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Great Great Book!!

Customer Rating:
I just got this book a couple of days ago and have been reading it cover to cover. I love it! I would consider it one of the best books on the basics of pilates that I have picked up. I have found it to be extremely helpful...Karon Karter has done a wonderful job...thanks so much.

Just couldn't figure it out

Customer Rating:
I'm usually someone who learns really well from books, even physical skills, so when I borrowed this book and the "Pilates Workout for Dummies" DVD from a friend I was pretty confident that I'd be able to learn something from them both.

The DVD was pretty good-- it was quite a workout and some of the exercises were pretty challenging for me as a beginner, but even though I'd never done Pilates before, I was never left wondering what I was supposed to be doing.

Unfortunately, this book wasn't very useful at all. I tried it a few months ago and I couldn't make head or tail of the instructions, or figure out what exactly was supposed to be going on. It sat on the shelf for a while, and today I gave it another try. Still no luck. Maybe it's the author's style-- they write very long instructions for each exercise, yet somehow they never seem to actually get across any useful information. The pictures are some help but not as much as I'd like. In any case, I think I'll be buying my own copy of the DVD, but not of this book.

What I started with

Customer Rating:
I started doing Pilates 5 years ago at the age of 16. I actually started with this very book, believe it or not. I have since had experience with others - a VHS by Ana Caban, Yogilates by Jonathon Urla, Winsor Pilates, Brooke Siler. I would have to say that the best out there are from this book and Brooke Siler's The Pilates Body.

In fact, now after 3 kids, 1 natural birth and 1 cesarean, I am going to back to this book.

This book is great because it goes into depth; teaching you how to add more moves in levels of advancement as opposed to doing them all (Mari Winsor).

All-in-All, this is a great book. Of course you want to see a view of it, or better yet work with a pilates instructor, but this is a good start.

Badly written

Customer Rating:
This book was badly written, and the writing interferes with the content. It is poorly organized with no central theme in each chapter, and there are often two adjacent sentences in a paragraph that don't seem to connect in any way. There are also a number of typos and grammatical ambiguities that compound the problematic organization, rendering the book incomprehensible in some parts.

Probably the biggest problem in this book is the lack of relevant and captioned illustrations. In some cases, exercises are only described with words, and there will be a single photo placed in proximity to two different exercises (so, which is it for, exactly?). To make matters worse, the book is printed in B&W and many of the figures wear black making it difficult to see the articulation that the movement is trying to convey. This is the only book I'll have ever returned to a bookstore.

Unfortunately, the author of the book really wants to do well. It's almost entirely the editor's fault for: not helping to establish a solid organization; checking for silly errors; using high production values. With a little guidance, this could have been a much better book.

Pretty good information

Customer Rating:
This is very detailed, but was not the "easy to do" guide that taught me how to do it anywhere, anytime. However, when I started buying tapes, I knew what I was doing. I'd buy this as a primer to the tapes.