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Episode 66: Dismantling Long and Lean Pt. 3
1.2k Plays7 months ago
Welcome to Episode 66 of the Movement Logic podcast! This episode is Part 3 of our Dismantling Long and Lean series. In this episode, Sarah and Laurel discuss the origins of Pilates, Barre, and yoga, and the connections between each movement method’s origins and the concept of a Pilates body, a Barre body, and a yoga body.
In this episode you will learn:
- The Pilates origin story, including its clear cut relationship to ballet and the ‘dancer body’
- The problematic origin of the dancer body in the 1960s in New York and its influence on Pilates and barre
- The Barre origin story and the Lotte Berk Method
- How Lotte Berk’s approach was sanitized for future iterations
- Whether the teacher and the teachings can be separated
- Laurel and Sarah’s experiences with the yoga body in their teacher trainings
- Some essential differences between the yoga body and the Pilates or Barre body
- What we can all do going forward to dismantle this patriarchal dominance over womens’ bodies
And more!
Sign up here to get on the Wait List for our next Bone Density Course in October 2024! It’s the only place you’ll get a discount on the course plus fun free bonus content along the way.
Reference Links:
Maintenance Phase: Pilates episode
1962 Sports Illustrated article
The Predatory Genius: what do we do when great artists are also moral monsters
Pilates Anytime: What is a Pilates body?
GX United: The down and dirty history of barre fitness
NY Times: From Shimmying to Standing on Your Head
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Movement Logic Podcast
00:00:02
Speaker
Welcome to the Movement Logic podcast with yoga teacher and strength coach Laurel Beaversdorf and physical therapist, Dr. Sarah Court. With over 30 years combined experience in the yoga, movement, and physical therapy worlds, we believe in strong opinions loosely held, which means we're not hyping outdated movement concepts. Instead, we're here with up-to-date and cutting-edge tools, evidence, and ideas to help you as a mover and a teacher.
Origins of 'Long and Lean' Concept
00:00:38
Speaker
Welcome to The Movement Logic Podcast. I'm Dr. Sarah Kort and I am here with my co-host Laurel Beaversdorf. What's up everybody? Today's episode is part three of our three-parter called Dismantling Long and Lean. In part one, we looked at the historical beginnings of the concept of being long and lean and how
00:00:58
Speaker
During different time periods, there were different amounts of value placed on different silhouettes based on the trends of the time. In part two, we discussed the racist and eugenic background of long and lean, the science behind body composition, and if anyone can just exercise their way into a long and lean body. Spoiler alert.
00:01:18
Speaker
They can't. Okay, so today we're going to delve a little deeper into the worlds of Pilates, Barr, and Yoga to find out how and why each methodology values long and lean. We'll discuss the origin story for Pilates, including the man himself, who is that to say he's like mildly problematic compared to some other cult-like figures in the movement world, which honestly isn't is not saying very much.
00:01:45
Speaker
We'll talk about how, when, and where Barr developed and what its major influences were, including one aspect of its history that I was completely unaware of until I started researching for this episode. And we'll get into yoga and the yoga body and how the Westernization of the yoga practice took what was, in essence, an outcome of a spiritual discipline and turned it into an aesthetic goal.
Success of Bone Density Course
00:02:10
Speaker
But before we get into it,
00:02:11
Speaker
We're going to talk about our bone density course because it was a smash hit. I would say it was a blockbuster. It went really, really well is what I'm trying to say. It was a bone builder. It literally was a bone builder. It was a bone builder hit. We got a lot of incredible testimony from people without asking for it, which to my mind is also a sign of a bone building hit.
00:02:34
Speaker
And Laurel, I was wondering, do you have any of these testimonials at hand? You could read one of them maybe? Oh, yeah. There's one right here in the Google document. Don't give it away.
00:02:46
Speaker
Okay, so this one's from Francesca in Vernizzi, I think is how you say her name, but I'm not sure I might not be saying that correctly. Francesca wrote, though I am progressing a bit slower than I planned, I was already able to see and measure considerable gains in strength in the first three to four months.
00:03:07
Speaker
The program gave me the opportunity to create a routine for strength training at home, which makes it possible for me to stick to it despite the challenges of daily life. Even more importantly, together with your podcast, it is helping me reconsider my relation to my body and accepting the idea of putting on a couple of kilograms as long as it comes from muscle.
00:03:31
Speaker
and a healthy fat ratio. The big aha moment occurred last week while I was listening to the dismantling long and lean episode driving my car. Looking forward to listening to part two.
Measuring Strength Gains
00:03:42
Speaker
Amazing. I love that she says, I was able to see and measure considerable gains in strength
00:03:50
Speaker
My brain loves the fact that I can measure my strength. I've had a long history of athletics and then yoga, obviously. Athletics are measurable. You can measure athletic performance, but it's not as clear cut as to how to improve athletic performance in my mind as it is clear cut as to how to build strength.
00:04:13
Speaker
And yoga obviously transformed my life in profound ways, but ways that were kind of hard to measure. So like strength also did these things, right? It probably has made me a better athlete and also...
00:04:26
Speaker
has transformed my life in profound ways, but I literally can measure how much stronger I am week to week, month to month. And I freaking love that. I find it very motivating. So I love that she pointed that part out. One of the things, as you're saying, with strength training is it's measurable in the sense of a month ago, I deadlifted this amount. Now I'm deadlifting this bigger amount. Therefore, I can tell that I'm stronger because I'm getting proof of it in the amount of weight I can pick up, right? That's right.
00:04:52
Speaker
It's not vague. It's not like, oh, I kind of think I feel better. I sort of feel stronger. No, you have actual proof. And Francesca was not the only participant. I think pretty much everybody got gains in their strength in terms of what they could lift.
00:05:05
Speaker
and also saw other measurable factors even in just sort of day-to-day activities like carrying groceries up the stairs or navigating other parts of your daily life where it was noticeably improved for a lot of people.
Inclusivity in Strength Training
00:05:18
Speaker
We loved this course so much. It was so much fun to teach. It was so much fun to see and work with all these incredible women and help them and observe them going through all kinds of challenges that sprung up that nevertheless didn't stop them from continuing with the program.
00:05:34
Speaker
I was just so blown away and humbled by so many of these women and how hard they worked. And I just want to say as well, our course is for anyone for whom the patriarchy has made it challenging or impossible to get into lifting heavy weights, to visualize yourself as someone who lifts heavy.
00:05:52
Speaker
to manage a gym or on some other area in which you might feel not welcomed. And so that includes anyone, man, woman, gender non-conforming, non-binary. We're here for all of you because we're here to support anyone who has had difficulty in the past and really does want to get stronger and get working with barbells. If you want to get stronger, like really stronger, like noticeably
00:06:17
Speaker
measurably stronger and you want to set the foundation for healthy bones and perhaps even improve your own bone density, you're going to want to take this course. And we are doing it again, which is good news for you, starting in October of this year, 2024. So we have a wait list.
00:06:36
Speaker
And the waitlist is the only way to get a discount on the 2024 course. There's literally no other way. If you think you might be interested in this course, but you're also saying to yourself, well, October feels like a long way away. In my opinion, you should sign up because we're also giving away all kinds of fun freebies to the waitlist as we get closer to October. So for example, one of the things we're giving is
00:07:01
Speaker
the injury decision tree guideline that I made to go along with the episode on how to exercise when you're injured. So there's all kinds of good stuff like that coming your way for free just for signing up for the list. And then if you want to take the course, you also then have access to the only discount out there. So I don't know, it seems like a non-brainer, no-brainer. It seems like a non-brainer to me. A non-brainer. It's so non-brainer that my brain cannot brain. Let's get into it.
Joseph Pilates' Influence and Philosophy
00:07:29
Speaker
I want to start with Pilates because I think a lot of people who teach Pilates have a good sense of the background and history, but if you're not a teacher, if you're just a practitioner, there's quite a bit to unpack. Laurel, what has your personal experience been with Pilates? Have you done much of it? What was your impression of it? Did you like it? Why or why not?
00:07:48
Speaker
I would say I'm definitely someone who does not have a good sense of Pilates in terms of its history. I have not done a lot of Pilates. I've done a couple of Matt Pilates classes I took from a teacher in New York City who was actually very non-traditional. It was not classical Pilates, classical Matt Pilates.
00:08:04
Speaker
And I liked it. I liked that class a lot. I often would leave feeling better than I would feel after some yoga classes, mostly because we did very different stuff in there. And then I took one reformer teacher training. Oh, right. Right. I forgot about that. Without ever having been on a reformer because it was Trina Altman's training. And I was actually hosting her, like helping to build her workshop in New York City as like a liaison.
