Episode 305
305. Tonight We're Gonna Teach Reformer Like It's 1996, with Heath Lander and Raphael Bender
Most of us were trained to teach using outdated methods designed for boutique studios in the ‘90s.
But tonight it's 2025 and Pilates is different now.
In this episode, we unpack why group teaching feels so hard — and why it’s not your fault. You don’t need more confidence. You need the right tools.
Whether you’re teaching 6 or 16, this convo with Heath Lander will show you how to teach large groups powerfully, effectively, and without burning out.
Connect with me on Instagram: @the_raphaelbender
Connect with Heath on Instagram: @contrologycollective
Download a free course guide:
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Transcript
Untitled project from Captivate
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April: m to teach in the industry of: ut there in the industry and [:Why are they saying that? In order to be a quote, proper Pilates instructor, you need to, you know, know all of the apparatus, know all of the principles, know the history of Pilates, you know, all of that kind of stuff. And why isn't that important?
Tell, tell, tell me how, tell me, tell me why we are here to talk about this today. Why, why are we talking about this? Uh, why are we here to talk about this? Well. We're here to talk about this because I'm really passionate about,
teaching because people love [:'cause you're juggling four individual programs as possible. Five is kind of black belt level and six is basically impossible. If, if they're getting completely individual programs, I mean, you can do it, but it's not scalable. You need people who are really skillful to do it. Yeah. I'm gonna, I I, I agree with you.
Basic definition. We've talked about that before. It's basically where everyone's doing the same thing. But I'm gonna say, like for me, a large group is more like seven or eight because that's where people that I've talked to and I've talked to a lot, seem to have kind of a, a, it's kinda like off the edge of the map where it goes gray in those sort of medieval maps and it says, here be dragons.
gerous. That would be scary. [:And it, to me it feels, that's my experience. And a lot of instructors feel like, oh yeah, five, I could do, yeah, six. Yeah. Could probably do six, but seven, eight. Yeah. That's where I'm like, yeah, nah. That's, that's a lot. That's when you say you can do six, are you giving him every single person a different program?
Uh, no. I think, well, so what you are differentiating here is that the skill of teaching individuals, whether you teach one individual or two individuals, or three individuals, everyone's doing their own program. Mm-hmm. Whereas what I'm differentiating is just literally the number of clients in the room, regardless of whether they're doing the same or different.
lled up about is that people [:What I'm saying is like, yeah, a hundred percent agree with that. And there are people out there that have just kinda like brute forced it and sort of figured it out for themselves. I've just taught a truckload of classes and they've gone, okay, I can kind of, sort of figure out how to teach a group now.
Uh, but I couldn't do more than five or six, you know, like, and that's because dear listener, if this is you, I say this with all love and respect. They just don't have the level of skill required to teach a larger group, you know? Right. And what I'm saying is that what defines that skill is that you have the ability to teach multiple bodies one program effectively, which means you've gotta have variability in the intensity.
'cause [: hurt themselves, but you had [:Right. But even, even if everybody's doing the same move, like let's say everyone's doing long stretch, but you've got seven or eight people in there, and you've got someone who's a beginner and someone who's intermediate and someone who's got a sore back and someone who's pregnant and someone who's got a, you know, whatever.
It's like, well you, if you don't have a system for scaling that to the group, you and you have to rush around and go, okay, Sally, I'm gonna take a spring off for you. Okay, Mary, I want you to lift your knees up. Okay. You know, John, put your foot bar down two notches. You are like, you just can't do that with seven or eight people in the room, but with five or six, you kind of can and you feel like a headless chicken.
you maintain that skill. But [:I mean, that's what I did for too long. Yeah, and I think, so the, the critical distinction there is the skill of running round, giving everybody individual modifications when they're doing quote the same exercise, like long stretch say, is not the same skill as teaching a group of 12 or 14 people long stretch and scaling it to everybody individually.
e where everybody has a more [:100000% agree. And I argue that it scales up to about 20. Yeah. If not more. And so I can hear you. S so, so there. Alright, so there's this kind of, um, there's a real disconnect in the industry at large brave graduates aside and people who have graduated from your program aside that.
n how to teach on all of the [: ilate Studios in the world in:And therefore it's not real Pilates like the stuff that I know how to do. Because you have to, you know, it has to become generic. It has to become planks and pushups and lunges and long stretches, and that'll, that's all you're gonna do. And then, then, and you know, the dumbbells are the devil and all that stuff.
