For the first time, the Flower Mound High School baseball team has been going to Lifetime Fitness twice a week for six weeks to attend 45-minute Pilates classes. With hopes to increase flexibility and reduce injury, the team went back to the basics during their off-season.

Pilates is a system of exercises using special apparatuses, designed to improve physical strength, flexibility, posture, and enhance mental awareness.

Pilates has become increasingly more popular for male athletes, because Pilates works the whole body at the same time, helping the athletes’ bodies to get balanced symmetrically.

Lifetime Pilates instructor, Joyce Christensen, explains why it is so beneficial for baseball players to do activities like Pilates.

“Pilates looks at the whole body and tries to get it balanced symmetrically,” Christensen said. “Baseball is a unilateral sport where players are either throwing or taking-off in the same direction. It creates a lot of muscle imbalance.”

Just a few weeks after the team began Pilates, head coach Danny Wallace was proud to see all of the benefits the team had achieved in return for investing their time into the workout.

“We noticed immediately that the injuries in the core area went away, and our flexibility in the core area increased,” Wallace said. “Even our weight lifts began to show big improvements.”

After six weeks of Pilates, the players are now more fit, more fast, and more flexible. The team hopes that all of their training will positively affect their agility in the rest of the season.