type of strength benefit from pilates?

[bents]

I'm naturally a slow-twitch muscle person, and pretty skinny. I don't like going to the gym or doing dumbbell routines. What I do enjoy is going to pilates classes, and not just because of the beautiful women. (Pilates is a like slower, strength oriented yoga, minus the metaphysics.) It involves a lot of holding awkward poses and slow precise movements, which requires strength, but not the kind of strength disc golf uses, which is fast and then over.

It's definitely great for balance and flexibility and an overall sense of feeling coordinated. But does slow movement strength training make you any better at fast motions like disc golf?

I don't know a lot about the biology of exercise benefits. Should I switch back to dumbbells (which I probably won't actually do because I hate it), or am I getting disc golf strength from Pilates?

[JR]

Welcome. I'm no expert but maintaining balance and getting more muscle power will help in keeping the wrist being bent down at the time that the disc leaves the hand minimizing the aerial drag on the disc maximizing the distance. Wrist rolls, hip tilts and planting the foot off the mark are reduced too increasing consistency and with practice probably a little accuracy too. Have you tried cable exercises with a cable that has handles in both ends? Attaching one end to a door handle you can pull the cable so mimic the arm movement of a throw with strengthening and conversion of the fast muscle cells into the even faster twitch cells. I saw a documentary that said that humans do not have slow cells at all. Pilates hits the core hard and that is the second largest power source in a throw as long as you utilize it in your form by twisting the torso to the right of neutral in the throw for a right handed backhand throw. That twisting motion is amplified by the arm acting as a lever. The faster the twist the higher the power generation through added arm thus disc speed is.