And it's like maybe your skills just aren't there. Like maybe you, maybe you just haven't practiced looking at lots of bodies at once and finding cues and spring settings that allow people to explore shapes effectively over time and build the capacity to do more over time. Is always, it's always over time, right?
e the shape, you had to kind [:You know, if you could turn your glutes on just enough, suddenly high bridge would be available to you. No one ever said, if you can't do high bridge yet, go into a shitload of shoulder presses, heaps of back bending in a, in a, in a non-moving surface and do lots of shoulder bridge and semicircle. And, you know, no one ever said any of that.
So there was no system for building things. It was kind of this, if it's not there yet, it's not there. We'll see how we go over time. And that doesn't work in a large group because you can't just go, oh, sorry dude, you just hang back there while we go and do this. Without the skills, you do end up doing generic things, but my argument is that with the skills, you can do lots of really cool Pilates stuff and build lots of strength and endurance and all the other good stuff that you can get from simple movements under higher load.
the different skills in your [:you know, that are, that enable, that unlock that ability to teach large groups where everybody, where it's not just pushups, planks, and squats, and not that there's anything wrong with, with squat, wrong with that. Yeah. Yeah. It should be a good dose of that, a good pushup. Love a good plank, love a good squat.
what are the, what are the, [:Uh, okay, cool. I think there's a bunch of things. One is an overreliance on demonstration and manual adjustments. Like, because that, that doesn't scale and if you rely on it, you won't develop the skills to describe the thing. Uh. So what is, what is the, what is the flip side of that? So that, so that is the one-on-one approach.
emphasis on the muscles that [:Let's leave the muscles. I, I'm with you on that, but let's just go. Okay. So if I, if I'm, if I'm teaching one-on-ones or two on ones or three on ones, and I'm doing a lot of demos, a lot of manual manual corrections. Okay, now I've got 12 people and I just can't do that for everyone. So what do I have to do instead?
Yeah. Alright. So any, any movement that you want to teach. Um, let's, let's say Highbridge. 'cause it's nice and big and complicated and strong and require lot, just for anybody who's been living under a Pilates rock maybe and hasn't been exposed to like what Highbridge is, just give us a real quick. You know?
Yeah. So full high bridge would be lie on your back, on the head, on the bedrest. On the bedrest. Lie on your back on the bed, head on the headrest, feet on the footpath. It's a high footer. It's probably two springs, maybe three, depending, depending what you do with the spring tension. But that would be the the go-to do a shoulder bridge.
pads, press up and maybe you [:So you're doing a thoracic bridge. If we were in gymnastics land, straight arms looks like a handstand full back bend on a moving surface off a cr. Right? And so then you push the carriage in and out. You push the carriage out and in. In and out. Yep. Yeah. Alright, great. So for the. In general public classes a total of none times, but, but I've taught high bridges of lots of different positions off the boxes and so on.
t say we wanted to, but, but [:Put the short box on, put your shoulders on the short box, feet on the bed, hands to the rails, lift up to high bridge. That's the version you can do to do today. It's like, yeah, that's fine. But if you don't think about it more deeply, then that's the only version you'll ever do because you've gotta still get your body off the bed.
So if you don't go and look for where you can build the lifting strength to get your body off the bed. So if you don't take that layer further back and do things that are slightly more, um, segmented, but to get past the prop that you're using, then you'll never get past the prop. Right. So, you know, back to the original question.
o teach a much larger group. [:Let's say chest expansion. So it's, it's a movement that, like when I learned it, it was put your hands on their shoulders and show their shoulder blades to go back and down. You know, you were gonna manually adjust the position of the scapula and it was really important that their arms stay straight, right?
'cause that's what the book said. And you would demonstrate it and you would say, you know, shoulders back, press the straps. Maybe I can't even remember the cues I used to use. Plus it would be know, inhale. Inhale to prepare, and back in the day, yeah, you would've said, inhale To prepare, gently engage a transverse abdo and pelvic floor.
aterally into the sides and, [:Maintain the arms long and soft as you reach backwards towards the back wall widening across the breast bones. How did I do? Yeah, that felt dramatically familiar.