00:08:31
Speaker
And so as a result, I got free entry into, or 50% off. I don't remember what it was, but I got a special deal to take the training and loved it, but have never been on a reformer since. I was actually wondering, and this might be an ignorant question, but in New York, in LA, you can't go five yards without tripping over a Pilates studio.
00:08:58
Speaker
Do you find that to be the same in Huntsville? To be honest, I've been here for two and a half years and I've been somewhat of a hermit. I do leave my house to go to certain places, but I have not been a very exploratory citizen of Huntsville. I have not wandered around looking for things like Pilates Studios. I do know there's Pilates here. This is a pretty affluent city and I feel like Pilates caters to a more affluent population, especially at the reformer Pilates.
00:09:26
Speaker
I imagine there's quite a few reformers in this city. I don't even think I can recall seeing a Pilates studio anywhere though, but I'm just driving around. I'm not really necessarily looking for them. They're here though. I'm sure. Your point about the affluence of your town is we're going to put a pin in that because that's a very important detail that we're going to get to. Cool.
00:09:44
Speaker
So as part of my research on the background of Pilates, I listened to a great episode of Maintenance Phase, which is a podcast that I love. I'm gonna link to it in the show notes. And in that episode, they discussed the entire origin story of the man, the myth, Joseph Pilates. One of the funniest things about that episode to me was that Michael didn't know the name Pilates, that it was a person, that it was based on somebody's name. So Aubrey's like, well, did you know that Pilates is a man? And immediately Michael goes, oh, Bob Pilates?
00:10:13
Speaker
And then I just walked around for a week being like Bob Pilates and laughing to myself. And he also said, I always think of it as Pontius Pilates, which is a really good joke for all you New Testament fans out there. If you love the Bible, Pontius Pilates. Okay, so if you too did not know Pilates is named for its sole creator, Joseph Pilates. And I want to talk about his background and his upbringing because it absolutely plays into how
00:10:38
Speaker
Long and Lean became the default Pilates aesthetic, despite some more current attempts to make it more inclusive. So Joseph Pilates was born in 1883 in Germany. His mother was a naturopath and his dad was a gymnast. And as a child, he wasn't especially like hearty and healthy. He had asthma, he had rickets, which I had to look up because I'm like, what the hell is rickets? It's a bone weakness that is due to a vitamin D deficiency. He also had rheumatic fever, which is an inflammatory disease that can happen
00:11:08
Speaker
after you have either scarlet fever or strep. So his father introduced him to this more physical world boxing, bodybuilding, gymnastics, jujitsu, and that kind of built Joseph into a stronger body and gave him relief from a lot of these things that he was suffering from. So he continues to pursue gymnastics, bodybuilding. In 1912, he moves to England and he starts working sort of a variety of jobs. He is boxing, he performs in the circus, doing all kinds of contortionist things.
00:11:35
Speaker
that whole like, when you pose as a statue and you don't move. And then two years later, in July of 1914, World War I breaks out. Immediately following it, Britain passes something called the Aliens Restrictions Act, which they could use to intern anyone that they suspected of espionage or thought might be a threat to security. And so I did not know this. In World War I, Britain interned 116,000 people over five years, including 57,000 German people who were living there at the time.
00:12:05
Speaker
Wow, that's amazing. Yeah. So Joseph Pilates, I mean, he's German. He's a traveling circus performer. He's not married to anyone. His English isn't great. So he's immediately suspicious. And so he gets sent to knock a low internment camp, which is on the Isle of Man. And Isle of Man is this tiny little island that is actually between England and Ireland. There are something like 23,000
00:12:33
Speaker
prisoners of war in this one camp. And so you can imagine there's a lot of trauma, there's mental illness, there's ill health, there's all kinds of, you know, terrible things that crop up over the five years that people are there. And so this is where
00:12:46
Speaker
the exercise format that we have come to know as Pilates is born. Laurel, did you know this? Not even a small amount of this. The sort of famous thing about the reformer is that the springs of the reformer were taken from hospital beds. So I had heard that he was working with people in hospital beds, which he was, he was working with a lot of people in the infirmary in the camp.
00:13:09
Speaker
But at no point had I heard that it was because he was a prisoner of war and he had been interned in this camp. And so Pilates says that nobody had enough food. Everyone was like starving and weak. And he saw these feral cats that were kind of wandering around the camp who also didn't have enough food and were starving, but they still managed to stretch and move around and maintain their limber bodies. And so that was part of his inspiration. And it immediately made me think,
00:13:39
Speaker
about Kelly Starrett's book, Becoming a Supple Leopard. This idea that we should all be able to move like cats. I don't know about you, but when I fall out of a tree, I do not always land on all fours. I'm more like a piece of toast. I land butter side down. How many trees have you fallen out of, Sarah? Not many, but I'm pretty sure that the next one, I absolutely will not land on all fours. I can visualize myself going in a fetal position and just landing really hard on my back and sorting it out later. Don't do that. Don't do that.
00:14:08
Speaker
Okay, so originally Pilates was calling this method contrology. So his definition of what these exercises were supposed to do is that they were going to reestablish the mind-body connection. And it was really about where is your mind when you're practicing these exercises. There was a big emphasis on breathing techniques, on focus, on attention, on control, as you would imagine from a method called contrology.
00:14:35
Speaker
So he would lead large groups of these internees in the internment camp in exercises. And then he
Critique of Pilates' Methods and Legacy
00:14:41
Speaker
also focused, like I said, on the people in the infirmary. They had better beds than the people did in the regular rest of the camp, and their beds had springs. And so he would take the springs off and use them for resistance, right? And this is the sort of famous origin story of the reformer. So after the war, he moved back to Germany. He started training boxers.
00:14:59
Speaker
He got married, and this was actually his second marriage. There had been a first brief marriage when he was originally in Germany, but the woman passed away. I don't know why. And this was when he first started filing patents for his exercise equipment. He patented 26 devices over the course of his lifetime.
00:15:16
Speaker
including most of the Pilates equipment that is used today, things like the reformer, the wonder chair, the magic circle. So in 1926, he emigrates to the US and on the boat, on the way over, he meets a woman named Clara Zunner, who he marries. Did he divorce his prior wife? Not clear. Anyway, he gets to New York. He may have, I'm not trying to like... So this is his third wife? At this point, yes, third wife. Okay. Yeah.
00:15:43
Speaker
So he opens his first studio in Midtown Manhattan near all of the ballet studios that are there. And so contrology very quickly gets a following among ballet dancers who want to reduce their injury recovery time and improve their performance. And so then next come the actors, right? The celebrities start to show up. They get wind of this exercise format. And so Laurence Olivier and Lauren Bacall and Katherine Hepburn and others
00:16:11
Speaker
And there are also other local devotees who are not celebrities and who are not dancers, but they just really love this work. And they eventually become sort of the second tier of teachers. Sometimes they're referred to as the Pilates elders. If you were going to go take class with Joseph Pilates in 1962, it would cost $5. And I looked up online one of those inflation calculators.
00:16:36
Speaker
in today's money, that would be $51. Oh, wow. Right. So that's expensive. I mean, that's, that's actually probably more expensive than taking a, I think a reformer class nowadays is like 30 or 40 bucks, something like that. And this is a group class, like to go to a group class. Yes. Go to a group class.
00:16:52
Speaker
Okay. So this is not for the people. You know, Tuesdays at 12, $51. There is an elitism that Pilates is known for and it's kind of built in from the beginning because if you pour, you cannot afford Pilates. There's just no way. I got a question. He's using the reformer. It's a mixture. He's got exercises that are on the mat and he's got exercises that are on various pieces of equipment. There's other equipment that he's built at this point as well.
00:17:16
Speaker
Yeah, because my understanding of why Pilates costs more, I mean it costs more at the studio I worked at in New York as well, is because there's only so many reformers and that's really expensive equipment. And so part of what you're paying for when you pay the Pilates entry fee is you're paying to use one of the few reformers. It's like supply and demand, like there's not a lot of supply.
00:17:35
Speaker
Right. You can only fit maybe six people, eight people in your class versus a group yoga class where you could fit maybe 30 people in the room. You don't take up as much space. And no overhead is much lower because you don't have this really expensive equipment. Right, equipment to upkeep and all that kind of stuff. While I was researching this, I saw this post on Facebook that was trying to take down the notion that Pilates was elitist because, as we know, Joseph Pilates started working with the infirm in the internment camp.
