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Grace Under Pressure
| The machine may remind you of a medieval rack, but practitioners of gyrotonics say there's no better exercise for learning to move with elegance and agility. |
By Wendy Marston
I suffer from dancer envy. No matter how serene my yoga poses are, or how sculpted my muscles, dancers shame me. It seems like there's one in every exercise class. Planted smack in front, she moves her limbs with the grace of a broad-winged bird gliding to its destination. Even offstage, this woman's body is her instrument. Mine is my jalopy.
But help is on the way: an innovative kind of mechanized training known as gyrotonics. Performed on a contraption called a pulley tower, it is a series of exercises that combine elements not only from dance but also gymnastics, yoga, swimming and tai chi. Practitioners hope that gyrotonics takes a place next to yoga and Pilates as an exercise method of choice. I knew immediately what I wanted: that tower was my ticket to looking like a dancer.
But first I had some fear to overcome. The metal pulley tower stands about seven feet tall and rests on carved wooden feet. Leather straps for hands and feet dangle from various parts of the machine, amid weights, pulleys and wires. The device seems better suited to torturing heretics than fitness training. Even so, the tower is user-friendly; its parts move smoothly and quietly. Its operating principle is simple: by making your arms, legs and other body parts move in controlled, smooth arcs, it expands your range of motion and increases strength and flexibility without injury. And if you are lucky, gyrotonics founder Juliu Horvath says, “You will go beyond narcissistic repetition and find the unexplored parts of the body.”
For us beginners, the circular nature of gyrotonics is mighty confusing. A Pilates machine, to which gyrotonics is often compared, is based on a linear principle. The Pilates Reformer (when will they invent a machine called The Welcomer?) demands that you push and then pull, move up or move back, lift or lower. If only gyrotonics were that easy. I sit, facing away from the tower, and place each hand on top of handles. My task is to reach out first with my left hand-still on the handle, which rotates under my palm-push outward and then pull back toward myself, and then do the other hand. I have watched my teacher, a soft-spoken German man named Jurgen Bamberger, do this with no trouble. Bamberger hovers behind me and gently intones instructions. “Reach,” he says, “twist more-no, the other way-turn, good.” Then he pokes me in my lower back, gently pulls my hips back down to the seat and extends my upper back by nudging it into a flatter position. “Bring your chin down,” he says. “Now try the other arm.” Finally I complete a rudimentary exercise and am exhausted. I want to go home.
After a few more attempts, I realize that reaching with my left hand sets my shoulders in motion, up toward my ears, and Bamberger doesn't like that. Reaching (dancers must know this, I suspect) means that the rest of you stays still, allowing the arm to extend. After the fifth repetition, I imagine I'm getting it. My neck already feels more swanlike. Then Bamberger regards me sternly, his eyes startlingly large behind his thick, wire-rimmed glasses, and informs me that I have to attempt to breathe and do the exercises. Once again, I'm lost.
But, he assures me when we are done, I'm no worse than most. To start gyrotonics, you don't need any experience in dance-just the $50 to $75 that an hour of private instruction will cost you. As in Pilates, a typical beginner session consists of the student, the teacher and the machine. “You don't need any background in movement at all,” says Bamberger. “We all have the ability to move.” The machines, he says, simply amplify and channel our natural humanability.
And since the weights can be adjusted on the tower, injuries can be treated. Indeed, practitioners claim that the system even promotes healing. A Manhattan-based general contractor, Jon Rickard, 48, credits gyrotonics for having healed his back injury. “I wrenched my back out skiing,” he explained. “My cousin is a dancer, and referred me to the gyrotonics studio.” Rickard began slowly, using no weights and doing just the movements. “I've had no problems for the last year, and I'm skiing,” he says. Rickard plays tennis and bikes, and visits the Yogamoves studio in midtown Manhattan twice a week. “This is my gym,” he says Horvath, the 58-year-old father of gyrotonics, seems unsurprised by the success of the technique he invented in the late 1970s while living in a shack in the Virgin Islands. Resolutely New Age in style, he claims to be a “universal being,” who exists in several dimensions and whose work is pushing the human race farther down its evolutionary path with his machines and techniques. Recently Horvath has been jetting around the globe training teachers and dealing with the company that is mass-producing his Gyrotonic Expansion System machines. He hopes someday there will be a tower in most gyms.
There are skeptics. “I've talked to scores of Pilates instructors,” says Peg Jordan, editor of American Fitness magazine, “and they're sort of lukewarm on it. I don't see it as much of a trend.” Loren Fishman, a physician who specializes in rehabilitation and physical therapy and the author of “Back Pain,” worries that gyrotonics could be harmful to people with certain problems. “Those kinds of motions are exactly what isn't good for someone with scoliosis, for example,” Fishman says. “I just wonder how much the gyrotonics teacher knows about people's injuries.”
Still, there are already about 100 gyrotonics studios worldwide, with fans like the actress Susan May Pratt, who calls the regimen vital to her training for a role as a ballerina in the movie “Center Stage.” She probably lost her dancer envy, too.
September 11, 2000