Pilates is about what to move.
PILANDES is about how to move.

What is PILANDES?

The easiest way to understand PILANDES is to compare it with Pilates. When you study Pilates, you learn the moves: which part of the body moves first, what moves next, how long you hold, how many times you repeat.

PILANDES is what happens next. Now you consider how you are doing the movement. As I lift my legs, am I tightening my neck? Do I need to tighten my neck? What else am I unaware of?

It is often those unconscious extra efforts that make your Pilates feel harder than it needs to be.

Pilates is voluntary movement
PILANDES is postural movement

Every movement has two actions. The first moves your arms, legs and torso to do what you want. That is voluntary movement, and it is what you train in Pilates. The second is postural: the way your whole body coordinates, automatically and behind the scenes, to support the exercise. When you combine PILANDES with Pilates, you consciously include this second layer of your movement system for the first time.

Pilates is conscious
PILANDES is automatic

Stand quietly on both legs and notice the pressure on your feet. You are slowly swaying back and forth. Did you decide to do that? No. Postural movements happen without instruction, and we rarely notice them.

F. M. Alexander, originator of the Alexander Technique, spent his life studying postural movements, and what happens when they go wrong. PILANDES is built on Alexander's discoveries.

So how much do you know about your postural movements right now?

Want to go deeper?

For Pilates educators and practitioners who need to understand the science and structure behind PILANDES, not just what it is but why it works. These are the ideas the Letters unpack.

Pilates is a direct method
PILANDES is an indirect method

You tell your leg to move, and it moves. But while it moves, hundreds of other muscles are activated by your postural system. Those two systems are neurologically distinct: postural movement starts in deeper, older parts of the brain, travels separate pathways, and uses muscle fibres built for sustained, effortless support.

Here is the part that puzzles everyone: you cannot directly command postural movement. When you force it, say by deliberately tightening your core before an exercise, you hand control back to your voluntary system and switch off the very support you were after.

PILANDES teaches you how to stop doing that. In order to control your movement, you have to stop trying to control it. Welcome to the paradox at the heart of the practice.

Pilates involves imaginative movements
PILANDES involves evolutionary movements

The exercises of Pilates have evolved continuously since Joseph Pilates. Postural movements evolved over 500 million years, not 50. They are already built in and already known to your nervous system. Dogs, cats and horses have them too. I have taught horses, and they love it.

In PILANDES you are not learning new movements. You are learning to recognise and allow the ones you inherited as a human mammal. The concept is simple. The practice takes time.

Who is writing these letters?

I have been teaching since 1979. I trained in London at the Alexander Teacher Training School with Paul Collins and Elizabeth Langford, then trained a second time with Marjorie Barstow (1899–1995), the first teacher to qualify from F. M. Alexander's training school. Her way of teaching changed mine.

I came to Japan in 1999, founded ATA, and in 2005 renamed my school BodyChance. Since 2023 I have been Director of Training at Zen BodyChance within zen place, where I developed PILANDES.