00:18:01
Speaker
So, he was a good guy, you know? And I came very close to jumping in and saying, yes, but then he charged $5 a class in 1962, which is $51 in today's money. But I didn't because I, you know, generally the good idea is to move on and not get involved in conversations like that. It's a fallacious argument. You can be elite and also have humble origins, right? Right. These two things can be true at the same time. Okay, so what is he preaching, right? What is he talking about? What does he want people to get out of his contralogy classes? So, I found a quote,
00:18:30
Speaker
from one of his books that is really sort of focused on your physical appearance. Laurel, could you please read this and then tell us your thoughts about it? Contrology is not a system of haphazard exercises designed to produce only bulging muscles, nor does contrology air either by over-developing a few muscles at the expense of all others with resulting loss of grace and suppleness or a sacrifice of the heart or lungs.
00:18:58
Speaker
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.
00:19:13
Speaker
or the muscle bound body of the professional weight lifter, you so much admire at the circus. My goodness. Okay, so what do I think about this? Yeah. When I read it, I read it with my personal trainer hat on with my I've done a fair amount of learning and studying of like strength and body composition and movement.
00:19:35
Speaker
I go, there's a couple of fallacious statements here. There are a couple of ways in which he's certainly taking a position on aesthetics that we see. We see still today in various formats like Pilates where there's this aversion to muscle mass, there's aversion to bulky muscles, there's aversion to muscularity.
00:19:57
Speaker
Uh, especially that of a brewery truck horse. I mean, God, God forbid you want to be some animals, but not all animals. And the one you certainly don't want to be is a brewery truck horse. A weight lifter. That is also a circus performer. Yes. Which weirdly is what he was. But so he's kind of straight up saying that doing contrology and contrology is what became Pilates later on.
00:20:18
Speaker
So he says that doing contralogy will give you a supple body, not an overly muscular body, which is not the body you want. I also find his saying overdeveloped muscles in some way put your heart and lungs at risk. I have sort of an answer to this. I mean, it's not a real answer. It's his answer, which for some reason, and it's unclear why, he was really against any sort of cardiovascular exercise. He thought it put too much strain on your body. So running or playing a sport where there's running like baseball or basketball or all these kinds of things, he thought were really bad for you and you shouldn't do them.
00:20:48
Speaker
I mean, it's definitely what sounds like a very antiquated, dated perspective, but it's interesting to hear how these ideas are still present today, but worded differently. I mean, another famous quote from him was talking about contrology. He said, you will feel better in 10 sessions, you will look better in 20 sessions, and have a completely new body in 30 sessions.
00:21:15
Speaker
Okay, that's a promise. Woo, marketing. I mean, that's what people really want to hear that there is this very defined end result that they're going to get from their investment. And it's something along the lines of looking great. That's a great way to market movement. In my opinion, this really directly connects Joe to the long and lean concept. It's not a stretch to see that in the beginnings of this method,
00:21:39
Speaker
Even though there are a fair number of people nowadays who would argue that the body shape is a byproduct and the goals of Pilates are not as external, it just makes me think of those TV shows where there's the wall with the pictures of people and the red string connecting all these things. I just see Joseph Pilates and then one string and then long and lean. It's not a complicated path. You don't have to look far to find the immediate connection to the aesthetic in the beginnings of the methodology.
00:22:08
Speaker
Yeah, but you can also see a red string connecting Joseph Pilates to rehabilitation with his work, with the people in the internment camp. And then what might not be as apparent until you learn the history of Joseph Pilates is this through line of probably a significant amount of personal trauma. And I wonder how that plays into
00:22:28
Speaker
some of the problematic aspects of this person. This is actually the point where I want to talk about how he's mildly problematic. It could be a lot worse, right? But essentially, he would run his classes wearing like little tiny shorts, like a, you know, sort of like speedo-esque, maybe a little bit bigger than that. Sometimes with a shirt, sometimes without. He would drink alcohol and he would smoke cigars all day.
00:22:57
Speaker
during class. The studio was covered in pictures and sculptures of him either totally naked or partially naked. He had a bad temper and he was mean to his students. He would throw them out of his class if they frustrated him. He just had a really generally dim view of Americans. There's a great article by Robert Wernick in Sports Illustrated from 1962 and all of these articles that I reference are in the show notes.
00:23:20
Speaker
Wernick says the first time he went to the class, he had to change into some similar little black shorts and have Joseph Pilate assess his body. And this is what Joseph Pilate said. 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. I mean, this cat theme just really keeps coming up. Anyway, look at a cat. Look at any animal. The only animal that doesn't hold its stomach in is the pig.
00:23:50
Speaker
Look at them all out on the sidewalk now, like pigs. Oh, it gets better. Laurel is making a WTF face at me right now, but there's more. Wait, just a minute. 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?
00:24:12
Speaker
Eat what you want. Drink what you want. I drink a quart of liquor a day, plus some beers, and smoke maybe 15 cigars. And what do Americans do? What do Americans do? They play golf. They play baseball. They use half of their muscles, a quarter of their muscles. They get fat. They go jogging. They go on crazy diets. They jump up and down in crazy exercises. They have bad backs. They have beer bellies. They slouch. They complain. They have hernias. I'm sure he cited all of this with research, right? Scientific research.
00:24:41
Speaker
I mean, if you're not getting it, the overall story from Pilates is that Americans are lazy and weak-willed. They cannot control their bodies and their minds. It's a moral failing, right? You're not disciplined enough as an American. This is reminding me of just like classic demagoguery, you know, where you're like, you have a huge problem. I'm going to point it out for you.
00:25:05
Speaker
I'm going to offer up my method as the single solution for it. Therefore, you need me. I'm the only person that can help you, or my way is the only way to help you. And then just the randomness of the litany of problems. I heard he has some cancer. They're bent over. They're coughing. They jump up and down. They play baseball. They have bad backs and beer bellies. Even though they don't drink a quarter liquor a day like me, they slouch.
00:25:34
Speaker
They are like pigs with their bellies not sucked in. My cat is right next to me on my desk right now. His belly is not sucked in folks. Yeah, I think even cats relax sometimes. He's still really supple though.
00:25:52
Speaker
Oh boy. Yeah. So that's the vibe. If you're going to go take class with Joe Pilates, that's what it's going to be like. And it does remind me of some famous and maybe not so famous yoga teachers. It reminds me of some of the claims in Iyengar's book, Light on Yoga, where he talks about the different yoga poses in the back and what they are good for, right? That they're going to feel infertility and things like that.
00:26:17
Speaker
Oh, yeah. Just massively unsubstantiated claims. They're totally made up. The thing is that everything that Joseph Pilates has just said, he may have observed, right? He may have made an observation about his environment and the people in it and gone. Based on my observation, this is what I see.
00:26:34
Speaker
But all of this is from his perspective and his perspective alone, and then he draws conclusions about what he's seen that are just totally made up,
Comparison with Iyengar Yoga and Pilates Mainstreaming
00:26:41
Speaker
right? And same thing with Iyengar. It's totally made up. Absolutely. I mean, Iyengar, it's things like, you know, barkanasana will help with infertility. Why? Because you're sitting with your legs opened? It's sort of like...
00:26:52
Speaker
How are you making that connection? And so it is, again, just just really sort of invented, you know, I think he also would really appeal. I mean, to me, it's not surprising that dancers flocked to him because the dancer and ballet teacher relationship is very much also like that. It's a very like, you're gross and disgusting before you even
00:27:11
Speaker
do anything. You need to do better. You need to work harder. It's not a relationship of respect. It is a dominance and a power relationship. My ballet teacher in college, I took one or two semesters of ballet. I was the run to the litter. Let's just put it that way. My ballet teacher was so well-loved though because she was the opposite of what you're describing. She was a very unique
00:27:35
Speaker
teacher for this reason, which is that she never said anything degrading or mean or negative about anyone's body ever. She only ever... And these are BFA musical... I was a BFA actor, but the musical theater and dance majors were in there and they're going to theoretically have a profession in dance. And so there is a level of
00:27:58
Speaker
seriousness that they're probably taking this class more so than like me because I didn't plan to like be a dancer of any kind. I just had to take it for credit. But she would compliment people's bodies. Like she came over to me once I was really struggling. This is this is like before I really did yoga and I was very inflexible. I like done
00:28:14
Speaker
years of basketball and volleyball and things like that, but never really stretched and wasn't flexible. And she's like, you have the most beautiful feet. Look at those arches. And I mean, I still remember that today. I was like, this belly, I'm so bad at this. But this belly teacher, who's like, amazing, thinks I have beautiful feet. Wow. That's so cool. I was so thrilled. Yeah, she was she was a an exception though. Yes.
