Practice What You Teach: Pilates Detective Work

One of the things I love most about teaching Pilates is the “figuring it out” part of the work.  I’ve learned over the years that by using movement to create balance in your muscles and your body often times you can get rid of pesky aches and pains throughout your body and you can just plain feel better in your body.  So when a client has something going on(whether its a tight low back, foot pain, or whatever) I love being a detective who looks for clues as to what might be imbalanced in the body and then figuring out what we can do from a movement perspective to create more balance.

This type of detective work is not always a quick process as often times the solution is not an easy answer…like we need to strengthen your bicep muscle.  Many times the solutions come over time as clients learn to pay attention to their bodies and notice their own alignment and movement patterns.  By regularly moving in alignment the whole body starts to realign and become more balanced. My goal is to give people a toolbox of skills so they can learn to use movement to work toward a more balanced body.

As an instructor I find myself not just cuing clients and helping them with this process in their session but often times I spend my own movement time playing with ideas and movements I’m teaching them so that I can better help them.  Which leads me to my movement practice this week.  All week long I have been playing with movements related to the gluteus medius and gluteus maximus.  During some “client detective work time” I started thinking that my client wasn’t activating these muscles properly and/or there was an imbalance and so I started playing around with the best cues and movements to encourage proper engagement and strengthen those muscles.

So I’ve been playing with movement specific to these muscles in my own body and also just thinking about how I use these muscles in everything I do so I can better relate that to my client.  The result….a sore butt( in a good way) and some awareness in my own body that I have some imbalances in my own gluteus muscles.  I know this as I have really been working on awareness and firing both sides together and my left butt has been much more sore than my right!!  #awarenessiskey #jobperk #PilatesInstructor  #PilatesNerd