What's the Difference Between Pilates and Yoga?

I discovered both Pilates and yoga through my ballet training in the 1990s, and have used both as centering mind-body practices throughout my life.

Pilates? Yoga? What Is It?

Sometimes it feels like everywhere we look there's a Pilates or yoga studio. Every gym and community center seems to offer Pilates, yoga, or a combined Pilates-yoga class. While both are mind-body practices on a mat, Pilates and yoga have different histories, different techniques, and different goals. In my own practice, I’ve used both Pilates and yoga to cross-train for ballet and to keep myself centered and healthy in daily life.

Mind-Body Practice on a Mat

The Mind-Body Connection

As mind-body practices, both Pilates and yoga focus on coordinating breath with movement. Because of the focus on mind-body connection, Pilates and yoga are typically done slowly, with careful attention to the details of each movement, position, and breath. Both tend to focus on flowing from one movement or pose to the next, with deliberate transitions in between.

Like many mind-body practices, the principles practiced in the studio (such as harmony, flow, and centering) are intended to be applied holistically in everyday life. 

This type of exercise is often referred to as holistic fitness. At Find Your Center, we think of mind-body exercises as centering practices.

The Mat

The mat is an important spatial component for both Pilates and yoga. It creates a sort of bubble for each individual to shift their focus inward. In a group class, students confine their exercises to individual mats, staying out of each others’ way. For solo practice, the portable mat makes it possible to mark out a space in a variety of environments–say the living room, a boardwalk, or a balcony.

Both yoga and Pilates mat exercises can also (but not ideally) be done without a mat on any clear flat surface that is the size of a person lying down.

The Yoga Mat

Typically, yoga exercises and sequences are done on a "sticky mat" or "yoga mat." The "stickiness" of the mat grips the floor on one side and your feet and hands on the other, providing a safe and stable surface for balancing.

The Pilates Mat

Pilates mats are usually thicker and don't need to be "sticky." The thickness protects the tailbone, spine, and ribs during rolling exercises, and the hip bones and elbows during side work. 

Not all Pilates exercises use the mat. Many studios have specialized equipment that guides correct technique. Pilates instruction with equipment is typically one-on-one and costs considerably more than a group mat class. If you're looking for Pilates without equipment, the term to look for is "Pilates mat."

Different Histories, Different Techniques

What Do “Pilates” and “Yoga” Mean?

You might have noticed that I always capitalize Pilates, but not yoga. This has to do with their different histories. Pilates is named after Joseph Pilates, who created it. We capitalize it because it's a name. Pilates is a technique attributed to a single individual who developed and documented his work in the early 1900s.

Yoga, on the other hand, is a Sanskrit word meaning "unify" or "unite." Yoga developed as a cultural tradition in northern India thousands of years ago. Because it's simply a word and not the name of a person or company, it doesn't need to be capitalized in English.

Pilates for Recovery and Dance

Joseph Pilates developed his movement system to overcome illnesses and injuries. He later worked with leading ballet and modern dance companies to train their dancers. Because of this history, Pilates technique overlaps in many ways with American ballet and modern dance.

Pilates stabilizes the core and aligns the body in low-impact positions, building a strong foundation from which to perform all kinds of high-impact movements.

Pilates is an accessible exercise method for people of all body types and levels of physical fitness, while also being a key training component for some elite athletes.

Yoga for Meditation

Yoga, coming from Buddhist and other Indian traditions, conditions the body to sit still in meditation. It is made up largely of asanas, or poses. Different poses engage different chakras, or energy centers throughout the body, in order to achieve spiritual and physical balance.

Historically, yoga exercises were designed to increase strength and flexibility to make more yoga positions (asanas) accessible. The goal was to find meditative stillness in a variety of bodily postures, in order to cultivate a spiritual sense of unity.

In practice, many contemporary American yoga classes de-emphasize the meditative aspect and cultural roots of yoga, instead focusing on physical fitness as a goal in itself.

