Lessons from Pandemic Pilates

It’s now been six months since I started teaching Pilates via Zoom at home, due to the Covid-19 pandemic.  When I began, it was frustrating.  I thought we’d be working online for 2-4 weeks, 6 maybe, and 12 weeks at the worst.  That’s how long other countries had closed before deeming it safe to reopen.  Now here we are, more than twice that long, and with no end in sight.  

Teaching Pilates on a screen can feel crippling— Pilates teachers are used to moving around their client, seeing them from all angles, changing body positions to get a better view from up above or down below, zooming out and zooming in to catch the nuances of a person’s movement.  Now we get one single camera view and have to infer the rest.  And that’s not even taking into consideration video glitches, streaming delays, choppy audio, and other technical issues.

The Pilates body of work encompasses many hundreds of exercises— I learned about 600 just in my initial training of the Classical Pilates repertoire and have easily added 200-300 more in the additional training I have done since I started teaching.  But when teaching someone at home, more often than not we are limited to just the mat work and whatever props a person has available.  While the Pilates mat workout is rich and certainly stands alone by itself, it can be so nice to give a person feedback from a spring or a bar, with support in different planes of space they just can’t get to with the mat work.  The equipment becomes especially valuable when a person has some sort of limitation— maybe they can’t kneel or put weight on their hands, maybe they carry some extra weight on their body, maybe they can’t invert their hips over their shoulders with much success.  These are the times we Pilates teachers are especially grateful for the springs, and now we don’t have them. 

Skilled Pilates teachers don’t just demonstrate the exercises to a client, but have refined verbal skills to explain exactly what they want the client to be doing and feeling.  As online instructors, we are called upon even more to refine our teaching through speaking.  But sometimes, all a person might need is a simple touch on their body to understand the intended movement.  A touch can be worth a thousand words, especially for those who aren’t primarily auditory or visual learners, or who don’t have much body awareness yet.  There again, teaching online can be crippling.  It’s like taking all your senses and removing a few and relying on what is left.

But gradually, over the last six months, teaching online has become much easier.  Not just easier mentally, but also easier physically.  One thing that is taxing about teaching Pilates in a studio is that teachers use their bodies so much to partner and assist their clients, not to mention all the equipment changes and moves that might occur during an hour.  Just the spring changes may add up to a thousand in a week, grasping your hand, pulling, and releasing your hand, over and over again.  

I don’t feel so blind anymore.  Even though I can’t move 360º around a person, I can see more than enough to know what is going on in their body.  I can even infer what is going on in a body part that’s out of the camera view.  My clients sometimes say, “How did you even know I was doing that?!”  Pilates teachers see everything, even when they can’t see.

And even though most of my Pilates clients don’t have access to spring feedback from the equipment, I am floored by how strong they have gotten.  Some people have lots of props in their home arsenals, such as therabands, rollers, hand weights, yoga blocks, and balls, and these can all be used to simulate the support or resistance of the Pilates equipment.  But some people have nothing but a mat, and even they are getting stronger.  People are having to take their Pilates practice into themselves and truly own it.  They can’t rely on me to hold them or push on them— they have to create their own support, their own length, their own strength.  We don’t chit chat as much because it’s too unnatural on Zoom and clients are trying too hard to do the exercises just by listening to my words— so our lessons have become more focused and more mindful.  

While we are limited in our body of work, simply because of lack of access to equipment, the online lessons haven’t gotten stale.  Pilates as a method is so deep it’s practically impossible to stagnate or get bored.  I like to think in the last six months I haven’t taught the same lesson twice.  And I’m especially excited to see my clients back in the studio one day, relating their bodies to the springs and the equipment in a more intelligent and self-directed way, not having lost any strength during the pandemic but in fact having gained it, and improving their flexibility and coordination in mind, body and spirit to a degree they may never have reached were it not for Covid-19 forcing us to do things a little differently. 

For assistance in your home online Pilates practice, check out these downloadable videos. https://www.upliftpilatesslc.com/downloadable-videos