Criticism

It's been a while since I've taken time to write.

Sometimes, all it takes is a little thorn in your side to get the creative juices flowing.

It just so happens that I had read this blog post from Carolyne Anthony's blog:
http://www.thecenterforwomensfitness.com/blog-1/bid/53650/We-are-all-created-equal-in-the-Pilates-world
Carolyne is a master instructor with an amazing understanding of Pilates AND a genius with its pre and post natal applications.

A few days later, one of the regular students of our studio came in and related to me a tale of her experience when she decided to try a different location, one that she decided to try when she got what I will call a "groupon like certificate." Everybody just calls them all "groupons" whether they are from Youswoop or Living Social or another entity.

I digress.

I had told this student, as I have tried to tell all my students, that my main goal at the studio is to create an unpretentious environment in which everyone can comfortably experience Pilates' work under the guidance of knowledgeable instructors. We all come from different backgrounds: From the Center Pilates, Power Pilates, Village Pilates, Fletcher Pilates, and STOTT Pilates. I think that we actually are better for it. Essentially, at the core, no pun intended, we teach the same exercises, but sharing our different experiences with each other has given all of us entire new bags of tricks. It is also way more than different cues and imagery. We learn from each other how to solve the mysteries of when student X does an exercise, she can't quite get this part right. We learn to tweak our spring tensions, gear bars, and body positions to help an exercise make sense to a student. The same equipment and body adjustments can be made to completely challenge and boggle the mind body connection of a student.   We look at our differences in philosophy and technique not as something to argue about, but as something to illuminate a deeper understanding of the work, and we always ask. "Why?"

So, when this student told me about her experience at this other place, I was a little chafed. Her first instructor was strict and authoritative in the worst sense of the word. She also made sure to mention that she learned her Pilates in New York years ago, repeatedly. Although my personal bias is that it shows your "age" as a Pilates instructor as well or your complete disconnect with the Pilates educators of today to tout your "New York" training from a long time ago, I will say that it is possible that this woman had a wonderful comprehensive education from one or many Pilates elders.  Based on the rest of the story, I doubt it. The coup de grace with this instructor is that she left this student feeling like she didn't know anything about doing Pilates, even though this student has been working out at PPP since June.  The instructor repeatedly informed her,"You're doing that wrong" and never really told her how to do it "right."  Her biggest failure was that her attempt to win over the student by trying to prove that we had not taught her anything backfired. 

I've never been comfortable teaching from the negative. Maybe it works.

The second experience is a real kicker as well.

My dear, sweet student decided to give another instructor a try. This time it was a man. He asked about her previous experience, and she told him she'd been coming to PPP since June. He then proceeds to warn her that at PPP, we are "classically" based and that his approach was contemporary and going to be a lot different. She said when all was said and done, it wasn't that different. He maybe had her turn her leg into parallel when she had it externally rotated through the hip.  What gets me about this guy is that he has never met me before in his life. He has never set foot in my studio, and obviously he hasn't even looked at the website. So how can he claim with authority to know what I teach?!?

I understand the compulsion to build your credentials by criticizing someone else's, but I think I learned early on that if you don't have anything to back it up, you just look petty when you criticise someone else.

And yet, here I am criticizing someone else, but it's okay, because I'm criticizing their being critical....right?

What it all comes down to is an affirmation that the formula I teach by is working:
Be honest
Don't guess
Know your work
And continue to get to know it
Have an open mind
Remember that it is about the students, and not yourself.
Remember also that it's Joseph Pilates that invented the work, not you.

And for today, that's all she wrote.

Don't believe the hype.

Trends cannot always be trusted.
http://www.acefitness.org/getfit/studies/toningshoes072010.pdf

Above is a link to a recent study on fitness shoes that are unstable on the bottom. According to this, there is little difference between this and regular running shoes. The only real benefit is that it might motivate people who aren't otherwise compelled to take a walk.

My mother has a pair of these. A few people I know and think are very intellegent people have multiple pairs. All of them have the feeling that they are accomplishing something. For many, that is a very difficult thing to acheive in the realm of fitness.

