Equipment Differences

The different Pilates equipment is used for different reasons. The cadillac is used more for rolling and articulating the spine, the reformer for supportive body alignment, and the wunda chair for challenging stability. The cadillac has a long supportive bed type platform making sitting and kneeling while rolling backwards, or cat stretching easier and easy to understand. The reformer is great for lining up the shoulders over the hips and hips over knees and feet. Many exercises are done lying down on the reformer taking gravity out of the equation of good aligment. The carriage is on a wheeled track which can be moved by pushing from a bar at one end or pulling on pulleys from the other end. The wunda chair is a small piece of equipment that makes any exercise done on it very challenging. Smaller equipment means less support. This equipment is for more advanced clients, good balance is a must when working on the wunda chair. There are 2 barrels, small and ladder. The roundness of the barrels allows for support and feedback into the muscles during spinal sequencing either rounding forward or arching backward as in a back bend.

One of the beautiful things about Pilates is that almost all exercises can be done any piece of the equipment or the mat. Just because a client might not “get” an exercise on the cadillac doesn't mean s/he won't get it on say, the ladder barrel. The reverse is true as well, understanding back extension (arching the back) on the reformer's box will not always translate to the Wunda chair.

Different equipment means the springs can be loaded in different places, this is another reason why a client will understand the same exercise on the reformer but not on the cadillac. Leg circles is easier to perform on the reformer because the springs are connected to a pulley system that connects with the client's legs. On the cadillac the springs are directly attached to the clients legs via loop around the feet. This makes it harder to control the leg circles. Why ? Because the legs can move independently of each other. If one leg is weaker than the other it will show up in how symmetrical the circles are from left to right. If the left leg weaker than the leg is not going down as low as the right or it swings out to the side more than the right. Doing leg circles on the reformer the pulleys work together make it easier to control the size and speed of the circles. The lack of symmetry of leg circles can be hidden because of the pulleys.