I’ve said it before and I will say it again – Pilates is a practice. It is one in which we continue to grow, learn, and evolve. There is no finish line. I was reminded of this this past weekend while participating in Cara Reeser’s Kathy Grant Legacy Training Workshop in Birmingham, Alabama.
I spent the weekend with 17 other Pilates teachers and enthusiast learning about Kathy Grant and her tool kit or foundation elements of Pilates. Often when I go away for Pilates training my students are eager to see what new choreography I will bring back for them. This was not one of those trainings! It was so much more. One of the comments I loved from Cara was that Pilates needs to work for our students not the other way around. Many times she would tell us, you are working to hard at that movement. And then she’d show us how to move smarter and more efficiently.
We spent a large portion of the weekend working on the basic elements that build to the bigger Pilates movements. I tell my students, “It is often the smaller movements that are most challenging.” We lived that this weekend. We deconstructed the work and found the parts that challenge us (that often times we could use momentum or different muscles to get through!) – and we worked on those tricky parts.
It was eye-opening and I felt things in my body that I had not before. I learned things about my body, I had not before. I’ve made progress in the past 4 days on movements that perplexed me by using these building blocks. I also took away lots of cues and tools for working with a varied population. It is rare to find someone who doesn’t have ‘something’ and we worked on making Pilates work for those folks. Cara generously shared with us her knowledge and the Legacy of Kathy Grant. I was humbled and inspired this weekend.
I will always be a student in Pilates and for that I am grateful!
12South Pilates & Personal Training 