The craft of cueing, and how Pilates teachers find words that land
A cue is a handful of words that changes what a body does. A teacher gives hundreds of them in a session, most of them half-heard, and the good ones sound so natural that it is easy to forget someone chose them. They are anything but natural. Behind a single clean instruction in the Roll Up there is usually a teacher who tried six worse versions first.
New York teacher Anula Maiberg has written about cueing as an art form, and the comparison holds up. There are schools and styles, minimalists and maximalists, and the same exercise can be taught as a list of anatomical instructions or as one picture. Neither is wrong. The craft is knowing which one this body needs on this repetition.
Three kinds of verbal cue
Anatomical cues
These name a bone, a joint or a muscle: "draw the shoulder blades down your back", "keep both hip bones level", "lengthen the back of the neck". They are precise and they can be checked. Their weakness is that they pile up. Give someone four anatomical instructions at once and they will usually stiffen into a careful, joyless shape while trying to obey them all.
Imagery
Images organise the whole body at once: a string lifting the crown of the head, a zip closing from the pubic bone to the breastbone, the spine peeling off the mat like a strip of tape. A good image can fix three faults with no anatomy at all. A poor one leaves the client wondering what a zip has to do with their stomach. Images are also personal. One person's "melting into the mat" is another's cue to switch off completely.
Outcome cues
These point to an effect outside the body: "push the platform away", "reach for the far wall", "keep the carriage silent as it comes home". Motor-learning research has generally found that directing attention to an outside effect helps people move more efficiently than directing it to their own muscles, and many experienced teachers use outcome cues more than any other kind without having read a word of that research.
Touch and demonstration sit alongside all three. A light hand on the back of the ribs can say more than a paragraph, though it should always come with permission and a clear explanation of what you are about to do.
Minimal or wordy
Some teachers talk through every repetition. Others name the exercise, count, and offer one correction per set. Classical studios often lean towards the second style, partly because the set order means clients already know what comes next.
Wordy teaching suits early private sessions and clients who like to understand. Its risk is noise: after a while the client stops listening and starts nodding. Minimal teaching gives the body room to find the movement and keeps the rhythm of the session intact. Its risk is the beginner who is quietly lost by the third exercise.
Most good teachers do both, and the balance shifts as a client improves. You use more words while the shape is new and fewer once it settles, which follows the same logic as progressing a client through the order. A few habits help either way:
- Cue before the repetition, not at its hardest moment.
- Give one correction at a time and let it work for two or three repetitions before adding another.
- Say what to do, not what to stop doing.
- Let silence happen. A client concentrating hard does not need commentary.
Group work changes the rules. With ten machines in a room, cues have to be short, loud and directional, a point made in the piece on whether a ten-person reformer class is safe.
Cues that tend to work
The table pairs an anatomical cue with an image or outcome cue for some common exercises. None of them is magic. They are starting points to test and rewrite.
| Exercise | Anatomical cue | Image or outcome cue |
|---|---|---|
| The Hundred | Pump the arms from the shoulder joint, keeping the neck long | Slap the surface of a pond without making a splash |
| Roll Up | Curl the chin to the chest, then peel the spine off one vertebra at a time | Roll up and over a large beach ball in your lap |
| Single Leg Circles | Keep both hip bones heavy and level on the mat | Draw a small circle on the ceiling with your toes |
| Spine Stretch Forward | Stack the head over the pelvis, then round forward from the crown | Make a C shape, as if pulled back by a belt round your waist |
| Swan | Lengthen the front of the hips, then lift the breastbone forward and up | Shine a torch from your collarbones to the top of the far wall |
| Footwork (reformer) | Track the knees over the second toes and press through the whole foot | Push the floor away and make the carriage glide out and back |
| Elephant (reformer) | Lift the lower back towards the ceiling as the legs move the carriage | Move the carriage with your belly, not your heels |
Breath cues deserve their own care. If you find yourself saying "breathe into your ribs" and getting blank looks, the piece on lateral breathing has ways to teach it with hands or a band.
Building your own language
Teachers rarely invent cues from nothing. They borrow, adapt and discard. Doing that deliberately is faster than waiting for it to happen.
- Keep a cue notebook. Write down the exercise, the cue, and what the client's body did in response.
- Borrow openly from teachers you watch, then rewrite each cue in words you would actually say.
- Try every new cue on your own body first. If you cannot feel what it asks for, nobody else will.
- Test it on three different clients. If none of them changes, retire it.
- Record yourself teaching a short mat class and count the words per repetition. Most of us talk more than we think.
- Cut filler: "just", "I want you to", "go ahead and".
- Ask clients what they heard. The answer is often surprising and occasionally very funny.
A few cues are worth retiring early. "Suck your stomach in" tends to produce breath-holding. "Relax", said to someone straining, rarely relaxes anyone. "Engage your core" without saying how gives the client nothing to do. And any cue that works only because the client is too polite to admit confusion is not working.
Try this in your next class. Teach one exercise using no more than five words per repetition, and notice which words the room responds to. Keep those, and cross out the rest of the page.
