Pilates offers Freedom, So Let’s Get Moving! “What Pilates Is and Why I Teach It”

By: Courtney Holcomb, PMA-CPT, Owner Waveforms Pilates

What Pilates Is

Pilates helps to close the gap between your physical moving body, and what your mind believes is your movement potential.  My role as a Pilates instructor is to assist in building confidence in your movement potential. 

What Pilates Is Not

When I first tell people I teach Pilates, I often get the response: “Oh, I can’t do Pilates, it’s too hard!”  Though there are many advanced movements in the Pilates repertoire that is just a small limb of the work. That is not the essence of the work.  Pilates has the unique ability to meet any body where it is at, and propel it forward to its potential.  I don’t practice or teach Pilates to be able to master a pose, to develop super strong muscles that can make shapes, or to perform high-performance elitist tasks.  It’s not about poses, or positions, it’s about movement.  I do Pilates so that I can move, so that I can be capable of moving, and so that I have more pain-free options throughout the day.  It’s all about movement potential, not about building rigid shapes, forms, bound muscle, or tense bodies.  Movement and Pilates gives me freedom to do whatever I might have to do during the day, and to experience my body in the world with the physical experience I was designed to have and enjoy.

Why I Like and Teach Pilates

If you are wondering why I like Pilates, it’s because it’s a tool that helps me move and experience freedom in my body.  That is the type of message that I like to send with the way that I teach my students.  That is the way that I want my students to feel when they leave the studio space.  That they are more capable of moving in their bodies, and that they experience and feel more freedom in their bodies.  I want to help them feel more capable and build self-confidence in their movement than when they first stepped foot in the door.  I want them to find a sense of liberation from any of the list of conditions or symptoms they may feel they are experiencing that they believe limit their ability to move freely.  They are not an accumulation of all of “those things”, but a wonderful, capable, and free body, with great movement potential.

As a Pilates instructor, I will help you build confidence in areas you don’t believe you are capable, to offer the options that you may not have thought were available, to help your mind and body work to free you of any restrictive “labels”, and to help you feel at ease in both mind and body.

For me, being a Pilates instructor helps me offers freedom.

So, let’s get moving!