I still got it. Lost it. Um, yeah, so.
So chest expansion to me is part of High Bridge, which is part of Downs Stretch, which is part of Tiger Stretch. And so the, the, the skill that we're talking about would be, how do I get you to make the chest expansion shape without touching you, without demonstrating and without using as many words as rafted because that's not efficient in a large group.
So when you say [:You know, all of those things will make, and, and that's the, that's fundamentally the skill that I've been refining is what can I tell you to do that makes you make the shape that you can then understand as a little motor in your brain that you don't actually have to think about. I just say do. Uh, okay.
Alright. So I want to, I want to double click on that, but just for those two, don't, don't recall what down stretch is. It's where your hands are on the foot bar, feet are behind, you're on the shoulder blocks. You got maybe like one, one and a half springs on something like that. And it's essentially an UPD dog shape or like a swan dive shape where your hips down, hit the knees down for the timing.
ou, you know, take that same [:There's no gravity resistance. You're not doing a lumbar extension, you're not doing a hip extension, you're not upside down, you're not weight bearing on your shoulders. Like there's so many things about chest expansion that are easier compared to Highbridge, but it's, you know, if you zoom right out into all we can see from space is the great wall of China and the continent of Africa.
k about. Indivi exercises as [: e where recorded back in like:Alright. And so the thing I wanna double click on, so we've got this sort of like, I, I'm picturing kind of like the, you know, the picture where they have like evolution. You've got like the, you know, the chimpanzee on the left and then you've a slightly more human-like figures progressively. And then you've got the caveman with the, the spear and the fur.
sion is at the other end and [:I love that concept. And so the, the thing that I want to double click on now, which I think is so crucial and so core to how you teach that gives you this superpower is, and you know, ladies and gentlemen listening, if you've never done a class with heath, like, fuck this guy really? I mean, Haley said it in a meeting the other day, Heath could teach a goldfish Pilates.
for me ever since that day in:You have well exceeded my level of skill as a teacher like you have, you know, where I have focused on other things like building a business and becoming a better leader and different, and not to say that you haven't done those things as well, but I've focused more on those things. You have just continued to teach thousands upon thousands upon thousands of classes and, uh, train thousands upon thousands of students to become Pilates instructors.
ond what you've experienced. [:The, I think the, the, the thing that I wanna double click on now is what you just said before we got into that kind of evolution of man, you know, conversation. Mm-hmm. Which is that rather than giving demos and using manual cues, or even saying which muscles to activate or you know, which body parts to extend or flex you use, you use a strategy where you tell people verbally, what, what do you tell them?
What's the core concept here? The core concept is, uh, alright, the core concept is get a good, get the start position right And then
re there's a focus on. Doing [:You could, I, I, I want, I wanna double click there because I think there's something hidden in that, or buried in it or implicit in it that you didn't say, which is that, and we've talked about this recently, is when we talk about refining a movement, you know, so a client's doing a movement, they're kind of sort of basically doing it right, like it's recognizably that movement that they're doing, but it's okay.
e's lots of different little [:Your focus is to really understand what that movement is for what it's about, and that your refinement should be that thing. So in chest expansion, it's about expanding the chest. Yeah. And so any refinement that you give in that movement should be about how can we make more chest expansion in this movement?
Fuck the toes. Fuck the fingers. Fuck the, all the rest of it. It's like bigger chest. Right? And the bigger chest is also part of a backend. So then. If the first thing is create the bigger chest, once you've got that, then it would be, well then what's the next, what's the second order of refinement? If you get there, it would be hips forward.
you would say push your, try [:'cause I want proprioceptive feedback about what you're doing with your hips, which I give you via, can you get your thighs to the shoulder pads and if you can move back so you're getting an external focus of attention and you don't know you're doing a back bend, you're just trying to touch your thighs to the shoulder pads with a big chest.
on in this particular stream [:You know, but we are working towards, everything is working towards that high bridge. Now this, this particular client may or may not ever get there or might not even care if they get there, but, but this is the progression of the movement. This is how it goes. And so when we are teaching High Bridge, we have in mind that this works towards high, well, sorry.
