Customer Reviews
The Pilates Body - By: Karen, 08 Jul 2003 
Fantastic, if you wish to learn about Pilates, who created it & how it came about this is your book. It is full of clear photographs for every single exercise from beginning to end with a clear step by step guide, it not only guides you through each exercise but also show's you how you can move forward & challenge your body as you perfect the Pilates exercise. This book was recommended to me by Pilates instructor as I wanted to learn more about Pilates & practice at home, by far the most in-depth book I have seen takes you right through from beginners level to advanced.
A Good Companion! - By: , 19 Jun 2003 
As a complete novice I opted to try Pilates using a DVD, Pilates for Dummies. However, there were a few exercises that I wanted a little more detail about. I wouldn't want to learn Pilates from scratch just with this book but as a companion to a Pilates Instructor or DVD/Video its invaluable.
Superb! - By: EMD, 08 Oct 2001 I highly recommend this book as a standard guide to home training on the Pilates method. All exercises are written out very plainly for everyone to understand with the accompanied pictures on each individual exercise.
Don't think twice about purchasing this book; get it & enjoy the new world of exercise with Joe Pilates.
A novice veiw point - the best Pilates Book! - By: A. Woodley, 20 Jun 2001 As a complete novice on Pilates & its background I started looking at all the books I could on the subject a few months ago. I had read about Pilatesin the Daily Telegraph - the first time I had ever heard of the programme.
There are two points I have to make as a novice - 1 -I'd never heard of Pilates before - & so I wanted to read as much as I could & try things out before I bought & - 2 - there are some very very good books out there on the subject . So I am definitely not an expert opinion here but just an enthusiastic amateur. And I am enthusiastic about it.
First off - if you haven't tried Pilates before - like I hadn't - I think you'll be pleasantly surprised by just how easy & fun the exercises are. Every book I read emphasised the need to move up the level of difficulty slowly - which means I have made very noticeable improvements, but I really enjoy the exercises each day. Its a bit like yoga & certainly uses some parts of yogain the exercises - only I find I domy Pilates exercises where I never really liked yoga that much.
Why do I like this book better than the others I used? Well I found the programme & the explanations which Siler used the best. Each Pilates book I read seemed to have slightly different combinations of exercises & different orders - but all the exercises are essentially the same so I don't know if there is really that much basic differencein them. In the end I just preferred the order & the presentation of Siler's book. She has all the philosophy of & explanations of Pilatesin the first few pages. What I liked best though was the is a two page 'order' of exercises - where each exercise is a small picture to remind you of where you are up to.
Following that each exercise is given a double page spread with one page devoted to what to do putin simple bullet points, & the facing page a bullet point list of things to concentrate on while doing the exercise.
So while I did like many of the other Pilates books I found this one the best.
Good Content, but not user friendly - By: , 16 Jun 2001 
The focus of this book is mainly on the "core" abdominal Pilates exercises. A prior knowledge & experience of Pilates is also assumed. There are a wide range of exercises demonstrated throughout the book with step by step instructions for each. However,for each exercise there is only a start & end position photo with no visual image for what the main movement of the exercise is supposed to look like! I found this somewhat disappointing, as though the exercise looked good, I was at a loss to know whether I was actually performing it correctly or not. There are hints as to what it should feel like, but without a decent visual interpretation of the exercise, I found that this did not help much. I expected this book to have clear sections for beginners through to advanced. The first section "Modified Beginners Exercises" gave that impression, but after that- beginner, intermediate & advanced exercises were all mixed up together. Based on my prior experience of Pilates,I thought that this book had great potential, but it was somewhat spoilt by the fact that it was so confused. I also thought that the "Advanced" exercises would have more detailed instructions to follow to enable you to get it right, but from the instructions given, even as a young & fairly supple person, I found these exercises almost impossible to perform. It is a shame that a good book like this has been spoilt by the lack of careful thought that needs to be put into the instructions & picturesin order to make it an enjoyable & worthwhile read.
