Ep 32: The Absolutely fabulous women of Primal Movement WORKS

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Join me in this fantastic interview with the talented, funny, and successful band of mighty misfits, the founders of Absolute Center in Lafayette, CA: Claudia Moose, Katie Santos, and Louise Johns.

In this episode you’re going to get a lot of laughs (that’s I think par for the course with us), get a ton of great insight into how to make business partnerships not only work, but thrive and discover more about the origins of Primal Movement Works and their upcoming teacher training.

You may have heard Claudia on our last podcast “Live from the PMA”. If you did, then you know that you’re in for a treat. If not, let’s not waste any more time…

Below you’ll find two of our cool new podcast elements: Heroes and Pro tips. We hope you love these new additions and they bring a little more value to your teaching.

Heroes

First on our list is one of Claudia’s favorite books:

• The Well Balanced Child: Movement and Early Learning by Sally Goddard Blythe  

And if you haven’t checked out what osteopath and acupuncturist Phillip Beach is doing, we highly recommend you investigate his book:

• Muscles and Meridians: The manipulation of shape.

Not only does the Primal Movement Works training program draw from Beach’s work, his archetypal postures and erectorcises are making a huge impact in the Pilates community as we look beyond fixed structure and predetermined movement to something that’s more resilient and truly human.

Our final “hero” is a little self-serving but also deeply in the service of moving our professional industry into the digital health arena. If you’re a regular listener you heard me interview Pilates Metrics founder, Joseph Quinn in Episode 29.

Pilates Metrics is an outstanding and powerful new cloud-based ipad app that is ultimately helping Pilates become more credible and viable as a proven tool for injury prevention and rehabilitation. What it does for you is help you plan, program, track and assess digitally, which provides more concrete data and more motivation for you and the student to stay the course, adapt, build and progress through the Pilates work.

The app itself is incredibly malleable allowing you to choose from 9 or 10 exercise libraries to work from. The libraries provide a technical and philosophical platform from which you teach. Some of them are based solely on a school’s training curriculum like Polestar and Fletcher Pilates. Others, like the one Skillful Teaching created, is based on a teaching philosophy.

The heart and soul of the Skillful Teaching library is a WHOLE PERSON TEACHING approach.

Pro Tip

Given all of that, our pro-tip for this episode is Keep it Simple and Let it go. Let go of form and explore what movement potential exists in the body as it is. See if you can find ways to open the body up to it’s own current potential rather than being so focused on what movement should look like. One way I’ve found to do this, working with the spirals of the feet in foot work is to deliberately work off center and to move through the varying angles and positions of the foot as the load of the springs oscillates and progresses. Watch how your student adapts, where they’re compensating in the knees, pelvis, low back and shoulders.

The caveat is that you work on a relatively light spring (1R, 1B to 2R) and the body you’re working with doesn’t have any acute foot, ankle, knee or hip issues. Keep your students safe, of course, but let them see how their bodies can move out of alignment. I think what you’ll find is that they have way more potential than you thought.

I’d love to know how that goes.

Links and Resources

• Absolute Center
• Primal Movement Works
• Primal Pilates FB page
• Skillful Teaching Pilates Metrics Library
• Pilates Metrics

Upcoming Primal Movement WORKS Training:

• Primal Foundations
  • January 28th & 29th
  • Register HERE

Connect With Us

• Email us at thinkingpilatespodcast@gmail.com or use the form below.
• Find us on Facebook at The Thinking Pilates Podcast

Reach us Individually

• Chantill – chantill@skillfulteaching.com
  • Phone – (707) 738-7951
• Debora – dkolwey@gmail.com