When we're teaching chest expansion, we have in mind that this works towards Highbridge. So all of my cues, the essence of this movement is the same essence as Highbridge. Yeah, it's the same, right? All of the ex, there's only two, three exercises in the world. And Cat, which is two of them, and Highbridge is the other one.
e of them. I don't know. But [:You know, it's like, well, what's it about? Yeah, it's about it making, it's about Highbridge, right? It's about making that shape in Highbridge and it's, it's not literally high bridge, like, it's not as extreme as Highbridge, but it should be the same shape in terms of essentially the same show extensions, right?
It's, it's about extension. Yep. And then the question is where it's being driven from. So it's extension being driven from that shoulder attraction rather than, I mean, it's usually driven by that, but you could do it passively over a foot bow or off a box. But you know, as you, it depends, as you think about it, as I've thought about it more, you can go, okay, chest expansion is one part of Highbridge.
idge is another part of High [:If you've got a Google pin, it'll start to organize what you're teaching. If you think critically and there's lots of roads to the Google pin, what do you mean a Google pin? Well, like the way, the way it works in my mind is if we say that Highbridge is the Google pin, then there's lots of is just like, this is where we're going to.
like, okay, to achieve high [:One is the, the, the thoracic extension and the lumbar extension, and the hip extension. Another one is the shoulder strength. To actually just get up into the, like you might have the mobility, but maybe just can't lift yourself. Then, I mean, I, you've got a, you've got a comfortable moving the bed. You've gotta understand that when you lift, you have to pull with, you have to use your hamstrings to lift initially.
'cause if you just push, you just fly out. You just push the carriage out. Yeah. So there are actions within it that you've gotta learn. So, so, so when, so when you have these, you know, concepts, it's like, okay, we need to develop the extension. We need to develop the, the shoulder strength. We need to develop the, the sense of pulling the carriage into the stopper as you lift.
arn that in shoulder bridge. [:But you might start to learn it in, I don't know, uh, semicircle, um, maybe some other, where would you, you learn the feeling of your shoulders in high bridge in Semicircle. You can learn the feeling of what you're trying to do up there, but the lifting strength comes from just pushups off the low foot bar.
Mm-hmm. And so when, so, or shoulder presses off the right. And so thus when we're teaching, say, shoulder bridge now, and we are thinking of this as an, you know, a different place on that evolution of, man, it's a bit closer to the high bridge. You know, maybe it's in the middle somewhere that, you know, what is this about?
when you get those, both of [:Whereas if we're refining like the hip rotation or the abdominal connection, it's like none of those things have got shit to do with the actual essence of what the exercise is about, which is hip extension and keeping the carriage on the stopper because that's your hamstrings and calves and all of those other posterior chain muscles.
And so the cues for shoulder bridge then become, guess what? Lift your hips, pull the carriage onto the stopper. Don't let the carriage lead the stopper. Get your hips as high as possible. Yeah. And then probably shoulders down, chest to chin again, like that would be the second order once you kind of nail that first one.
Now the whole back's working [:People can really do that. And you don't need to really cure it a lot because when you lift a high bridge, you need all of your, I mean your, your whole back, like spinal extensors, hip extensors, they've all gotta go for you. You gotta do it all at once on a thing that wants to run away from you. So it's like you just gotta grease that groove until people know how to do that.
They don't have to think about it. When you say shoulder bridge, the chest comes up, the hips go up, the bed's on the stopper, it's like, okay, now we're getting close to, and we could start looking at, can I press to my head? You know, it's like it's, I'm not gonna unlock the movement. I'm gonna build it so that when I look at you, I think you are so ready for the next layer I'm gonna offer it.
lver bullet, it's a thousand [:When we ask you to do it on a moving surface with more spring tension, which is more, more support. And that's another idea, right? When we, when, when we were training exercises had fixed spring tensions, this is such a bug bear for me. It's just like, you've got this incredible tool and then we say, no, no, no.
hat's gonna make the lift to [:Something like that. It's like, all right, so that says that there's a, there's like a variation of like 5% in like, how hard you should make this for different people, right? So just say, you know, my daughter and I go to Pilates class together. She weighs 50 kilos. I weigh a hundred kilos, right. Uh, I've been weight training and doing Pilates for 20 years, five days a week.
