Pat Guyton Pilates, Inc. is the home of Pilates Conservatory. I strive to deepen my knowledge of Pilates and to pass on the art of pedagogy to every student. I was deeply moved by this message from one of my Japanese students.
My student has studied the full Romana syllabus and is very well educated. Her intuition told her that she needed to learn how to apply what she had learned in her previous education so that she could teach with more knowledge. She is dedicated to helping her clients understand Pilates and achieve greater health. She also wanted to understand how to teach each student based on individual needs and goals. She emailed me about a referral that had her very worried. She had doubts about her ability to teach someone with superior movement experience as a dancer and an athlete. Her words inspired me.
Thank you. It was really challenging to teach her, but worked well.
I talked with my student. Our studio offers a “complementary session” to new members and it’s only 30 minutes. I thought “shoot” and only 30 minutes?
She looked to be very cautious about people. At first she just told me she is a college student, has a dance and sports experience but is not doing any sports now.
She said she was taught some Pilates exercises before and sometimes she’s doing those exercises on her own. She wanted to know if she’s doing in “correct way”.
So we started on Mat. Like as you said, she had an ached back and her spine doesn’t bend forward very much. Oh yeah. Thank you, Pat!!! So I told her with a few reasons about importance to have limber spine for healthy body, making space and articulating. And for her it’s very important doing exercise making correct C-curve.
After 20 minutes, she started to talk she used to do intense training as a professional athlete since childhood. I wish if we just had 1 hour not 30 minutes!
She didn’t look to be ready to do short spine, or knee stretches, in fact she was not very strong. We were running out of time anyway, so we just worked on leg & footwork and elephant on reformer.
Overall it worked well. Hopefully she’s coming back to studio but I don’t know yet.
I appreciate Pat for reminding me of basic. I could have been in panic without your help. I was a little too worried about having professional athlete that I almost forgot that basic of Pilates is always same.
Thank you to my student for reinforcing my belief that we can help each other rise to excellence in practice and in teaching. Thanks, Yuuko for sending me this student!