00:28:39
Speaker
All of my classmates were like, Eugenia is so wonderful because they'd had teachers in their past that were awful, terrible to them, just mean, abusive. Yes. And we're actually going to see a bit more of that coming up when we look at
00:28:55
Speaker
this sort of relationship of the Pilates body and the dancer's body, right?
Influence of George Balanchine on Pilates
00:28:59
Speaker
If we go back to Joseph Pilates and his wild claims, he's still running the studio. He runs a studio in New York City for 40 years. And then in 1967, he dies at the age of 83 of emphysema.
00:29:10
Speaker
which feels unsurprising considering the cigars. So his wife Clara then takes over the studio and runs it until 1977 when she passes away. That original studio eventually closes, but his teachers, his elders then go on to sort of spread the message. But Pilates doesn't really go mainstream, mainstream until after
00:29:30
Speaker
the 80s aerobics craze. And it emerges as a kind of counterpoint, a more focused and gentle form of exercise, instead of, like, people, in Joseph's words, bouncing around, jumping around like crazy, right? So, as it becomes more popular, then we see the celebrities who start talking about doing it. And it's people like Madonna and Jennifer Aniston and Uma Thurman and Gwyneth Paltrow and in maintenance phase.
00:29:59
Speaker
Michael calls this the willowy white wealthy women. Willowy white wealthy women. Yeah, that's a good one. I love that alliteration. And so Pilates is one of these movement modalities that is cyclical in its popularity, in particular in the media, like when the media is looking for like, what's the newest hottest thing that everyone's doing. So there was a yoga boom in the late 1990s, early 2000s, there was a CrossFit boom in sort of the mid 2000s, there was a SoulCycle peloton in the 2010s,
00:30:28
Speaker
Now, a bunch of people are doing pickleball. I don't know where that came from. But anyway, humans like new things, right? We're bored easily. And unless you're really a devotee of a particular modality, we tend to get excited about the newest latest thing and drop the previous thing. It's another exercise format that also has no conclusive evidence that it is superior to other types of exercise.
00:30:50
Speaker
Right. Often the people who are really devoted say like, no, it's because it's better than this and it has everything you need. And that's just not ever been proven to be true in research. Okay. So if we talk about like, what is a Pilates body? A Pilates body is it's what we think of as a dancer's body, right? Some muscle, but not too much muscle, some tone, which just kind of means decreased body fat so that the muscles are more apparent, but again, not too muscley. But where did this image of a dancer's body come from? Because if you actually take a look
00:31:19
Speaker
at a lot of dancers, and in particular, ballerinas, they will have very defined leg muscles, in particular, very defined calf muscles from being on point. They're probably, in a lot of ways, a lot more muscular or even bulky than this image that we have of a dancer's body that's being sold to us is.
00:31:37
Speaker
I remember doing a show once with a ballet dancer and I was like, damn, I wish I had calves like that. She was like, pow pow. Yeah. So then where does this idea of a dancer's body come from? Well, I have an answer for you. So what we think of as the dancer's body comes from a famous ballet choreographer in the 1960s named George Balanchine. He's considered the father of American ballet
00:32:01
Speaker
He co-founded the New York City Ballet and was its artistic director for 35 years. Some would say he was the greatest ever American ballet choreographer. And so Balanchine favors thin willowy women for his ballets. And he's also changed the costuming for ballerinas. Previously, it was like a lot of bulky tutus. He stripped down the costumes so that the movements are more clearly seen. Dancers are wearing things like leggings and leotards, and you can see their entire body. And so this shape, this
00:32:30
Speaker
thin willowy shape, the long and lean, becomes the de facto body shape for all dancers going forwards. Okay, so what do we know about Balanchine? Well, when I was researching him, I didn't have to dig very much before I found an article entitled, The Predatory Genius. What do we do when great artists are also moral monsters by Terry Teachout? Yeah, exactly. I read that and I went, oh shit, here we go. Here's what Teachout says in general about the choreographer-dancer relationship.
00:32:58
Speaker
Most of the dance companies of the modern era were founded and led by charismatic choreographers, more often than not men, who controlled all decisions related to the hiring and promotion of their dancers. The more accomplished the choreographer, the more absolute his power, and the greater the desire of ambitious young dancers to work with him. The leader of a dance company spends most of his time with attractive young people who are in no position to reject his advances
00:33:22
Speaker
should he feel inclined to make them. Not surprisingly, it is far from unusual for choreographer leaders to become sexually involved with their dancer employees. The existence of such liaisons is taken for granted, as is the notion that choreographers will seek inspiration by
00:33:37
Speaker
falling in love with quote-unquote muses whose dancing moves them, changing partners as newer dancers stimulate their waning creative impulses. Laurel, does this power dynamic remind you of anything? Oh, boy, does it. Yeah. It's just the same story applied to a different context, isn't it? Yep.
00:34:03
Speaker
At a certain point, it's just like, oh, of course this is what happens. Of course, it's always the same freaking story, not to be too pessimistic. But I'm reminded again of how important I feel like these conversations are, where we don't forget the history, the past, that a lot of these modern day physical formats that we're still engaged in come from.
00:34:24
Speaker
Yeah. Right. And a lot of times that past is really ugly and sad and devoid of justice for the victims. Right. Right. The victims have been erased. And what's left is the legacy of the abuser and everyone's celebrating it uncritically. And it reminds me also of the sort of cult dynamic of changing favorites. Right. So that then
00:34:43
Speaker
you get people kind of fighting each other for your attention, right? You set up this dynamic where your power, you're under control of this person's career, whether or not they get time on stage, whether he casts you in his ballet, right? It's different in that way from yoga, actually.
00:34:59
Speaker
for yoga, that's my primary movement format that I'm familiar with. And so what's different though, about this is that you're right, he's a boss, right? Whereas like a yoga teacher, unless you want to be a yoga teacher, a lot of my yoga teachers were actually kind of my bosses, because they were senior teachers that had say in like, whether or not I was promoted in various ways, or given certain trainings, but and none of them were abusive, by the way, like, it's not the same thing with like a regular yoga student going to a yoga teacher's class and getting abused, the control in
00:35:25
Speaker
this context is extending into professional upward mobility, right? Yeah. So what I ultimately learned from reading this article was that Balanchine was a massive womanizer. He married and divorced four times.
00:35:39
Speaker
He took it for granted in his earlier years that his prima ballerina, and the prima ballerina is the most coveted spot. It guarantees that you're going to be dancing the lead roles of the ballet. So he took it for granted that she would also become his lover and that he would marry her once she turned 21. However, of course, the older he got, the less appealing this was to the dancers, and they began to reject him. This is again from Teach Out's piece.
00:36:07
Speaker
It became Balanchine's informal policy to discourage his female dancers, not just the ones whose favors he coveted, from marrying. He gave his preferred ballerinas different kinds of perfume so he would know whenever they were in or out of the theater. One of them, Melissa Hayden, later recalled that he started touching her and other dancers in rehearsal
00:36:28
Speaker
in ways that were unrelated to the work at hand. And while he was too serious about his work to maintain a Hollywood type casting couch policy, he started taking roles away from dancers who refused to let him manage their private lives. So Laurel, do you want to comment on how historically women have had to just manage men like this in order to A, not be completely taken advantage of, but also B, not lose their jobs. It's like we all sort of
00:36:56
Speaker
have a doctorate in how to do this? And also, do we think this type of behavior would be acceptable today?
00:37:04
Speaker
I'm just like flashing before my eyes are all the memories I have of being sexually arrested in the workplace. Yeah. Oh my God. And the way I would manage it, which would often be to just like, well, on one hand, I'll pretend that didn't happen and on the other hand, I'm going to call it out. It was going to be a bad outcome for me either way. It's like a trap, right? You know, I could ignore it and then it would keep happening or I could call it out and be fired. Right. Two bad choices.
Pilates and Dance Body Ideal
00:37:28
Speaker
Yeah, so Balanchine is not obviously looking for an equal. He's looking for something to treat as an idol, a muse, a thing of beauty, an object that he can mold to his work. And I flashed on the movie Dazed and Confused. I don't know if you're familiar with that movie, but Matthew McConaughey plays an older man.
00:37:44
Speaker
who's still dating high school girls, and it's from the 1970s, and his line famously is, I keep getting older, they stay the same age. Oh, yuck. Which is gross. So, okay, even though unsurprisingly, Balanchine turns out to be at the very best a chauvinist pig and at worst a predator, this is not really well known until he gets to be older and a bit more famous. Early on, he gets away with a lot of bad behavior because, you know, the art is what matters.