She's 18 years old. You just started working out three months ago. It's like, are we really gonna need the same spring setting? You know?
k that. Two people are gonna [:It's like if you went into a cloth shop and they said, oh, we've got, you know, a size 14 and a size 14 and a half. Those are your options. Yeah. You know.
n. It is thoracic extension, [:That, and a a, but a, a really important, this thing there is not talking to the biomechanical or musculoskeletal things that are happening, right. It's what are you doing with your body to the space around it, right? And so, so, but that the, the, the understanding in the mind of the Pilates instructor is that that exercise is about making the shape that we could describe as, you know, through actors thoracic extension, right?
Yep. Yep. And then communicating that verbally in a way that is super clear and focused on. Objectively observable, concrete things that the client could do, like lift your chest,
which is like, it's, [:Or it's like, well, how do you know if they did that? What does it mean? You know, five different people could look at it and and disagree about whether, whether or not, or how much they, they did it. Where it's like lifting your chest is, it's either you chest either lifted or it didn't. So it's, it's knowing what, where you, you know, what the end point of your evolution of man, you know, diagram is where you are at with this exercise that you're teaching on that.
fair, you can use a bit of a [:There's nothing wrong with doing that, but you don't have to literally jump on a reformer and Right. Do chest expansion. You can just stand there and go, I'm lifting my chest here and this is what I want you to do. And, and you, and so using some combination of, of, I don't know, like, what would you call it, micro demonstrations or ad hoc demonstration.
It's not like a literal, full demonstration of the move, but it's like you are kind of embodying the essence of what you want them to do, what, what we call it in the. Certain, what I've always called it is hand dancing. Right. Which is a loose general term, but it's not literally my hands are your feet.
ift your chest and you would [:Yeah.
Alright, so that's skill number one. Well, I guess it's really two skills. It's, it's, and saying that, you know, like knowing where you are on the evolution of man chart like that, you know, that's easy to say, but it's like a lot of thinking has to go into, okay. You know, when you and I learn these moves. We learned 500 plus exercises in the stock Pilates system and they, they were just literally disconnected single data points.
done and is take all of the [:And it's not, it's not it. And just like really like the evolution of men. It's not actually, like you say, a straight line because some people need to work more on one thing and other people need to work more on another thing. So for some people they might have the shoulder strength, but they don't have the.
Spinal mobility. Other people might have the spinal mobility, but not the shoulder strength. Maybe some people have got both, but they don't have the hip extension or the hamstring strength. So there, there are different things that different people will need to focus on. So it's not literally a straight line A to Z, but you know, if again, if it, it's kind of a squiggly line, but it does go from A to Z.
is at the top of this column [:But that it, it's also the categories of strength, range of motion and skill. Mm-hmm. And I use, if we're still talking about Highbridge, there's a variety of exercises that I use that don't look anything like highbridge that tell me how your high bridge is gonna go. Okay. Which include includes shoulder bridge.
f every exercise of re human [:So there's some degree of strength, range of motion and control challenge to every movement. And it goes from zero, none at all, to 10, like maximum possible. And some movements have very high challenge for all three. Some have very low challenge for all three, some have very high for one low, for the other two, et cetera.
So you can challenge strength through a large range or a small range with a large challenge to control or a small challenge to control. So you, so, you know, talk to me about how you think about those three components, strength range, emotion, and control in relation to teaching a large group where you have diverse levels of capacity.
And so when we have diverse [:I. And so we can just break it down to really concrete things rather than saying like, Sally is more advanced. It's like, what does that actually mean? Well, Sally is stronger, more flexible, and has better control. That's what that means. Yep. So how do you think about that and how do you apply it? You know, what's the, where does the rubber meet the road on that to make it useful for teaching a large group effectively?
ig moves, star, high bridge, [:And I built all this stuff out, tested it, and this is where the thinking started to kind of coalesce and make sense. And then that kind, I, I did that and I just, I said, how do you, you know, this is going really well. Look at what you guys can do. And about 80% of my clients said, we really don't give a fuck.
