Circling in on Gyrotonic[R]: it's tempting to compare the conditioning system with Pilates--but the real question is who should use which modality, and when?

In a fitness market that seems eternally hungry for new ways to hone and tone the body, Gyrotonic[R] is the latest find cropping up in health centers and studios across the country. The name has the sound of an early twentieth-century blood-boosting medicine, or of a modern, health-food take on the Greek sandwich, the gyro. But it is neither a variation on one of the old iron supplements nor is it a food, although its adherents say it has tonic properties and you do apply it to the body. Having more in common with gyroscopes and other things that rotate, Gyrotonic and its older sibling, Gyrokinesis[TM], are the names of the therapeutic movement system invented by former dancer and self-healing guru Juliu Horvath.

Myth has it that more than twenty years ago, after finding some swivel-chair mechanisms in the trash, the now 60-year-old Horvath engineered a system of stretching and strengthening that he hoped would improve both his turnout and pirouettes. First calling it the Juliu Horvath Method[R], he finally opted for the more esoteric Greek name Gyrotonic, meaning a circling ("gyro") stretch ("tonic").

Today, Gyrotonic is a full-blown stretching and toning system that combines elements of yoga, the biomechanical principles of ballet, and some of the ideas of physical therapy with the buoyant flow of swimming. It is intended not only for dancers but for athletes, people with disabilities or injuries, and anyone intent on fine-tuning the body.

Like Pilates work, it is in large measure a machine-based system with 150 exercises on 4 different machines that are designed to build core strength, along with muscular flexibility, joint suppleness, and whole-body fitness. But Horvath believes that "Pilates never used breath" and "never had circularity of movement," and he was determined that Gyrotonic have both. Based on repetitive cycles of circling movement and rhythmic breathing, all performed with diffused resistance from weights on whimsical-appearing machines, the work strives for nothing less than to synthesize the freedom and control of dance with the deep, awakening sensations of yoga.

Horvath is a charismatic and earthy Hungarian who grew up in Romania and danced with the State Opera Ballet in Timisoara until he defected in 1970. In late April 2003, he was at the San Francisco Gyrotonic studio to oversee the final stages of a Level 1 teacher certification. He displayed a tough charm as he discussed the students' performance, and it culminated in pithy bits of wisdom about life, movement, and freeing the body's energy. Many of these teachers-in-training were current or former dancers themselves, while the studio, housed in the same building as the San Francisco Dance Center, is administered by master trainers Debra Rose and Nora Heiber, former Alonzo King's LINES Ballet dancers.

When the day's certification workshop was over, Horvath grabbed a glass of wine and happily launched into the tale of how he developed Gyrotonic. Dressed in a flowing tunic and baggy pants, with hair to his shoulders, he talked in passionate, heavily accented English, describing himself as someone who had always been a physical polymath: Everything he attempted, from tennis to gymnastics, he said, he mastered with no instruction. "I had no lessons in anything!" he marveled, as though surprised still by such a fate.

Then he discovered dance. "A gymnast friend of mine took me to a ballet performance and said, 'Look at this!' "The ballet was Scheherazade, and the next day Horvath was class at the ballet, and a mere year later he is said to have begun performing featured roles with the company. Even though he had to go to class, master ballet vocabulary, and learn dances, he never lost his sense of his own virtousity. "Anything they showed me," he said, "I could do."

Although his tales of self-regeneration are enough to make even Zeus envious, Horvath modestly calls himself "a continuous learner." Injury, however, comes even to the gifted, and Horvath finally hurt himself so severely that it put an end to his dancing and thrust his learning in a far more self-conscious direction. With a ruptured Achilles tendon and damaged spinal disc, Horvath retreated In the Virgin Islands to recover and retool. There, he learned yoga, although not, he explained, through study ("I experienced it," he said), and even claims to have devised his own brand of acupuncture, which he used to heal his ruptured tendon. By his own accounts, it was then that he started on a path to becoming an intuitive adept, "seeing" the inner workings of the body and intuiting means to heal what was broken, like Joe Pilates before him.

Gyrokinesis was his first invention and is still frequently people's introduction to the Horvath system. Performed on low stools, it is a movement series that recalls yoga and exploits seven different movement directions of the body, from side-bending to circling, designed to tone and strengthen the upper body. Physical therapist and DANCE MACAZINE health and fitness writer Suzanne Martin, who has done some Gyrokinesis, says it is "like doing a modern dance class sitting down, but without specific instruction." Unlike most forms of yoga and similar to dance, positions flow from one to another, aiming, according to Horvath, to eliminate the beginning and end of every movement. Yogic breathing accompanies every move.

Through a combination of trial and error and insight, Horvath eventually designed the Gyrotonic equipment--primarily the Combination Pulley Tower Unit, along with four specialized machines: the Jumping Stretching Board, the Gyrotoner, the Ladder, and the Leg Extension Unit. He then transferred the movement principles of Gyrokinesis to the equipment. These are curvy contraptions made of wood and various pulleys that might look at home in a Grimm's fairy tale. They also would seem to make comparison and competition with Pilates almost inevitable.

For Nora Daniel, though, the question isn't Gyrotonic versus Pilates. It is which is the best modality when and for whom. Daniel, a Cyrokinesis teacher now ill Palm Desert, California, is the daughter of Bella Lewilzky as well as a former dancer in the Lewitzky Dance Company, Lar Lubovitch Dance Company, and Mark Morris Dance Group. She finds Pilates exactly right for people who need limits and physical containment, or have injuries to heal. Gyrokinesis, in turn, she believes, offers what she calls an engaged meditation with the external world through pulse and flow. "The work is entirely connected to breath. It is not about dropping into a deep embryonic state." Daniel says the movement encourages the mover "to experience a different reality of the inner body while the eyes are open and one is conscious of space."

Individual training is a luxury not everyone can afford, and Daniel is aware of that. For the same fee as a dance class, as compared to $60 or more for a single private training session on the machines, Gyrokinesis can give people many of the benefits of Horvath's system. Practitioners can even continue doing the exercises on their own. Daniel believes in Gyrokinesis primarily because the absence of an apparatus between the mover and the movement makes the method a first cousin of dance. Some of her students, in fact, have become interested in studying dance as a result.

But not everyone is keen about Horvath's circles, especially Gyrotonic's reliance on weighted repetitions, which, some critics say, can cause muscle strain and unwanted bulk. Pilates trainer Sarah Aimsworth, a Pilates instructor at the Joffrey Ballet School, has tried various therapeutic systems and concluded that Pilates, with its stress on minimal repetitions, is right for her dancers, and not just physically. Pilates, she believes, is designed to keep the mind active while activating muscles without injuring them.

"You do something three times and you do it right. Repetition is mindless and goes against ballet, which is so mindful." She also says that she finds that Pilates irons out her dancers' physical problems. "Just this summer, I had twenty girls come to me bow-legged and by the end their legs were straight." How did she do it? "It's not like I'm a genius or anything. It was just from getting them to use their inner thigh muscles."

"There's value to all these systems," and there is no magic bullet in any one regimen, says Martin. "With Gyrotonic there's an emphasis away from confinement. It works on opening the body, and is almost a belief system, relying on a lot of imagery as opposed to anatomic specificity. They try to free the person." And that, she says, "sure feels good."

Ann Murphy is a Berkeley, California-based writer on the arts.