00:38:11
Speaker
And we see this all the time where it's like, do we criticize the work separately from the person? Separating the teacher from the teachings. Right. So he defines this concept of a dancer's body. So we have the ballerinas of New York City in the 1950s and the 1960s flocking to Pilates because it helps them to rehab from injuries.
00:38:29
Speaker
And we also have wealthy people who can afford the equivalent of a $51 class multiple times a week. And we have Joe himself talking about having a limber and supple body that isn't too muscly. And we have here the birth of the Pilates body. And in the most recent repopularization of Pilates by the celebrities, the quite willowy women who all had the Pilates body, I would say there really wasn't too much pushback against this idea.
00:38:56
Speaker
That in thirty sessions you'll have a brand new body until maybe maybe the past ten years i'm not so deep in the plot is world so that may be inaccurate but as an outside observer that's kind of what i've been seeing the push back feels like it's relatively recent within the last decade.
00:39:10
Speaker
In 2020, in Pilates Anytime, Roxy Menzies writes a great article called, What is a Pilates Body? Link in show notes. And it discusses the slow pushback within the industry against the term and concept. She writes, under the umbrella of this perceived Pilates body lies not only a society outside of the industry that promotes discrimination and self-loathing under the guise of optimal health, but much, much more. It's not as simple as fat versus thin.
00:39:37
Speaker
It's about gender inclusivity, sizeism, the hierarchy of Pilates lineage, ableism, harassment, trauma, fatphobia, and mental health. The Pilates industry's top players continue to feed into this unrealistic ideal and are slow to open up to inclusive
00:39:53
Speaker
to inclusivity and change. The Pilates industry is historically known as exclusive with a reputation of elitism, which still remains today. As a majority, we are still creating barriers that exclude, promote shame, anxiety, trauma, and unhealthy behaviors. Laurel, do you have any last thoughts on Pilates before I start talking about the history of
Evolution of the Lotte Berk Method
00:40:14
Speaker
Barr? Only that so much of the origins of Pilates are
00:40:20
Speaker
reminding me of the origins of Iyengar yoga. I feel that there's an interesting parallel between the life, the history of Joseph Pilates and the life, the history of BKS Iyengar. We're going to talk about that. Okay, so now we're going to switch and talk about bar. Laurel, have you ever gone to a bar class? I feel like I already know the answer and it's no. Yes, I have. But I think it was called something else. Okay. But it was bar. Because I actually like hooked a bar into the wall.
00:40:50
Speaker
And there was a little ball, and my ass hurt for three days afterward, and I couldn't sit down. Did I do a bar class? Probably. So like Pilates, bar promises long and lean muscles, a dancer's body. And this phrase I always think of as sort of a dog whistle phrase as well, improved strength, balance, and flexibility, because that just tells me there's not going to be anything heavy.
00:41:13
Speaker
I don't know why. I see those three things together and I'm like, oh, this is like ladies workouts. Long, lean, dancer's body, strength, balance, flexibility. Yeah. Right. This exercise format that we call bar, and that's the French spelling, B-A-R-R-E. It's the name of the bar that you hold onto when you are doing your warmups in the beginning of a ballet class.
00:41:34
Speaker
So in a bar class, you typically start at the bar doing very small movements, like you might be up on your toes, but also in a plie, which is like a squat with your legs turned out, but your heels touching and doing pulses, which are tiny movements where you're going about one inch up and down. Legs that are quivering, burning, dying are encouraged. And then you do some similar work in the middle of the room, some abs, some light hand weights, like you said, maybe a ball, some stretching. My impression of bar overall is that we're deep in dog whistle country.
00:42:04
Speaker
because it's all about toning, lengthening, sculpting. I took a little sidebar into the land of pulses because I was like, what are these pulses supposed to be doing? What are the claims? The claim is that it brings more blood to the muscles so that they can increase growth. That's the opposite of actually how muscle growth works. Muscle growth and how to build muscle is a far from settled topic according to research.
00:42:29
Speaker
actually, one of the ways that is positive as a mechanism for muscle growth is actually the buildup of waste products within the muscle, not the clearance of it, right? Because that's what the bringing brain and blood muscle does is it clears the waste products, it clears the byproducts of the
00:42:43
Speaker
chemical reactions that take place in order for the muscle to contract. It's that buildup of waste product that is positive is one of the mechanisms of hypertrophy. Well, you definitely get that buildup because that's that burn that they're looking for where it's the sensation you're having when the waste products are just building up and building up and building up. Absolutely, absolutely. And so bringing more blood into the muscle would actually reduce the burn, but then they're simultaneously saying we're trying to
00:43:05
Speaker
feel the burn. Yeah, I couldn't find any research on the value of pulses. It may be because there's I don't know if there's a scientific name for pulses, but well, no, I know what it is. It's like micro partial reps. So you can do full range of motion and partial range of motion, partial range of motion.
00:43:22
Speaker
reps are called partials. And it's a very common thing that would be employed in athletic training because sometimes athletes should train partial ranges because it's a little bit more relevant to the force production capacity that they're trying to build for their sport. For bodybuilding, it's also really common because there are certain ways you can bulk up a muscle
00:43:39
Speaker
better with partials than full range of motion depending or what part of the muscle you want to bulk up. But pulsing is not something you see in bodybuilding, and it's not really something you would see, I don't think, training an athlete unless pulsing is a part of the athletic profile. But if you were to try to find a way to describe it using exercise science terms, I would say that it's like micro partials.
00:44:03
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you're not seeing somebody doing a 300-pound back squat doing pulses, right? That's just not happening. Or it's a way of taking an isometric exercise and putting a little tiny bit of movement into it. Right. I mean, my sense in a non-scientific way is that it's a way to make a body weight or a very lightweight exercise become more fatiguing to your body's endurance capacity. For sure. Because there's nothing heavy enough to build strength.
00:44:32
Speaker
Also, you're increasing perturbation, so that's also going to make the exercise more energetically taxing. It's just a way to move. I think that the way that it's explained is what's a problem because it's inaccurate, but I don't have anything against pulsing necessarily. I feel like it could have value. It definitely adds a rhythmicity to the movement, which could be helpful, especially for having a rhythm to follow can, I think,
00:44:55
Speaker
be helpful for being able to hold something for longer or kind of drop into the feeling of the movement. The claims made about it are where I'm like, I don't know about that. I mean, I always sort of feel a little bit resentful when I'm in a class and I've had this experience in Pilates classes as well.
00:45:11
Speaker
where you've been doing whatever exercise or variations on an exercise, you've done like six or seven rounds of it, and then they're like, now hold and pulse. And I'm always mad because I'm like, you're just trying to get my leg to feel worse than it does right now. You're trying to make me numb. Exactly.
00:45:27
Speaker
Just to sum up pulses, fine. Claims about them, probably wrong. So this bar class that we know today, it was actually born out of something called the Lottie Burke Muff. And this is again, another single person starting an exercise modality, although different from Pilates. In this case, the originator. And as we're going to see an important part of her emphasis and focus was bred out of the style as it changed names. Contrology started as controllity became Pilates.
00:45:53
Speaker
lottie burke method changed into bar so lottie burke started her method in london in nineteen fifty nine and she was a former ballet dancer and she suffered a very serious back injury and this led her to sampling different methods of rehabilitative therapy
00:46:09
Speaker
and also using her own ballet bar training, she created this method out of that. And then it expanded to the United States in 1971 and then morphed into the bar that we know today with lots of different offshoots and variations. Again, it didn't take long to find some really interesting information. So on a site called GX United, I found an article from 2021 called The Down and Dirty History of Bar Fitness. I was like, oh, yeah.
00:46:35
Speaker
So this is from a woman named Summer Sides. She writes, the original Lottie Burke technique was a combination of modern ballet moves, yoga, and rehabilitative exercises. The goal of class was to improve strength and flexibility in women. Using a combination of bar work and floor exercises, the workout was designed specifically for non-dancers to achieve a dancer's body. So now again, on our red string map, we've got a straight line from creator to long and lean, right? She was literally a former ballet dancer. Fine.
00:47:04
Speaker
Okay, but here's something interesting that I did not know about Lottie Burke and the Lottie Burke method. And so the article goes on to say, unlike many fitness programs of that time, the Lottie Burke method was exclusive to women, barring men from entering. Why? Because Lottie promoted her technique as a way for women to improve their sex life.
00:47:24
Speaker
Wait, wait, wait. It gets so much better. It gets better. It gets better. That's what the pulsing is for. I mean, yes, possibly. She was known to talk about sex during class. This is 1959. Live a bisexual lifestyle that included an open marriage and promotes sexual liberation for women through her movements. I mean, it's kind of badass.
