Joseph Pilates — Joe, to everyone who knew him — devised a system of exercises and equipment built to correct asymmetry, misalignment, and dysfunction. His exercises demanded real focus: the mind engaged with the movement of the body, developing coordination and control rather than mindless repetition. By training the body to work in every direction against gravity, Joe’s method prepared his students to move through life instinctively and effortlessly, without having to think their way through it.

What that correction actually looks like is often small and specific. A hip that sits slightly higher than the other. A spine that’s rounded forward from years at a desk. One side of the body doing more work than the other, without the person ever noticing. Contrology doesn’t treat these as problems to fix with a single stretch or a quick adjustment — it retrains the whole body, over time, to move the way it was actually built to move.

Sandy Shimoda captures it perfectly in her book Contrology Handbook: Contrology is corrective exercise that prevents the unnecessary deterioration of the body, keeping the muscles of the center primed and ready for action.

That distinction matters. When Joe’s exercises are executed using his actual method, that’s Contrology. When they’re taught randomly, stripped of order and intention, the whole point of the work is lost. Joseph Pilates believed in sustaining good health through a systematic, deliberate approach to exercise — one built around what he called a “perfect balance of body and mind.”

As Sandy Shimoda puts it: “There’s no quick fix here. Your movement can’t be corrected with a prescription. You can’t pay someone else to do the work on your behalf. You have to do it yourself — for the rest of your life.”

At Lilyfit, we aim to stay as close as possible to Joseph Pilates’ original teachings. That means the routines and movements themselves, how they’re executed, and the order in which they’re performed — what’s known as sequencing. We follow the lineage of Jay Grimes.

Jay arrived at Joe’s studio on Eighth Avenue in the 1960s, by which point Joe had already spent roughly forty years developing his method in that same small room — experimenting, refining, keeping what worked, and discarding what didn’t. What Jay learned wasn’t an early draft. It was the culmination of a lifetime of exploration, tested and shaped through decades of real students, real bodies, and real results.

That’s the line we’ve inherited, too. From Jay Grimes to Susanna Foustok, and from Susanna to us here at Lilyfit — the same method, taught the same way, still carrying the work forward exactly as Joe built it.

As Jay himself put it: “I’ve never seen anything better than what Joe did, so I don’t see any need to change it.” Neither do we.