Like, I just don't care if I ever do highbridge. Right? Like, not that motivated, right? I like your classes 'cause you push me, you make me stronger, more flexible. I really don't care about Highbridge. And so I kind of went back to the drawing board and thought, okay, what do I, what do I want to give people?
And it was like, this is where I ended up with my, you know, the whole thing that I say to you all the time. Stronger, more flexible, more skillful. So you live healthier, happier, longer lives. What I came to see is that what people value is results in their daily life as a result of a session they love. So you, you've gotta give them a session they love.
why people do Pilates. To a [:It's a bit, it's a long way away. So. What I've come to is a constrained set of movements that are closely related to much bigger movements, but they scale really easily and they work in clusters where the flow is smooth and you, you, you have minimum downtime. You're basically always working out unless we're having a nice stretch in between.
themselves to either one or [:'cause there's, there's no skill of holding the plank. My mom can keep her knees on the bed and on a one spring. It's like everyone can gimme five to 10 reps, probably 20. And then I can say to those people that look like they're struggling, bring the foot bar up. I used to do it with the foot bar up, but I discovered that most, a lot of people bang into the pulleys and it seems to work better on a low foot bar.
So it's like I've evolved over time these meat and potato settings. And if I do long stretch with a group and I look at how they go on one spring, I very quickly start to calibrate, okay, cool. We can do knee stretches, knees off, or we can do full long stretch just by the way they move and how they go.
e strength of the front leg. [:Which once upon a time was High Bridge, but now I'm like, yeah, high Bridge is off down there, and you maybe we get there one day, who cares? Meantime, I'm gonna make sure you get stronger, more flexible, and you understand the machine and you get more skillful in your body. Right. Does that make any sense?
houlder injuries or whatever [:Right? So if you would, if, if we thinking about the shoulder bridge equivalent, it would be like all springs on, everyone can do it. Right? Or even, even two and a half, right? Yeah. Um, and so you just basically you start at the low end, the easy end. Of where it's like, okay, the, the, the most inexperienced person here with the lowest level of strength can definitely do this unless they've got some kind of major injury.
or are we at the right level?[:Right. And, and so did you Once upon a time I would've wholeheartedly agreed with it. We should say the easiest level, but it's not the easiest level. The easiest level would be one and a half springs, but one and a half springs, low foot ball, knees down, long stretch is just boring. Like, there's almost nothing happening, whereas one spring.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there's the, it's so that's why I call it like meat and potatoes. 'cause it's not the easiest, right? It's the one that I reckon everyone can do 20 of and when they've done 20 they'll feel something. But my mom's gonna feel a lot and RA's not gonna feel much, but it's gonna give me that kind of bracket.
Right? So it's not like it's boring. Well of course the easiest level would be like all springs on foot bar, the lying prone, you know, focusing on your breath, you know? Yeah, right. So that doesn't look like long stretch,
eet on the, on the headrest, [:Okay. That doesn't look like it looks less like long stretch, right? Yeah, it does. Right. Yeah. So, so, so the, it's, it's not really does or doesn't, it's not a binary, it's like how much does it look like long stretch, right? How much That's right. And so ultimately we want to get to it is long stretch, but as we make it easier and easier and easier, it doesn't necessarily look less and less and less like long stretch, right?
Until we get to like lying on the floor, eyes closed, quiet breathing, it's like, okay, that doesn't look a lot like long stretch, but it is a lot easier, you know? So, so yeah. So I think absolutely like, not the easiest version, but I would say like the easiest version that you are pretty darn confident everybody can achieve today.
h, I'm doing something here. [:Then we'll stand up and do some lunges. And if you all moved well with that, we'll go back and I'll make it harder by a degree, by a strength, via a rom, by a control. Both or all three. So I'm, it's like, okay, I've done one pass at it, go and do some lunges, do another one, change it up, do the other lunge, come back, change it up again.
It's quite common for me to do five long stretch sets, but by minor adjustments to position and foot bar and spring tension. There are different muscle groups and different shapes and different movements and the people don't get bored. You know, like the people are like, this is awesome. I get to understand the spring tension.