00:47:47
Speaker
I mean, right on. Good luck doing that in Huntsville, Alabama right now. Exactly. Nowadays, we'd look at something like this as kind of gimmicky, right? Right. But in 1959, this was the downright scandalous. Yeah.
00:48:03
Speaker
I mean, it's still the 50s. Holy crap.
Celebrity Influence on Pilates and Barre
00:48:05
Speaker
Yeah. So the article continues. Her technique, sharp wit and vivacious personality attracted women and celebrities. Here we go with the celebrities again, right? Such as Joan Collins and Barbra Streisand to her London based studio apartment. Her classes made these women feel empowered, strong and sensual. So the celebrities again are bringing attention to the method. They're they're thrusting it into the spotlight. While we're on the subject of frosting,
00:48:32
Speaker
Were we on the subject of thrusting? We're about to be, because here's more from Side's article. She named exercises things like the prostitute, naughty bottoms, which actually sounds better if you say it with an English accent, naughty bottoms. Naughty bottoms. Naughty bottoms. And the sex.
00:48:49
Speaker
She developed just the sex. She developed the now popular pelvic tilt exercise, which she referred to as the lovemaking position. It is said that if a student struggled with this move, she would look at them in wide eyed wonder and ask, how is your sex life? Oh my gosh.
00:49:07
Speaker
But perhaps most famously, she is rumored to have told clients, if you can't tuck, you can't fuck. This is super cult leader type behavior as well, where you start to challenge the accepted norms and like cross boundaries with students and like start to say taboo things that make people uncomfortable in public and you sort of
00:49:33
Speaker
groom people to be accepting of these things in ways that they would otherwise not be over time. I don't know if that she also ended up being sort of culty in her attitude, but it's just amazing. The parallels between people who teach movement and cult leaders sometimes are like, my God, they have a lot of the same tactics. They really do.
00:49:56
Speaker
I will say to be fair, I think the dynamic changes partially because she's a woman and partially because the classes are women only. I think the sense in the beginning at least is that let's take this thing that has so far been taboo for you and bring it into the spotlight and let's talk more about what you need and what you're not getting, right? The background of this was the beginning of the sexual revolution that was taking part.
00:50:20
Speaker
in the swinging 60s in London, right? This is that Austin Powers, Do I Met You Honey, baby? Like it's this is during that time. Yeah, right. Yeah. I'm just wondering like how much of this is actually empowering women and how much of it is just like a another way of her like gaining power in her system of control. But when you put it that way, I can see your point that like it is definitely not the same thing as what we normally see in terms of sexual boundaries being crossed by teachers because those teachers are usually men, let's be honest.
00:50:47
Speaker
Yeah. So in the early 1970s, one of her students named Lydia Bach brought the Lottie Burke method to New York City. And in 1972, Bach was quoted in a New York Times article stating that the workout is a combination of modern ballet, yoga, orthopedic exercise and sex.
00:51:02
Speaker
The pulsing is all on that last characteristic. I've decided. You've decided that's what it's about. Well, get ready because you may be right. Since then, the Lottie Burke Method has morphed into styles and places like Exhale, Physique 57, Pure Bar, and Bar Method. They have all lost or removed the original sexuality of the Lottie Burke Method. And there's this hilarious piece discussing this in the cut from 2018 by Danielle Freedom that I would love you to please read.
00:51:32
Speaker
Here's what I remember about my first bar class. The workout was so grueling, it made my muscles twitch as I lay on my back, rhythmically thrusting my pelvis to a sensual cover of Rihanna's umbrella. Beyond the thrusting itself, I was struck by the expressions of the spandex-clad women beside me who seemed entirely unamused by the synchronized schwing we performed.
00:51:53
Speaker
All around me, everyone was taking their air humping very, very seriously. Bar enthusiasts are known for being physical overachievers who are already fit, but nevertheless driven to chisel themselves to perfection. So my question is, Laurel, do you think that all bar enthusiasts are legitimately fit or do you think there are overachievers only in the sense of
00:52:16
Speaker
chiseling themselves to achieve an appearance of fitness instead of a measurable fitness like VO two max or heart rate variability or bone density. Are they all over achievers? Probably not. Although I mean, you have to have like a certain level of tolerance for struggle to take a bar class. That's just a fact. Like you have to be okay with those muscle burning sensations of fatigue. Otherwise, why the heck would you choose bar?
00:52:37
Speaker
They are driven to chisel themselves to perfection. I'm not sure that's true for everyone who does bar. I think that, though, for the most part, when I think of somebody who does bar, I imagine their target audience that it seems apparent from their marketing, which is like a woman who's trying to look a certain way, typically to have
00:52:58
Speaker
what is described as tone or chiseled arms or legs or a butt, you know, essentially wants to change their body composition through exercise, which is not the best way to change your body composition. So the sexuality has been squeegeed out of the format.
00:53:14
Speaker
But the dancer body remains. There are actually lots of bar studios here in Huntsville, Alabama. So this is kind of like the Bible Belt. There's not a whole lot of sexy talk in the movement. I believe it. I believe it. But we still have all that dog whistle language, right? Sculpt, chisel, long and lean, tone. If you've listened to the pod before, you've probably heard my story about the fat burning comment that the teacher said one time in a bar class.
00:53:38
Speaker
Oh yeah, burning the fat on the inside of your body. So I haven't been to a bar class in a while, so things may have changed. But for me at least, it certainly didn't feel like we were there to get the kind of strong that you can get with lifting weights or to really improve any aspect of our cardiovascular health. We were there to sculpt and to tone with our two to three pound hand weights and to turn our bodies into dancer bodies.
00:54:00
Speaker
Were you trying to get stronger? Because so often, also, the marketing includes this goal of building strength and building flexibility. I don't feel like I was getting stronger as much as I felt like I was tired and sore afterwards. But if you don't really know what it feels like to get stronger, if you don't have the physical embodied experience of what it feels like to lift something heavy,
00:54:22
Speaker
you may relate that sense of burning and fatigue to, oh, well, I must be getting stronger because I'm tired. For sure. And also, I will say, like anything, if you haven't never done bar before and then suddenly you start doing bar, you might actually achieve some measurable increases to strength, but that's probably going to top off pretty quickly. And I would say more than strength, probably endurance is the capacity to more plausibly be building with bar.
00:54:47
Speaker
muscle endurance, not cardiorespiratory endurance.
Patriarchal Norms in Exercise Formats
00:54:50
Speaker
Right? This dancer body, we've heard it in Pilates. We're hearing it here again. We're seeing this dancer's body as an ideal. And if we look at it through our patriarchy lens, this is a body where the goals are really, for the most part, appearance-based, right? This is not a capable, strong, an independent, a self-reliant body. This is a body that still needs a man to put the bag in the overhead compartment. This is a body that can still be owned and dominated and used. And
00:55:17
Speaker
As we know from our second episode in the series, this dancer's body shape is going to be defined, I mean, really mostly by genetics, but then also mostly by eating habits more than exercise, right? And so if we're idolizing this dancer's body, we have to look at what is the reality for professional dancers, especially ballet dancers, and the pressure towards thinness is not a choice around health. Anorexia, bulimia, orthorexia is rampant.
00:55:45
Speaker
There's an article called The Cult of Thin from 2016 by Deirdre Kelly in Dance Magazine. And she says, during a recent performance of Balanchine's The Four Temperaments, a court member at a professional company complained that she was so hungry she thought she'd faint. The dancer next to her started to worry.
00:56:01
Speaker
that she herself wasn't hungry enough. In shape for us is being hungry, she said later on. Eat nothing and see how far you can go. Although most professional ballet dancers are naturally slender, having been selected at a young age for advanced training partly for their physique, even those with genetics on their side can be made to feel their bodies aren't good enough. Dancers interviewed on the condition of anonymity
00:56:24
Speaker
confide that weight gain can get them fired while thinness can help them advance. Even though the field has made progress and has become more aware of the health risks of dieting, directors having fat chats to tell dancers to slim down remains routine. We are starting to see some changes with ballet dancers like Misty Copeland, who is not only not a white woman, but also has a body with breasts and muscles.
00:56:49
Speaker
but this balance sheet influence still persists and these changes are really slow to take root.
The Yoga Body Ideal
00:56:56
Speaker
Laurel, it seems to me like historically things like dance and gymnastics are the sort of most quote unquote permissible exercises for women to do in a patriarchy because they're not considered too masculine or too aggressive. Are we seeing changes to this? Are we not seeing changes to this? What are your thoughts?