I consider that an advantage. Just like I consider other trends like "hot yoga", cutely named fitness classes such as booty ballet and buff brides bootcamp, and infomercials to be advantageous. Sometimes, we need that excitement to get moving, and I'm all for movement. Heck, in my days working as a waitress at the Cheesecake Factory, I burned off a slice of cheescake a day by doing TaeBo with Billy Blanks on my TV in my little studio apartment.

Just remember, folks, that this formula, in it's purest essence, will always hold true: get off the sofa, move around in a way that you enjoy and causes you to sweat a little, or almost lose your breath. It doesn't take money. It just takes motivation to get up.

I am a big believer in losing your breath once a day in any fashion, by being inspired, surprised, or just plain juumping up and down.CARDIOLATES, anyone?

The Domes

Once a student has been made aware of postural/ alignment issues, one of the most common approaches I see them take is to throw their body in the opposite direction. If they slouch, they force themselves upright. If the hike up one or both or their shoulders, they try to shove them back down. I understand the impulse. You want to fix the problem as soon as possible. Unfortunately, it's not as black and white we would like. We can't just "put it back" when we realize that it's out of place.

When we get into mind sets like these, it's important to remember that ultimately, our goal is centering. When all is said and done balanced muscle development is the goal.

So when trying to self correct your posture, think of lining up your "domes". This is a little imagery trick I learned from two amazing Pilates instructors: Arlene Bass and Sharon Gawin in their "Unlocking Thoracic Mobility" workshop. (I always feel the need to give credit where credit is due.)

Your body has natural structural domes. Going from the bottom up, the first is in your feet. If you place your feet together, you'll find that the arches of your feet form two halves of a dome. Going up to the pelvis, your pelvic floor is a dome. Above that, your diaphragm is dome like, and then over that the roof of your mouth is also a dome. I've found that if you try to center these domes, one on top if the other, you'll develop a relaxed centered posture over time, rather than one that slouches out of tiredness and forces itself back up.

Give it a try.

Let me know how it works for you.

Computer Neck

If you're reading this, I would wager that you are probably, at this very moment, slumped forward, developing tension at your occipital ridge (the base of your skull), rounding your shoulders, and collapsing your upper spine forward in the direction of your screen. You may or may not be leaning to one side in order to compensate for one arm being on the ready to use the mouse and/or sinking deeper into one hip than the other.

You're so busted!

Let's face it, no matter what your vocation, you likely spend three or more hours in front of a computer. If your job requires it, you spend even more time. Even if you aren't required by work to be in front of a computer, you there is so much recreational fun to be had. I am right there with you. I spend at least two hours a day coordinating your schedules, communicating with instructors and business partners, and in addition to do love online shopping and a video game or two. I am fortunate enough to have equipment steps away, and while I am not as religious about it as I would like to be, I do often walk 10 feet away from my grunt work and lie back on the spine corrector and open my chest and relax my neck when things get tiresome. Some of you, I'm sure also have the benefit of expensive Herman Miller chairs or those stability ball chairs. Still, all of us slouch, and the more we do it the worse it can get.

What this is creating is something that I call computer neck. You can't usually see it because it's behind you, but often this chronic slouching makes your head pitch forward or your body and the base of your neck sitck out to the back, and that's just the visual. The misuse of your muscles creates an imbalance of the spine that can cause fatigue and headaches and even blurred vision.

Let me tell you why repetitive slouching gets harder to correct the longer that we do it. Our muscles are coated in the thin layer of tissue called fascia. Fascia is a connective tissue that is found throughout the body. Like other structural elements in the body, when stress is applied to it, it thickens. Therefore, extended periods of slouching  can lead the the thickening of the fascia of the muscles holding you in that position. Essentially, it's like when your mom told you not to make ugly faces because you'll freeze that way.  The buildup of the facscia surrounding your body can cause you to "freeze" in that position. You aren't likely to freeze solid, but fascial thickening is one of the reasons why if you have become a chronic sloucher or developed a computer neck that it is tiring to return your body to an upright position. The other reason it is difficult is that you are not habitually using the muscles that hold you upright and they have weakened.

SO, how do we escape this downward spiral before we all look like humpbacked little tired people?

We move.

Two things will help break down fascia that has thickened: massage and movement. So now that I've given you an excuse to go get a massage, know that you should also head down to your friendly neighborhood Pilates studio www.pppilates.com to train those muscles that have fallen out of balance.

