LifeSpan Pilates Launches Pilates Roots: The living lineage of the work Joseph Pilates called Contrology.

New York, NEW YORK, July 17, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Search “classical Pilates” in any major city and you will find dozens of studios claiming the title. Ask what makes their teaching classical, and the answers vary widely — a weekend certification, a style preference, a teacher who once trained with someone who knew someone. The word has become one of the most searched terms in the Pilates industry and one of the least defined.

LifeSpan Pilates, a certified Romana's Pilates International™ (RPI) center in Midtown Manhattan, has launched Pilates Roots — a growing educational archive at lifespanpilates.com/roots — to document what the Pilates method actually contains: where it came from, how it was preserved, what a genuine apprenticeship requires, and why the difference between a lineage and a label matters to anyone serious about the work.

‘The word ‘classical’ is everywhere right now, and we understand why people use it — it’s how students search for what they’re looking for. But the term has drifted so far from any consistent standard that it no longer tells you much. What we can tell you is what we actually are: a certified Romana’s Pilates Certification center, trained through the direct lineage, and held to ongoing standards by the organization Romana’s own family leads. Pilates Roots is how we document that.’

— Cynthia Shipley, LifeSpan Pilates

The Lineage Behind the Label

The Pilates method was created by Joseph Pilates, who called it Contrology — the complete coordination of body, mind, and spirit. He never issued weekend certifications. He taught the way craftspeople have always taught: through sustained proximity, direct correction, and years of apprenticeship alongside a master. The people who received that transmission directly became known as the Pilates Elders.

Among them, Romana Kryzanowska worked alongside Joseph Pilates longer than anyone — from the early 1940s through his death in 1967, and then continued teaching and certifying instructors for more than six decades. She did not modernize the method for commercial appeal. She preserved it. Her daughter Sari Mejia Santo, who trained with Joseph Pilates directly as a child, now Chief Educational Officer of Romana's Pilates International™ alongside her own daughter Daria Pace who now leads Romana’s Pilates International™ as Chief Executive Officer — making this the only living Pilates lineage that passes without interruption through the same family from Joseph Pilates himself.

LifeSpan Pilates holds active certification through RPI. Its instructors complete a structured apprenticeship — seminars, observation hours, supervised teaching, and ongoing mentorship — and maintain that certification through continuing professional education. That ongoing requirement is one of the things that distinguishes a current RPI center from a studio that trained in the lineage at some point but no longer maintains an active relationship with it.

What Pilates Roots Documents

The platform centers on a deeply researched cornerstone article, “The Roots of the Pilates Method,” fact-checked against primary sources including Joseph Pilates’ own published writings and Cathy Strack’s Love All Around, the definitive Romana Kryzanowska biography. Surrounding pillar pages go deeper on each major topic:

• Romana’s Teaching Legacy — who she was, what she chose to preserve, and why it matters that she spent 60+ years doing it
• The Pilates Apprenticeship — the RPI training model and what distinguishes it from short-form certification programs
• The Original Apparatus System — why the Reformer alone is not the method, and how the full system of equipment functions as an integrated whole
• The Six Principles — concentration, centering, control, breathing, precision, flow — with their historical origins and lineage attribution
• Contrology — the name Joseph Pilates gave his method and what it reveals about his original intent

‘Students come to us having searched ‘classical Pilates New York’ and found fifteen options. Pilates Roots exists so they can understand what to actually look for — what an apprenticeship involves, what the lineage means, what it looks like when someone has genuinely trained in this method versus borrowed the language of it.’

— Tasha Norman, LifeSpan Pilates

About LifeSpan Pilates

LifeSpan Pilates is a Romana's Pilates International™ certification center in New York City, offering private instruction, teacher training, and apprenticeship within the direct lineage from Joseph Pilates to Romana Kryzanowska to RPI’s current leadership, Sari Mejia Santo and Daria Pace. All LifeSpan instructors hold current RPI certification, maintained through ongoing continuing professional education. The Pilates Roots educational archive at lifespanpilates.com/roots is a growing public resource for students, teachers, and journalists seeking accurate historical and lineage information about the Pilates method.

Press Inquiries

Tasha Norman
contactus [at] lifespanpilates.com
917-965-2844
https://www.lifespanpilates.com/
33 West 46th Street, 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10036

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