00:57:12
Speaker
Oh yeah, I think we're seeing changes for sure. I think it's still the case that little girls are drawn to ballet and gymnastics at a young age because of their perception, even in that early age of the difference between boys and girls, and there's already this
00:57:32
Speaker
maybe this preference for fitting more into their gender of being more girly in order to be accepted by their in-group and to not associate with those gross, yucky boys. And girls and boys are treated differently. There are different expectations of girls than boys. I mean, I was at an outdoor restaurant area last night. You went there with me. Stovehouse in Eliana was walking along a very
00:58:00
Speaker
higher than her height wall balancing and my husband and I were a little bit like should we let her do it should we not let her do it and you know because there's this fine line between should we let kids take the risk so that they can learn to assess risk
00:58:12
Speaker
Or should we make sure that they just never get hurt, those two extremes, right? And it was like kind of a fraught moment for both of us. And I wasn't sure what the right thing to do was. And he wasn't sure what the right thing to do was. But this woman came over to us at a certain point and looked over at, my daughter was with another girl and another boy. And she was like, I never did that at my, when I was that age. And she looked at my husband and she was like, I know you did. And then she looked at me and she said, but we never did that.
00:58:42
Speaker
And so it was so fresh in my mind, this example of how little girls are raised differently than boys. And I think that it's very...
00:58:53
Speaker
deeply ingrained in our culture. I don't think that it's changing very quickly, but I do think it's changing because we have athletes like Caitlin Clark. We have much more interest in women's volleyball right now from a spectator level to the point where women's volleyball is bringing in a ton of revenue as a spectator sport compared to other women's sports.
00:59:13
Speaker
We're seeing, I think, more interest in researching women athletes, mostly because there's been no research, comparatively speaking, on women in any context other than pregnancy. I think it's changing. I think that the aesthetic expectations are also changing.
00:59:30
Speaker
And that's my hope. I mean, Eliana's in gymnastics. She's asking about ballet. I'm just trying to like change the topic every time. Because I'm like, gymnastics seems to me to be a little bit better. There's just, I have so many people tell me so many horrific stories about ballet that I know there are horrific stories.
00:59:48
Speaker
that have happened, abuse in gymnastics as well. But to my mind, I'm a little bit more concerned about ballet, frankly, as a culture for my little girl to be brought up in. I also appreciate a lot of what gymnastics has to offer just in terms of the way that it
01:00:05
Speaker
strengthens and it bestows so many amazing capacities on the body, especially when done at a young age, like bone density. I mean, it's the best way to build bone actually is gymnastics. But no, I don't think it's changing quickly. I do think it's changing slowly. I think it is getting better. I think it's changing. I think it's getting better just maybe as quickly as I would like it to.
01:00:27
Speaker
That's my answer. Yeah, I think that's right. Okay, so we have saved yoga and the yoga body for last. As you probably know, Laurel and I both started our movement teaching careers as yoga teachers in New York City, but we came up through very different schools. There is such a thing as a yoga body, but there's sort of a few different ways to get there ideologically.
01:00:48
Speaker
In terms of appearance, it's basically, it's kind of another variation on the dancer's body, right? It's long and lean again. But let's back up for a second. Laurel, can you talk about what it was like during your training or as a teacher? What, if any, emphasis was put on your appearance, either overtly or not? When I think of a yoga body, I think of a flexible body. So when I say yoga body, I mean a yoga body that's idealized, right? The person who is selected by the teacher to demonstrate whatever impossibly large range of motion or whatever Asana were,
01:01:17
Speaker
were seeking to look at, right? And so because so much of the yoga asanas require this very large range of motion, person you want to be is the flexible person because that's the person who's going to receive the praise, receive the attention. Do you remember clapping for the person who demonstrated like 100%? Everyone would gather around and they would do like this like scorpion or whatever and put their toes on their forehead and they're like,
01:01:43
Speaker
Yes, I remember that. You wanted to be flexible, but so here's what I want to say about that in body composition, right? Yes. If you can create these shapes like a bind, for example, you probably have long arms. There's the long part of it, right? If you are going to wrap your
01:02:00
Speaker
leg around your neck, or if you're going to do, say, like, T.T. Basana, which is firefly, many arm balances, for example, many binds, for example, you would probably have an easier time doing it if the circumference of your limbs and trunk are smaller.
01:02:16
Speaker
Yeah, right. So flexibility is not just about stretch tolerance. Okay, it's also about limb length. It's about limb diameter. It's about cross sectional area of muscles and other soft tissues, right. And you don't like also the shape of your joints and your structural variation. But when I think of a yoga body, I think of someone who's flexible, but the flexibility is afforded largely by genetics. Yes. You know, just what what mommy and daddy gave you. Yes, absolutely. You know, if I'm going to
01:02:46
Speaker
wrap my leg behind my head, I better not have too much leg in the way. Exactly. That's what I'm saying. Tissue approximation, the less tissue you have, the easier it's going to be for you to get your parts closer to your parts. Right. So it's not quite as overt as, we're going to build you this long and lean body, but it is sort of seen that, oh, well, the person in the middle of the room getting the applause is the person who has the correct composition to be able to do this.
01:03:12
Speaker
And every once in a while that's the person who's actually really freaking strong, right? But mostly it's the person who's pretty freaking flexible. Right. So that's what you saw in your training and in your teaching. Did you ever see any sort of preference given to teachers who embodied that more than others? Yes, but I don't think it was ever overtly expressed as a preference. There was no like, we're doing this yoga to be long and lean.
01:03:38
Speaker
We're doing this yoga to look a different way. I didn't get a whole lot of that in my studio, thankfully. There wasn't a whole lot of overt communication around changing aesthetic appearance in terms of body shape or body composition. There was covertly a preference, though, in terms of just look at the teachers that are working at the studio, compare them to what the average woman looks like. The people working at the studio are
01:04:07
Speaker
thinner, taller, and whiter, there's a preference. And then you would also, unfortunately, hear students make comments like, I love so-and-so's class. She's so beautiful and tall and lean. And I just hope that if I keep taking her class, I'll look that way. And then every once in a while, people would also let slip really mean and hurtful comments about other teachers who were just not inspiring. Sometimes that was the
01:04:36
Speaker
the word that was used based on their appearance. Yeah. It's like when people say like, oh, can this person be my personal trainer? They're kind of overweight. How good are they at being a personal trainer when they don't look like what I think they should look like? Yeah. And Damali Frazier and I had to talk about like your body is your business card type paradigm that is such bullshit. And then also I think that there was a preference for a certain aesthetic when it came to alignment, obviously, like how people looked in the pose.
01:05:04
Speaker
which you really can't separate from the body in the post, right? You can say like, this person's alignment is better than this person's alignment, and they have roughly the same proportions and body composition. But I think a lot of times what happens is we just take this person who's classically considered to be attractive.
01:05:21
Speaker
who's probably long lean, white, right, and young, and like their alignment's okay. And you're like, wow, that's such an inspiring pose. It's like, because humans are dumb, like we don't, you know what I mean? Like, I knew we see what we want to see. And we think what we have been told to think for the most part, and we don't like analyze
01:05:43
Speaker
what we're seeing and why we think the way we think very much until we do. Yeah, I remember someone years ago talking about their yoga teacher.
01:05:53
Speaker
And this was a student, not a teacher, and they pulled out their phone and showed me a picture of their teacher doing scorpion pose with, you know, the sunset in the background. And they were like, isn't she so inspiring? And I was like, in my mind, I was like, I mean, the sun is doing a lot of work in that picture, you know, whether nature is doing a lot of the heavy lifting in this picture. I mean, yes, she's actually being upstaged. Right, exactly. This person is naturally flexible enough and has enough arm strength to do this pose. Yes.
01:06:21
Speaker
But does that mean I'm inspired by them? I don't know. But that but to your point, that's what a lot of, you know, students are, you know, that's what sort of what they see as the inspiration. So I trained at Jiva Mukti Yoga in New York, which is a much more overtly spiritual practice, they unapologetically include a lot of teachings from the yogic texts,
01:06:40
Speaker
meditation. They require certain behavior modifications from their teachers. For example, if you were going to be a teacher, you had to at least be a vegetarian. It would be better if you were fully vegan. But this is because the reasoning for Jeevan Mukti is that they are committed to what they call ethical vegetarianism under the broader umbrella of the concept of ahimsa or nonviolence.
