Balance Fitness Studio in Carbondale Mixes Pilates and Recreation Therapy

It's sort a mixture of philosophy and religion, fitness and health, relaxation and energy. You feel it the moment you walk into Balance Pilates and Fitness Studio and meet Barbara Tyler, the woman behind the exercise ball.

Barbara is a certified Pilates instructor, nationally certified in recreational therapy and has a master's degree in fitness education. When she was 38, she was a certified aerobics instructor and decided that she didn't want to spend the rest of her life jumping around. Since then, she has found a more holistic approach to health.

She decided that blending art and science to create fitness held great appeal, but not in the form of aerobics. So, she modified her approach, got her master's degree and began teaching less harsh, but equally effective methods of fitness and health improvement.

Aerobics may even be partially to blame for the clients she sees today. "Aerobics was all the rage in early-to-mid 1980s and people spent the next two decades pounding their joints," she said. Together with the aging of the Baby Boomers, aerobics may have contributed to the need for a joint-friendly, healthy form of exercise.

Enter Pilates. The program is designed to integrate the health of the mind and the body, through whole body training instead of targeting specific muscle groups. And, it is a toning system that results in a body type more akin to a dancer than a body-builder.

Once you are adept at the philosophy of Pilates, you will have the grace, strength, balance and coordination to move fluidly, Barbara tells her beginning students. "Then, I tell them it just takes a lot of learning to get there."

Walking through the door at Barbara studio means beginning with a basic assessment, a discussion of your goals in choosing to visit the studio and look at the health factors that might impact your ability to exercise. Just looking at someone can help determine some of their strengths and abilities, but it takes discussions of former injuries, illness and lifestyle to determine where they need to begin a therapy routine.

"You can't always tell just by looking at someone that they just had their medial meniscus repaired," she said. And, since Pilates is a great post rehabilitation workout, it is not uncommon for Barbara's clients to be recovering from injuries.

The range of exercise provided through Pilates is extreme, from pre-Pilates workouts for those suffering from diseases like fibromyalgia, arthritis and movement limiting conditions to level 5 Pilates, a system designed to provide performance enhancement for serious athletes.

The pre-Pilates program, fundamentals of movement, is designed to help people begin to overcome injury, illness and disease through proper breathing and posture. "My family calls me the 'posture police' and worry when I come to visit," Barbara said.

The loving and smiling reference to her nieces and nephews aside, Barbara is very serious about the need for good posture. "This is a posture corrective system. So many of the problems we see is because we are too slouchy, spend too much time bent over a computer keyboard. It's that sedentary part of the population that keeps the fitness industry in business," she said.

Once Barbara has accessed a new client's health and exercise needs and desires, she creates a workout plan for them and helps integrate it into their lives. "The whole idea is balance. You don't need a gym or a house full of equipment to be healthier," she said. Often, she can help clients find one exercise tool and a series of 10 to 12 exercises to modify their lives.

In addition to her Pilates studio, Barbara has been a personal trainer for 14 years, helping men and women, though mostly women create "A Balanced Workout/A Balanced Life." That means everything from helping stay-at-homes moms with active toddlers learn to twist, turn and pick up after their children in a manner that won't result in injury to helping lifelong athletes cope with medical diagnosis that severely change their lives.

"I know a life-long runner who was recently diagnosed with osteopenia. She came wanting to know what she could do about it," Barbara said. Osteopenia is a condition where the bone mineral density is less than it should be. It is often the forerunner to osteoporosis,

Other women, Barbara said, come into the studio looking for help relaxing, losing weight or simply to become more healthy. Pilates does not promote weight loss through cardiovascular exercise as some programs do. Instead, the 80-year-old system developed by Joseph Pilates promotes weight loss through the development of lean muscle tissue. Lean muscle requires more energy to fuel it than fat does and so a woman with more lean tissue will be able to lose weight easier than someone without the muscle tone.

Pilates also works to decompress the joints, making it a natural partner to chiropractic therapy, Barbara said. That means that she can help people recover from injuries even faster than with chiropractic care alone.

She is also a post rehab specialist, having been taught by a physical therapist how to assist people making the transition from physical therapy back to a fitness program. Pilates is designed to make the entire body "functionally fit" and is good for helping to relieve stress and depression and help people with movement limitations regain some strength and balance and freedom.

Barbara said she sees a great many clients who come in after using a home Pilates tape to see "if they're doing it right" or because they have injured themselves trying to follow a tape without any instruction. In those cases, she can help clients to gain a more full understanding of Pilates, improve their techniques and venture beyond the 30-minute workout to a more whole body approach.

In his explanation of his system, Joseph Pilates said the objective was to invigorate the body and the mind. "My method develops the body uniformly, corrects wrong postures, restores physical vitality, invigorates the mind and elevates the spirit."

Those ideals are what Barbara hopes to help people find while bringing a little "balance" to the lives.

In addition to her own studio and personal training business, Barbara sometimes is an instructor at John A. Logan College and through the Recreation Department at Southern Illinois University.

This semester she is teaching a Friday evening class at the Rec Center designed to assist people recently diagnosed with osteoporosis or other degenerative bone disease. The class, which begins February 2nd, meets at the Rec Center from 3:15 p.m. to 4:15 p.m. on Fridays.

She will also be introducing a new class at he studio this spring, a Yogalates class, which further integrates the principals of yoga and Pilates for a more relaxing and invigorating fitness experience. For more information on the Yogalates class, you can reach Barbara at (618) 351-9927 or stop by the studio at 1400 W. Main Street in Carbondale.