history of clinical pilates

With over 30 years personal experience with the Pilates system, founder and director of the Clinical Pilates programme, Craig Phillips, has taken his experience as a dancer with Australian Ballet Company for 10 years and, combined with his physiotherapy training, pioneered a scientific approach to Pilates that is now being recognised and adopted worldwide.

After furthering his training in the USA, including with many of the "masters", in the 1980s Craig was the first to correlate Australian spinal stability research to the Pilates work introducing the concept into the USA almost a decade ago. He presented the first paper proposing this link in New York in 1993. During that time he brought the Pilates work back to Australia and set up the first Pilates studio in Victoria in 1988.

The Clinical Pilates concept has been at the cutting edge since then expanding into functional stability muscle facilitation, electromyography (EMG), diagnostic applications, correlation to the evidence-base and as an adjunct to manual skills. The most recent development has been the use of real time ultrasound to take theory into practice and identify how the Pilates programme can effectively activate the most appropriate muscle activity.