01:07:01
Speaker
non-harmic. So Ahimsa, if you're not aware, it's one of the yamas and the niyamas, which are the ethical guidelines for yoga practitioners. This comes from Patanjali's Yoga Sutras. They are the first two of the eightfold limbs of your yoga practice. They actually come before the physical practice. They come before asana. So I wanted to talk about a couple of the other niyamas that can be interpreted in ways that would, if you will, impact your body, your physical body as kind of a byproduct. So
01:07:27
Speaker
One of them is called tapas, and tapas is usually translated to mean inner fire, and it refers to having sort of discipline over yourself and remaining with discomfort when it arises, not immediately seeking a way out. So often it was described as like you're in a yoga pose and you're having some discomfort.
01:07:44
Speaker
and your impulse is to jump out of the pose as fast as you can. And so the tapas is building the resilience to stay with the yoga pose, even as it feels hard. But you could also interpret this as like anytime you're you're getting some sort of signal from your body that you should practice just kind of sitting with it and not
01:08:03
Speaker
immediately jumping up and changing it. And so that could also be interpreted as just because you're slightly hungry doesn't mean you need to jump up and eat something. I remember there was a teacher who told a story about meditating outside one time and she could feel all of these mosquitoes biting her, but she didn't stop meditating because that was her tapas practice.
01:08:20
Speaker
completely differently. My boyfriend James and I have been doing a lot of cold plunges lately. And that is definitely a tabas even though it's freezing, it's not fiery. But there is a lot to it where you're just in this incredibly uncomfortable situation and you're not leaving it. So another one of the niyamas is saucha, which means cleanliness. And I've sort of heard interpretations about it as maintaining a clean space for your practice, a tidy home, but then this idea of like a quote unquote clean physical body with a clean diet because you're trying to
01:08:48
Speaker
purify your physical form, whatever that means or might look like. So if you are practicing a yogic lifestyle in the sense that you're following these ethical and moral guidelines of the yoga sutra, you might develop a physical thinness, then could be equated with a kind of moral superiority, right? A mastery of your physical form and all of its foibles, or what I started calling the aesthetic aesthetic.
01:09:13
Speaker
This is a way of getting the yoga body that it's not about sculpting and toning and chiseling. It's much more about shunning or lowering the value of your own base physical needs in favor of getting closer to a spiritual plane. There's a documentary I saw a while ago, I cannot remember the title of it, but they were filming this big festival in India and they showed this man who
01:09:36
Speaker
had held his arm in the air for an insane amount of time, like years and years and years. And his arm had now shriveled into sort of a thin stick and a completely unusable hand. And I don't think he can actually lower his arm now.
01:09:51
Speaker
And the man described that he originally raised his arm and kept it there as a way to show his devotion to God. So that's a more extreme version of what I'm talking about. But this concept of not being at the mercy of your body's whims and base needs, which might also include things like fasting for long periods. That was a common practice among the teachers at Jiva Mukti.
01:10:13
Speaker
And I remember Sharon at one point talking about another teacher who was doing a yoga demonstration, and she was saying she was the embodiment of jiva mukti in her graceful movements and her fierce energy. And this teacher was also very thin, which was sort of the unsaid part of the praise. Yeah, right. The physical asana practice at jiva mukti is pretty strenuous. And if you had more mass on your body, it's like you were saying harder to do things like the arm binds.
01:10:35
Speaker
And the attitude generally was that props were for people who weren't as good at yoga. So certainly if you were going to be a teacher, you were really only supposed to be using props if you were injured. But even in this supposedly more spiritual iteration,
01:10:49
Speaker
Westernized yoga is the domain of thin white women because the more advanced you are, quote unquote, the more you can twist yourself into a pretzel. And, you know, you, as you're saying, have to be some amount of thin to do that. And this was seen at D.V. Mukti sort of going hand in hand in the advancement of your spiritual discipline. Right. And we've got
01:11:06
Speaker
Like you said, these thin white women sitting at the front of the yoga class talking about all kinds of philosophical concepts. They have this dancer's body probably already without the yoga, but the students don't know that, right? And so that's this huge marketing ploy in all kinds of group fitness situations. You hire people who are already fit, and then you claim that the yoga or whatever the movement is, is what makes them look that way.
01:11:29
Speaker
Yeah. Would you say that the veganism was sort of a covert way of having an eating disorder for a lot of folks? Like they used veganism to restrict their diet. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Under the guise of I am creating this kind of inside and out spiritual cleanliness. I'm a good person. Yeah.
01:11:50
Speaker
Yeah, it seems to me that unlike Pilates and Barr, where there's this direct relationship from the initial conception of the exercise format to this long and lean body, in the yoga world, the yoga body shows up with a lot of different meanings. And in our red string world, if we put yoga body in the middle, there's a lot of branches reaching out. There's the yoga body as seen in mass Western cultural appropriation of the practice, which turns it into sort of a simulation of a dancer's body, something similar to it.
01:12:20
Speaker
That same yoga body commodified by Western culture turned into the face of, and I just looked this up, an estimated 107.1
01:12:30
Speaker
billion global industry in 2023. And then we also have this yoga body as the aesthetic aesthetic, right? A result of your spiritual practice of non-attachment to the physical form. And then the flip of that is sort of the yoga body as a sort of demonstrative piety, a means by which the world can see
01:12:50
Speaker
your adherence to an ethical and moral path. Aren't you such a good person? Because you're so thin. Do you agree with this? Do you see that the yoga body is a bit more multi pronged in its conception than the Pilates body or the bar body? I would say so. Yeah. And I think that a lot of that has to do with its cultural roots, right? And the fact that it is not considered a form of exercise first and foremost, but rather a spiritual practice. Well, I don't have anything else to say. Do you?
Addressing Biases in Fitness
01:13:19
Speaker
I think that was a fabulous way to contextualize the first few episodes. Bravo to you on your putting this all together and researching all this. Thank you. As you know, did not read the outline before we had this conversation.
01:13:35
Speaker
I learned a lot. I did in this moment learn a lot that I did not know before, before having this conversation in real life. And I think that what can we do with the knowledge now, and the information that has been shared about the origin stories, or rather, you know, look behind the curtains of the underpinnings of some of these movement formats, their origin stories, their creators, what can we do with that as Pilates practitioners as
01:14:05
Speaker
bar practitioners as yoga practitioners and teachers of these formats, knowing what we know and knowing we want to do going forward, right? So I don't know if that's a question we're leaving listeners with.
01:14:19
Speaker
or if we have anything to offer. Yeah, I think one of the biggest things is with this knowledge, we can start to really, I would say in particular as teachers or community leaders, we can really start to unpack our own choices in terms of what's the language that I'm using when I'm teaching. Is my language inclusive or not?
01:14:41
Speaker
is my language unconsciously fat shaming? Whether I thought it was or I wasn't really aware that it was, right? What are my own personal biases against different bodies? And how am I changing in my teaching, right? Am I actively speaking out against what I feel is impeding progress in that direction? I think that looks like
01:15:05
Speaker
Different looks different for different people, right? So there are people who are more disruptor types who will get on social media and actively call out problems that they're seeing. I mean, I think that we, you and I, Sarah, are pretty comfortable in that role from time to time. I was about to say, that sounds very familiar. It's definitely not all that we do, right? I wouldn't say that we're like leading with disruption, but there's the disruptor type, but there's also the private conversations you're having with students.
01:15:33
Speaker
There's the ears, the filter that you're taking in what you're hearing with, and then how you're responding to that. So whether it's in your local studio, or it's with your students one-on-one, or in your classes, how are you, yes, leading with more positive, progressive language that takes us in a better direction?
01:15:57
Speaker
But then also, what are you doing with the language, the choices, the attitudes, the biases, the discrimination that is keeping us stuck in the past? What are you doing about that? How are you addressing it? How are you responding to it?
01:16:13
Speaker
Is it a head in the sand situation where you're pretending it's not there because you're afraid of the repercussions of speaking truth to power? If power is where it's coming from, maybe it's your boss, maybe it's your studio owner, your client who pays you, right? I think that's something everybody has to work out for themselves. But if we're going to move the needle faster rather than slower, I think we need to do both actually.
01:16:36
Speaker
I think we need to examine our own beliefs and biases and change what we do going forward. But also I think we do need to call into question the ways that are impeding that progress around us. Yeah. And hopefully this episode and all three of our episodes about dismantling long and lean have given you some good fodder, some good ideas to ruminate on, some different ways to think about your own body, your own practice.
01:17:00
Speaker
And then your expansion of that into your teaching or the way that you exercise or take classes. Yeah. All right. So you can check out our show notes for links to references we mentioned in this podcast, including the link to sign up for our bone density course 2024 wait list. And if you appreciate the time and energy that Laurel and I put into these episodes, please express that appreciation through subscribing, rating, and reviewing anywhere that you get your podcasts.
01:17:30
Speaker
And we will see you in two weeks. We're getting slightly better at that.