, yeah, great. Alright. So I [: t, how, how do you do that in: e are like. If this was like.:That's like 90, 90 plus percent of the jobs in Pilates are teaching group reformer. And that's where 90 plus percent of the clients are. Yeah. And so if you want to actually help people, you have to go where the people are and you have to give them what they want. If you wanna make money, you have to do what the employers who wanna pay you wanna pay you to do.
are still teaching like it's:Whereas John Cusack films, right.
dating. This was back in the.: e thing that you're gonna be [:Like everything you do with 10 people takes longer. So you've gotta do things that are really in a way that's really efficient and with forethought and minimize transitions, minimize the faffing about with equipment. 'cause everything just takes longer and longer and longer. The more people you've got.
So that, that's one part of it. You, you start to frame things around minimum, minimal transmi transmissions, transitions like it's gotta be, everything's gotta be efficient and smooth. And you with the least possible faffing about, everything's gotta start with something that everyone can do. And any direction that you go on, whether it's in the direction of Highbridge or whatever, has to be graded in such a way that you've, you can read people's capacity for the next thing from the current thing.
And you know, these are all [:And then just do it that way for a really long time. Just get your reps do, what's your thing? 10,000 kicks? Just yeah, don't learn new shit. Just do that thing for the next 12 months minimum. And when I'm watching my clients do chest expansion, I'm looking at their thoracic and their hips and thinking like, okay, do they have the shape here to do highbridge?
Not necessarily that we're going, sure, yeah. Not necessarily that we're going to high Bridge, but this is, this is the, this is where we are going with this. Right. And when they're doing sho, when I'm teaching shoulder bridge, I'm looking at like how high their hips are and whether the carriage is on the stopper or not.
ey have the lift and do they [:Is that what you were talking about? Well, I, I did that from the knees down. Long stretch, but yeah, same, same move. Great. So I then I'm thinking like, okay, this is where we are developing and also just testing the shoulder strength required to get up into. High bridge, right? Yep. A hundred percent. And so we are looking at, in those three movements, we're looking at strength, we're looking at range of motion, we're looking at control as components of that ultimate, you know, expression of those three things combined high bridge in this, in this shape.
o on one spring, but I can't [:You know, if you can't, you say That's what we've gotta work on. And that's why I'm getting stuck in my high bridge and I can't lift my head off the, the headrest is 'cause I just don't have the grunt in my shoulders yet. Yeah. So doing it off a box, go circling back to the start of the conversation doesn't help me develop that, that strength.
'cause it's not. I'm not practicing lifting off the base position, which is actually where I'm weak. I'm starting already lifted, and I'm not actually doing the thing that I wanna get better at, which is lifting. And if I wanna get good at a middle split, I have to practice doing a middle split, not a front split, not a backend, like literally the exact thing you want to get better at.
using my shoulders, using my [:So, but so the, the, the, this is kind of like the skill and strength thing, right? The lift is the strength, plus there's the skill of all of the other bits that you've described. But then doing the one from the box is, it's like you get, you get the top position, you can work the legs off the foot by, you can get the feeling of the shape, so then you know where you're trying to get to, right?
't have the strength to lift [:It's like, well, doing it on the box is not gonna solve that. That's, that's right. The box isn't the solution that person needs. Maybe some, maybe some, maybe some press presses from the bar, maybe some, uh, semicircle, maybe, you know, there are other things there that will develop that shoulder strength in that position that will eventually over time lead to unlocking that full movement.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So that was the process I went through at, in depth and at, for some significant, it's considerable period of time and thinking about strength, ram's skill and, and, but then as I said, it discovered that, well, first off, people, it was, it was, it was the pointy end of people's interest, but the, the thinking that the framework is very effective for.
h other exercises. Now it's, [: o the future. You've got your:Yeah. You know, and we do some shoulder bridge and we do some chest expansion, we do some down stretch, we do some semicircle. And I'd be looking at you going, yep. Okay, cool. Your hamstrings are not strong enough to lift you, you don't understand the movement of the bed, or your hamstrings are freaking awesome, your shoulders are really restricted.
could probably whack in this [:Right. So the thing is that your method is backwards compatible. Like being a good group teacher actually makes you a better one-on-one teacher, but being a better one-on-one teacher doesn't make you a better group teacher. Correct. Yeah. And, you know, having worked this way and run, like you say, thousands and thousands of reformer classes, that, that, that had a fault.
