Why the best Pilates teachers never stop being students
A Pilates certificate shows that you can teach the repertoire safely and competently. It does not make you a finished teacher, and the teachers most worth learning from are usually the first to say so. The certificate is a licence to keep learning in public, with clients watching.
Classical studios make the point neatly. Elaine Ewing runs Rhinebeck Pilates, a classical studio in upstate New York, and studios of that kind aim to teach the exercises as close as possible to the way Joseph Pilates left them when he died in 1967. You might expect there to be little left to study once the order is in your head. The teachers who last tend to find the opposite.
A certificate is a starting line
Training gives you the exercises, the safety rules and a framework for building a session. The first year of teaching then shows you the gaps. There is the client whose shoulders creep up in every exercise no matter what you say. There is the cue that works beautifully on one person and baffles the next. There is the transition you can do in your sleep and cannot explain.
Bodies vary far more than any manual can show. So does the method itself, once you look closely. Spring settings, rhythm, the reason one exercise follows another, the way a single cue can change where effort lands: these take years to understand, and nobody gets them from a training manual alone.
Being taught yourself
Of all the ways to keep studying, regular lessons with a more experienced teacher do the most. Someone else sees your habits, the ones you cannot feel any more. You notice which cues land in your own body and which slide off. And you remember what it is like to be the client, slightly nervous, trying hard, not sure what is being asked.
Once a month is a sensible rhythm for a working teacher, more often if you are preparing for something specific. Every so often, book a session with someone from a different lineage too. Watching how another school teaches the same exercise sharpens your eye for what yours is really asking. Teacher associations exist partly to keep this kind of contact going; Josie Calloway's piece on guilds and teacher lineages explains how they work.
Workshops, chosen with care
Workshops are the most visible kind of continuing study and the easiest to overdo. Five weekend courses in five unrelated topics leave you with five folders of notes and not much change on Monday morning. Better to choose a workshop because your teaching has raised a question you cannot answer: a run of clients with stiff upper backs, say, or a piece of apparatus you rarely use.
Then give each new idea time. Try it in your own practice for a couple of weeks, use it with one willing client, and only then teach it widely. Some certifying bodies and associations ask for a set number of continuing education hours to keep a certification current, so check what yours requires and plan the year around it rather than scrambling in the final month.
Your own practice
Teachers who stop working out lose their feel for timing and effort, and their cueing drifts towards words and away from the body. Two sessions a week of your own, done as a client would do them, are a reasonable minimum. Do the full order at least once a week, not only the exercises you teach most.
Keep a short practice log: date, what you did, springs, anything that felt off. Over a year it becomes a record of how your own body has changed, which is useful when a client asks how long things take. It also shows which exercises you quietly leave out. Those tend to be the ones you teach least well.
Reading the source
Joseph Pilates wrote two short books, Your Health (1934) and Return to Life Through Contrology (1945). Many teachers reread them once a year, and each reading lands differently as teaching experience builds. Exercises you once thought you understood make a different kind of sense after a few hundred clients. Imogen Hale's piece on his phrase 'complete coordination of body, mind and spirit' is a good companion to the 1945 book.
Beyond the source texts, a decent anatomy reference earns its shelf space, and so does a little history of the method. Reading research summaries on Pilates and exercise in general keeps your claims to clients honest.
The apprenticeship habit
Comprehensive training is built on apprenticeship: hours of watching qualified teachers, practice teaching under supervision, being corrected. The best teachers keep that habit long after the logbook is signed. They observe colleagues' sessions, trade lessons with other teachers, and take on apprentices of their own, since explaining your choices to a trainee is one of the fastest ways to find out which of them you can justify.
Experienced teachers also have a part to play in raising standards generally. Opening the studio to observers and mentoring newer colleagues does more for the method's reputation than complaining about teachers with thin training.
A year of study for a working teacher
| How often | What | Why it helps |
|---|---|---|
| Weekly | Two sessions of your own practice, one of them the full order | Keeps timing, effort and transitions in your body |
| Weekly | Ten minutes of notes after teaching | Catches the cue that worked and the one that did not |
| Monthly | A lesson with a more senior teacher | Someone sees your habits; you remember being the client |
| Monthly | Observe another teacher's class or session | New cues and a different sense of pace |
| Quarterly | Reread a chapter of one of Joseph Pilates's books | The original intention behind the exercises |
| Yearly | One or two workshops chosen from questions in your notes | Depth in one area instead of a scatter of topics |
None of this needs to be grand. Keep a small notebook in your studio bag, and after every lesson where you are the student, write down one cue that changed something in your own body. Use it with a client before the week is out.
