#PracticeWhatYouTeach: Getting Down and Back up

Can you sit on the floor and stand back up without touching your hand or knee on the floor?  Last week when I took Benjamin Degenhardt’s Upright Pilates workshop he started by talking about this ability. There has been some interesting studies done on life expectancy in older adults being directly correlated to this ability.  The first thing that popped into my head when this discussion started was….Can I do it?    When I got to try it during workshop time I was a little embarrassed at how hard it was for me (I am a Pilates teacher after all….). ..and I have to tell you I had to use a hand on the floor.  This bothered me and I made a pact with myself to practice and master this!

Have I mastered it yet? Nope. Have I been practicing…you bet.  Almost every time I practice Pilates I take a little time to try out my ability to get down and stand back up. Somewhere in that practice I learned a lot about my teaching and about what I can do to help others move better in their life. Here’s a quick video of my 8 year old daughter and I practicing!

I had been practicing the crossed leg sit and stand which is often shown as the example of getting down and back up. I found myself getting creative and exploring what was so hard about the movement and what I needed to do to be successful at it.   I discovered if I added a little rolling like a ball in once I sat down I could use my momentum to help get me back up.  I learned that the position of my feet and ankles made a big difference in my success of standing back up.  And then at some point as I practiced I had an aha moment.  It went a little something like this in my head:

Most of my clients are probably not going to be able to do this. Is there any benefit to training them to get up and down exactly like this? Does it really matter if one hand or a knee touches the floor?  Probably not.   Is there benefit in helping them strengthen and balance their bodies in a way that allows them to safely get down and up from the floor? Yes of course!! Do we do this type of work in our sessions?…ALL THE TIME!!   What can I do as a teacher that would benefit my clients the most when it comes to getting up and down?

My conclusion:  Talk about the benefits of Pilates more! The Pilates exercises are so well designed to help us live life and do little things like get up and get down to the floor. Sometimes I need to be reminded as a teacher that my job is not just to teach the correct way to do an exercise or movement but to motivate, inspire and educate clients on why this work will help them live life better. I don’t know about you, but I’m much more motivated to do the detailed work of an exercise when I know why I’m doing it and what it will help me do in the rest of my life.

As a quick example, we often have specific foot and ankle positions that we use in Pilates exercises.  Sometimes I feel like these adjustments seem small or insignificant in the big picture of the exercise to clients.  I have found though that when I talk about how important it is to have flexible, strong feet when you want to get up off the floor or at that moment you need to catch your balance….clients seem to connect to that more, something clicks and they make the effort to work on that detail of the exercise.

Don’t be surprised if you hear me teaching a little bit more about not just how to do an exercise but why we do it! I would love to know from you: is this type of teaching helpful for you as a student? Are there any particular exercises or pieces of the Pilates exercises that standout for you because of what they help you do in your day to day life?