Like you said, it had a, a backward effect on small group and one-on-one. And that was, you know, people would come and watch me teach small groups and say, you've got six people in the room, no one rests and you've got time to talk to people and everything's in. Its ho it's everything's in its place. Like how do you do it?
ffing about with manual cues [:Yeah. I was like, let's do an exercise on the chair now let's go to the caddy. Now let's go to the reformer. I was like, nah dude. You're gonna spend 20 minutes on the chair and you're gonna work every muscle group in your body and every shape you can possibly make, and then we'll move on. Yeah. And, and I think the other things that you didn't mention there in terms of what makes that possible for you and easy for you is that you are not afraid to have people do the same exercise multiple times during the session.
the principles of Pilates or [:Um, you know, does that make me less of a Pilates instructor?
Uh, I think, well
what that, that brings us back to what is Pilates, right. Well, I don't want get into that rabbit hole 'cause that's, no, that's turtles all the way down. Yeah. I,
I, I mean I used to feel test desperately insecure in our industry because I was old. I'd come to it late. I wasn't an osteo, I was talking to osteos and physios. I assumed they knew so much more. Then I actually worked with an osteo, well, well do know so much more, but ironically, most of it's useless.
d, didn't you learn this? He [:And Pilates is a language that we've got. Language is viral, right? And it's changing, like large group performer is a new dialect of this thing. And if you're sitting there going, well, no, you've gotta speak the words like this. It's like you're speaking Latin dude, like you're speaking Latin in, you know, New York right now in Times Square.
It's like you, you're just gonna have to let that shit go. I, I love that. I love that metaphor. I think it is so apt. It is spot on. That language evolves and you know, it, it, it, it's obvious when we think about, you know, the English of Shakespeare or choa, you know, is virtually unintelligible to a lot of people now.
guage just evolves over time [:Like if you think about when, when I was a kid, we used to call people spastic, you know, like there was, there was literally a, a society called the Spastic Society. And that wasn't a derogatory term, it was just a description. 'cause in physiology, spasticity describes when you have uncontrollable muscle contractions, right?
came like a, a, an insulting [:And so there were terms that changed then their meaning over, you know, with then we sort of called them like cripples and we, that was bad. And then we called them disabled and then that became bad. And now they were differently abled and they, you know, like they're, they're, and, and this is just a natural evolution of language that happens in many different, you know, realms.
Shakespeare used to say V and Vow, you know, and Vine. And we just say you now, which is actually the plural of, you know, second person. Uh, so anyway, language shifts, but there are some people who hold onto that. As, and they are like the, the grammar police. And they say, oh, you know, you know where, where and where.
ou know, they try and police [:It's, it's, it's evolution is harnessed to or driven by making, like helping people achieve things, build trust, transfer information, create transactions. So it's, it's, it's evolution is driven by efficiency. And it's, it's, it's, it's implicit, uh, outcome, like what you're trying to achieve with it and trying to be efficient with that.
ould do it like this because [:It's like, well, the only is that the way that you and I learned it, which was the quote proper way that everyone had to do it. 'cause that's the way we learned it. It's like, that's not how Joseph taught it. Right. That's the other thing, right? It's, I mean, you look at him teach, it's like, huh, it's not contemporary.
That is not start, dude. And either way, it's not classical either, and it's not classical, but, and we all thi O, you have to assume that we all share the same mission, which we're using movement to help people live better. And I just think we've got this opportunity to do it at scale. If I can teach 20 people effectively for 25 hours a week, or 25 one-on-ones, do the math.
ing good at one-on-one. Yeah.[:A healthy dose of skepticism. And you're thinking like, yeah, yeah, but I can make more difference for someone in a one-on-one than Heath can in a group of 12. It's like, uh, you haven't done one of Heath's classes. Like, honestly, like this is a superpower and the world needs, the world needs to, to learn about it.
And if you think that you can do more for someone in a one-on-one than in a large group, I promise you it's just because you lack skill in teaching large groups. Mm. All right, my friend. Good talk. Yeah. See you next time.
