The Dulak Pilates Center, which has been open since 2003, offers its clients personalized sessions designed to enhance strength and flexibility.
Pilates, as owner Janice Dulak stressed, teaches people to move from the “powerhouse,” the set of muscles in the center of the body that include the abdominals, back muscles, and gluts. Pilates practitioners use a variety of weighted machines designed by Joseph Pilates to improve the strength and stability of the core.
SP: Tell me a bit about Pilates.
Janice Dulak: Joseph Pilates — who was a gymnast, diver, and bodybuilder — developed the method about a hundred years ago. He opened his first studio in New York City in the 1920s. He always taught people one-on-one, and he invented all the equipment you see in the studio. When he was developing Pilates, he started with mat work on his own body to make himself stronger and more conditioned. But he realized quickly that most people using his system were moving and exercising but weren’t getting at the real essence of Pilates, which is to stabilize your spine.
When you look at animals, you can see that a lot of their movement comes from stretches and arching the spine. Pilates incorporates that idea; the whole concept is to move from your spine, not from your arms and legs. Once he realized that, he invented equipment with spring resistance to target the exact muscles of the body we want to move. In Pilates, we want to move from the core outward to the extremities. We work one-on-one we want to make sure our clients are using the right muscles. If you look around our studio, you’ll see our teachers do a lot of hands-on teaching to show clients exactly where they need to be feeling the exercises.
Dulak discovered Pilates as a modern dancer in San Francisco in 1988. After a knee injury, she was told she could either receive surgery or rehab. She chose rehab and immediately began experiencing the benefits of Pilates.
“I went into a room in St. Francis Hospital that had all this weird equipment,” said Dulak. “It kind of looked like a torture chamber, but it was actually Pilates. Within a week I was back in my ballet class. Within a few months, I fired my chiropractor. As a dancer, I was living on Ibuprofen and my back always hurt. But all of a sudden, my back wasn’t hurting and I was dancing better than ever.”
After realizing how much Pilates was helping her, Dulak began researching Pilates and discovered her Pilates teacher Romana Kryzanowska, who began studying with Joseph Pilates when she was 16.
“My teacher recently passed away at the age of 90 something,” said Dulak. “I trained with her since 1989. Joseph Pilates left everything to her, so I got as close as I could to the horse’s mouth, you might say. I like to keep the method very pure. It’s become very popular to do Pilates, but I do what you might call ‘classic Pilates.’ I do what Romana taught me. I feel like I’m carrying on the tradition.”
SP: Could you say more about the equipment in the studio? How it is designed and how it is used?
Dulak: If you go into any Pilates studio, you should see all these pieces of equipment. There are about ten of them. The difference between gym equipment and Pilates equipment is that we can do about 50 to 60 exercises on each piece by adjusting the cables and where the body is placed. The first piece Joseph Pilates made is called the Reformer, which is a bed-like contraption with spring resistance. We call the “meat and potatoes” of Pilates the Reformer and the mat. The Reformer helps you feel the muscles you’re supposed to use during mat work. When you come to any Pilates session, you’re going to do Reformer work and then mat work. Then from there, we look at each individual body and decide whether it needs more flexibility or more strength and choose additional pieces of equipment based on that. We call the other equipment our “extras.” We might choose the High Chair, for instance, to lengthen your body. Or we might choose something else to condense the body and isolate particular muscles. We tailor each session to the specific body we’re teaching.
Dulak is a Pilates Master Instructor and leads groups of apprentices in a year-long teacher training program. People interested in teaching Pilates need to already be at the Intermediate level of Pilates, which takes at least a year of consistent practice. During the program, students are assessed at different points by teaching their own classes and by responding to lengthy written exams, which ask them to design workouts for bodies with particular constraints, such as a sprained ankle or other injury.
Besides training new instructors, Dulak is the author of Pilates for the Dressage Rider and travels around the country training riders how to use Pilates for the best responses from their horses.
SP: What is the clientele of this studio like? Do your clients tend to have similar backgrounds in terms of physical experiences?
Dulak: Not at all. I teach all ranges. For instance, I teach an Olympian who is ranked as one of the best in the world for discus throwing. She does basic to intermediate level work even though she could probably bench press both of us together. When she first came here, I gave her a basic lesson — she came in the next week and said she was so sore she couldn’t lift for three days. She says that Pilates has helped so much in her sport—before she started, she was ranked 15th in the world, and now she’s ranked 1 or 2. But we also have folks who are retirees. We have musicians, people with rods in their spines, people with knee replacements, and people with hip replacements. Our clientele is extremely varied. We’re not just teaching routines. We’re teaching bodies. And bodies change over time. Sometimes people come in and I say, “What happened to you?” because a hip is out of place or something like that. Maybe they’ve been gardening a lot, or maybe they got hurt. Then we work together and they feel better. That’s what keeps me going after all these years.
SP: It sounds like it’s very creative work.
Dulak: It is. It’s always thinking outside of the box. It’s always a puzzle, and you have to find what is going to work for this client to make them feel whole.
Dulak generously offered Sam and I each a complimentary session so we could try out Pilates for ourselves. I worked with one of the current apprentices, who trained me in some exercises on the Reformer and the mat. The pace of the session surprised me: most of the movements were performed slowly and with control, and we only had time for a dozen or so exercises on each piece of equipment in an hour. My abs were definitely burning the next day, however, which made me think that Pilates’ method of isolating specific core muscles makes for a very efficient workout.
SP: What are your thoughts on the popularization of Pilates?
Dulak: Movement is good. Better that than sitting on the couch and watching TV. But I’m a purist. I’m not into fads. To me, a lot of popular Pilates is giving people the wrong idea. It’s like the game Telephone — when pass the idea through so many different people, you end up with a completely different message. That’s not necessarily bad or good, but it’s not the original message. I believe that the original message is important. I’m always trying to find the source of something. When I chose my dance teachers, I chose them based on the line of dancing I wanted to learn. I want the kernel of truth about the sport I’m learning. I’m not going to judge what other people do, but I would hope people educate themselves about what they’re learning. It’s sort of like real food. Why would you buy boxed mac and cheese when you could go to Big Grove and have mac and cheese that’s really good?
SP: It seems like your style involves pursuing all the nuances of your chosen work.
Dulak: Yes. In my dance career, I was a modern dancer, which was very esoteric. And then I started doing Pilates in the 1980s, which at the time no one really knew about. And I also do dressage, which is an esoteric art form as well. I seem to always choose cutting-edge subjects to study and learn. I like exploring esoteric things completely, but I don’t like fads.
While the Dulak Pilates Center heavily emphasizes individual work, they also offer a very basic group class that once a week. The group class is less expensive than private sessions, but it’s also very safe for people who are healthy to learn about how Pilates works. Regular Pilates practitioners can also be approved to join a more advanced group mat class to complement their individual work and be able to practice Pilates more than once a week.
SP: Anything else you want to tell us?
Dulak: I live the life of the body. There’s so much joy in figuring out how a body can move. I want to translate some of that joy to others. My goal is to have people say during a lesson, “Wow, I’ve never felt that before.” Those are the moments when I feel I’m really teaching them about the body works.
The Dulak Pilates Center is located at 44 East Main Street, Suite 102 in downtown Champaign.
All photos courtesy of Sam Logan.