Pilates Technique

Pilates focuses on small precise movements to target core strength. While many Pilates mat exercises appear on the surface to be like any other workout, the holistic approach and precise technique are what make them Pilates.

Pilates alignment targets muscle engagement for a sleek and toned look. The principles of alignment are generally the same as ballet, with an emphasis on lengthening and toning.

Pilates, like ballet, uses lateral (or intercostal) breathing. The lateral breathing technique makes it possible to keep the abdominal muscles flat while breathing through the rib cage.

Yoga Technique

Yoga includes more weight-bearing balance and flexibility work. There tends to be less emphasis on precision and the movements are usually bigger.

Rather than focusing on how the body looks, yoga alignment has to do with connections among chakras for optimal benefit, and with ways to deepen stretches and increase the ability to hold a pose.

Yoga includes a wider variety of breath techniques than Pilates. One important breath technique for yoga is belly breathing, or filling the belly with air on an inhale and flattening the belly to push air out on an exhale.

Can Pilates and Yoga Be Combined?

There are some basic aspects of Pilates and yoga techniques that are impossible to do at the same time. For example, we can't keep our bellies flat with Pilates breathing at the same time that we round our bellies with yoga breathing.

There are similar incompatibilities with many aspects of Pilates and yoga alignment. Both are anatomically safe when done correctly within the corresponding movement system. But if we try to combine them, we run the risk of mixing techniques in a way that is no longer safe.

If you want to combine Pilates and yoga in a single class, make sure you have a teacher who is properly trained in both, and able to guide you in a safe practice.

When I teach or train Pilates and yoga together, I start with Pilates exercises to engage core muscles with low impact. I then make a clear switch to yoga, taking a moment to reorient to a different practice before delving in.

Why I Do Pilates

In my pre-professional ballet training in the 1990s, Pilates exercises were always present. My teachers Nan and Mia Klinger had ties with George Balanchine, the “father of American ballet,” who had worked with Joseph Pilates in New York. Many of our ballet warm-ups overlapped with Pilates mat exercises. I didn’t know this at the time, but learned it many years later, when I took my first Pilates class and discovered that the technique was already familiar.

In the early aughts, I had not been training ballet for several years and had started to develop lower back pain. I tried a Pilates session at a local studio, and discovered that not only were the exercises and techniques familiar to me, but they made my back pain disappear. I began using Pilates mat exercises to redevelop some of the core strength I had lost since leaving ballet. I developed a practice to align my body and engage my core muscles every morning, and I've carried the practice with me to this day. I find that if I do 5 minutes of focused Pilates every day, I can bring strength, alignment, and mind-body connection into my daily life.

Why I Do Yoga

I took my first yoga class when I was training ballet as a teenager. In the 1990s, yoga was not yet popular, and I was by far the youngest person in my class. One of my ballet teachers had noticed that I wasn't connecting my movement with breath, and this was making my pirouettes awkward, tense, and off-balance.

I started making time for an hour a week of yoga, amidst my 20 hours of weekly ballet training. I found that it not only helped with my dancing, but that I also felt calmer and more in control of my life when I walked out of yoga class each week.

These days I practice yoga on my own to stretch tight muscles, challenge my balance, and meditate. Yoga is much more focused on stretching than Pilates, and I quickly find myself feeling stiff if I do Pilates alone. 

Sometimes I find it hard to have patience for a full stretch session. But, if I take a yoga approach to stretching, I can gently flow through different positions, discovering tight areas I didn't know I had, while continually moving.

I like the balance challenge of yoga because the positions are very different from ballet. Ballet balances help me correct and maintain a healthy and confident posture. Yoga balances often put weight on the upper body and challenge me to strengthen muscles that are less emphasized in ballet and Pilates.

Finally, I find yoga a great way to meditate through movement when I'm feeling too restless to sit in stillness. Sometimes, when I want to meditate but feel antsy, I'll start with meditative flow yoga and then sit or lie down briefly in stillness to connect with my breath and observe my thoughts.