You'll find that with a focused diligence, you can rediscover the alignment you had before you had that 9-5  (or for some of you that 24/7) job.

The MAN behind the Method

I used to hear this a lot, "So is Pilates a kind of yoga?" Nope, no it's not, and the explanation of the differences is another blog entirely, but one of the primary differences is that it's not ancient. The fact that it is not ancient is what makes it even more accessible. While it's too late to train with the man himself, it is still possible to work with people who have been worked out by or worked with him, which is pretty amazing.

In the years that I have been teaching, more has been discovered about this remarkable innovator. Here is my  attempt to put it all together.

Joseph H. Pilates was born sometime in 1880's in Mönchengladbach, Germany. His father was a prize-winning gymnast of Greek ancestry, and his mother a naturopath.  In his youth, he suffered from asthma, rickets, and rheumatic fever. One source that I have read says that his last name prompted the kids at school to call him a "Jesus killer" which caused many fights. Since he was so scrawny and didn't fare well in these fights, he dedicated his life to improving his health and his physical strength.

I also read somewhere that a family physician gave him an anatomy book: "I learned every page, every part of the body; I would move each part as I memorized it. As a child, I would lie in the woods for hours, hiding and watching the animals move, how the mother taught the young." He studied both Eastern and Western forms of exercise including yoga, Zen, and ancient Greek and Roman regimens. By the time he was 14 he had developed his body to the point that he was modelling for anatomy charts.

It could be both of these things, or part of none of it could be true.

When he moved to England in 1912, he earned a living as a professional boxer, circus-performer, and self-defense trainer at police schools and Scotland Yard. Nevertheless, the British authorities interned him during World War I along with other German citizens in a camp on the Isle of Man. Not many of my students even know what an interment camp is. A handful of people come to me and tell me that they heard that Pilates was in prison. Let me break it down for you to dispel the myth.  The Isle of Mann is an island in the Irish Sea between Ireland and Great Britain. During World War I,  people who were from "enemy combatant" countries we detained there. At first, when I pictured this, I thought of concentration camps. Horrifying. It turns out that on the Isle of Mann, people were allowed to do pretty much what they wanted, they were fed, they were taken good care of a led comfortable lives. They just couldn't leave.  It was during this involuntary break, he began to intensively develop his concept of an integrated, comprehensive system of physical exercise, which he himself called "Contrology." He studied yoga and the movements of animals and trained his fellow inmates in fitness and exercises. The legend is that  that these inmates survived the great pandemic of 1918 due to their good physical shape which was a result of exercising with Joseph Pilates.

Call me crazy, but sometimes I think, "How nice! I wish someone would put a roof over my head and feed me so that I can develop my own system of exercise."  I know, it's naive.

After the war (WWI), he returned to Germany and collaborated with important experts in dance and physical exercise such as Rudolf Laban. In Hamburg, he also trained police officers. When he was pressured to train members of the German army, he left his native country, disappointed with its political and social conditions, and emigrated to the United States.


The year 1925 is the approximate time when Pilates migrated to the United States. It is thought that he was brought over by a boxing promoter to train boxers in his method.  On the ship to America, he met his future partner Clara. I recently attended a presentation by Ken Endleman, the founder of Balanced Body (a great guy if you ever have the chance to meet him). He has been doing some research on his own and discovered that there is no official record of Joseph and Clara ever actually marrying. Is has long been assumed that Clara was his second wife. Ken's research finds that  Clara may have actually been his third wife, if they married at all. What a cad!

In truth, it's really none of our business, and we always talk about him nowadays as a man before his time...maybe he was just setting a future trend for eternal cohabitation. I digress.


 The couple founded a studio in New York City and directly taught and supervised their students well into the 1960s. Joseph and Clara Pilates soon established a devout following in the local dance and the performing-arts community of New York. Opera singer Roberta Peters, well-known dancers such as George Balanchine and Martha Graham became devotees and regularly sent their students to the studio for training and rehabilitation.

Joseph Pilates wrote two books, that we know of:  Return to Life through Contrology and Your Health. He was also a prolific inventor, with over 26 patents cited.

