these muscles, Pilates strengthens the core by targeting your stomach, back, sides, and hips, which is crucial to maintaining a strong core and a healthy lifestyle. 

Your core is one of the main components of your overall health and well-being, and exercising these groups of muscles is critical to reaping the full benefits of working out.

12. Pilates Helps With Other Exercises 

While Pilates is one of our favorite workouts, it doesn’t have to be the only exercise you participate in – in fact, engaging in Pilates exercises is one of the best ways to improve your other exercise routines!

Pilates focuses on controlled movement patterns and enhances your flexibility and range of motion, giving your body the strength and agility it needs to participate in other exercises.

Practicing Pilates improves your ability to engage in other exercises, including long-distance running and high-intensity workouts.

Pilates also contributes to other strength training exercises and helps you build a muscle foundation that makes weight-lifting workouts less strenuous, allowing you to pursue your fitness journey more with new exercises you can comfortably perform.

Enjoy a Pilates Class With Chicago Athletic Clubs 

The benefits of Pilates make this exercise one of the most important contributors to your overall health journey. With Chicago Athletic Clubs, you can partake in a private or group Pilates class that exercises your whole body to enhance your fitness levels!

Learn more about our Pilates class and become a member of Chicago Athletic Clubs today.