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Jillian profiled in...
Pilates Style magazine
May/June 2006, pp. 36-37
Pure Principles
by Randye Hoder
Back pain took Jillian Hessel from aching to "beaming."
How she found Pilates:
A dancer since age 12, Jillian Hessel had long been plagued with back pain so severe, she would numb it with cortisone shots. "I thought everyone who was a top athlete or dancer just lived with pain," she says.
Then she took one of those "classic slip-on-a-banana-peel falls" while dancing with the Geneva Ballet in Switzerland. An X-ray revealed that she had double curvature of the spine. Soon after moving to New York in the late 1970s and joining Ballet Hispanico, a fellow dancer in the company, who also suffered from back problems, convinced Hessel to try out her gym. She found herself "in a windowless room with all this strange equipment." It was there, in the studio of Kathleen Stanford Grant, one of only two teachers certified by Joseph Pilates, that her life's course was changed.
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© 2006 pilatesstyle magazine