Joseph Pilates died in 1967 at the age of 84 in New York. I used to tell, which great dramatic flair, the story I heard of how he died of complications from a fire in his studio. In the tale that I was told, Joseph went to the studio to rescue his equipment and fell through the floor. When the firemen arrived, they found him hanging from a rafter by his hands and he had been there for hours!  That just goes to show that you can't believe everything that you hear. I just came across this quote from Mary Bowen several places on the Internet:

"The Fire" - People often ask me "Did Joe Pilates die in a fire?" One woman in London where I was giving a workshop at the Pilates Foundation of UK last May said she had read that it was so in The New York Times. To set the record straight - no, Joe did not die in a fire. He died two years later, in 1967, of advanced emphysema from smoking cigars for too many years (which he took up out of disappointment that he wasn't taken more seriously by the powers that be, especially physicians, during his lifetime). His personal friend, Evelyn de la Tour, shared that with me. There was a fire in 1965 in the storage room at the back of his floor. The studio and his and Clara's apartment were in the front of the building and were undamaged. Bruce King had an apartment near the storage room. He had to move out due to severe smoke damage. The day after the fire Joe went to inspect the extent of loss to his possessions in the storage room and one of his feet fell through a hole in the floor scrapping his leg. That was the extent of his injury from the fire.


That just goes to show you, you can't believe everything you hear.
My mentor, as a joke, told someone in teacher training that Eve Gentry died doing Eve's lunge. A spring snapped and hit her in the jugular. Within a week, all of the teacher training students were retelling the story with passion.

I will be really intrigued to see what truths and what myths survive about Joseph Pilates a century from now. He will probably have a harem and will have been able to fly.

AIC

The brilliance of this system is truly unparalled. Most anatomy study in the fitness world is done two dimensionally. We look in books at artists renderings, which are often accurate, but in most cases, we are looking at a cross section of a few muscles or a single diagram of one muscle. It can be difficult to envision how it all comes together. If we are lucky, we can learn how to palpate the bony landmarks and the bodies of the muscles on ourselves or others to get an idea. If we are very lucky, and passionate about anatomy, we may get the opportunity to observe or participate in a cadaver dissection, but even that process can be fraught with difficulty because there are a lot of other things in a body, and you are also taking it apart. You are subtracting.

There is just something about building the anatomy and adding it to the framework of the bones that makes complete sense. I’ve done the essential anatomy twice now, and I feel after only two times, I can name every muscle on the torso, the upper arm and upper leg, without having to look at a book. I also feel fairly confident about the muscles of the lower leg after only once. I’ve looked at all of these muscles hundreds of time for reference in books, but it wasn’t until I had built them and talked about them while I was building them that I truly understood their form and function. The Zahourek system of learning is brilliant.

Once the whole thing is put together, you also can perceive both the complexity and simplicity of the whole muscle system. You process the complexity because it’s hard to put all of that together. The simplicity you see is that there is not a muscle in the system that doesn’t serve some sort of purpose, even if it’s just to stabilize a joint….ha, I make it sound like joint stabilization isn’t important….we’d fall apart without it.

I have to also give tons of credit to Nora, our instructor. It’s not only the system itself that works. Her depth of knowledge, wealth of experience, and passion for sharing the information with focus and purpose made our teacher training 120% effective, if not more…..I know….that’s not very scientific, but I’m making a point. I’m already absolutely in love with the learning process, and I’m going to work doubly hard at teaching so that I can instill the same passion for it that I have and so that I can honor Nora and the work she has put into the process.

Pilates Scientists

I'm in Sacramento, CA right now. I'm taking a course that is training us to teach Anatomy in Clay through Balanced Body University. I'm surrounded by the most intelligent, sensitive, supportive, and hilarious Pilates instructors and bodyworkers from all over the world, and it reasserts this idea that I have about instructors. There are two kinds. There are plain instructors, and then are truly Pilates scientists. There are those who learn a system of exercises and how to modify them, and then there are these amazing people who examine it from all sides, turn it inside and out and come up with purpose and intention for the traditions and new proven ways to use the method with incredible results.

I've always wanted to be the latter, but until now haven't been connected to the resources. Now, I have this amazing network, and the journey begins.