GYROTONIC: A Discipline for All

Jennifer Aniston, Madonna, Julianne Moore, Tiger Woods and Shaquille O’Neal are some of Hollywood’s fittest celebrities, and what they all have in common is
 Gyrotonic.

This discipline is much more than toning your body for the photographers; it is a holistic approach to movement that is designed to meet the needs of people of all ages, body types and abilities. “Gyrotonic is good for everybody,” says Instructor Silvia Luna Fagioli of Body Evolutions, a studio in Manhattan’s East Village. “Methodology allows users to stretch and strengthen muscles, while simultaneously stimulating and strengthening connective tissues in and around the joints of the body.

Silvia Luna Fagioli

Pulley Tower

These exercises are synchronized with corresponding breathing patterns, thus enhancing aerobic and cardiovascular stimulation and promoting neuro-muscular rejuvenation.” 

Silvia, a native of Cesena, has been working as a gyrotonic instructor for the past two years. The discipline was part of her life back in Italy where she was planning to open her own studio. “I became familiar with Juliu Horwarth’s discipline in Rome when I saw the Pulley Tower in another dancer’s studio.” Horvath, a Hungarian dancer with the Romanian  State Opera Ballet and the New York Opera Ballet, developed the gyrotonic discipline, its equipment, and exercises after many years of intense study and self-exploration. Because of injuries that ended his dance career, he began to develop what was once called Yoga for Dancers into the evolved gyrotonic exercises. This unique method offers the same benefits also acquired by practicing yoga, dance, gymnastics, swimming and tai chi, yet it is not derived from these exercises modalities. 

“Exercises are performed on the Professional Pulley Tower,” Silvia continues, “Through the years I have seen even people in their nineties doing the workout... once a lady walked in the studio using a cane; after the class, she felt she could walk better (this is because the circular, spiraling and undulating movements of gyrotonic help increase the functional capacity of the spine, contributing to a spherical and three-dimensional awareness, resulting in increased equilibrium).

This is what makes me happy, to see the change, physical and mental, happen right in front of my eyes. People feel better. They simply glow, from the inside out.”