Harder Isn’t Always Better: The Smarter Way to Build Strength

"I've been lied to my whole life. This just feels relaxing, and yet my body is starting to change."

In this episode, Nic flies solo to unpack a question she gets asked constantly on her teacher trainings: why isn't harder always better?

She explores what conditioned so many of us, especially in the fitness world, to believe that pushing more, harder, and faster is always the goal, and shares her own burnout story from the corporate world that led her to Pilates in the first place.

Nic unpacks the difference between a Pilates instructor and a Pilates teacher, why the classical repertoire is built on mastering the fundamentals with ease before adding intensity, and why some of the most common cueing in Pilates today (think "engage your core," "zip up and hollow") doesn't actually hold up to what we now know about the body.

She also reflects on lessons picked up across a year of guests on the podcast, and makes the case for why efficiency, not effort, is the real skill Pilates teaches - both on the mat and in life.

Timestamps

00:06 Intro: why harder isn't always better

08:44 Nic's own burnout story and how Pilates changed her life

12:45 Getting "practiced" at being busy, and the cost of always pushing

17:32 Pilates instructor vs. Pilates teacher

27:04 Adrenaline, burnout, and "I came for my bad back and stayed for my mental health"

33:31 Why we shouldn't be cueing "engage your core" (and the "zip up and hollow" story)

40:24 Why the end of class matters as much as the start, and closing thoughts

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I truly believe that we as a human species have been conditioned to believe that harder is always better. In every aspect of our lives, burnout was almost being seen as a badge of honour. It's not really educating them about anything in their body. And it maybe is bringing them more into their burnout, more into their sympathetic nervous system, more into cortisol overload. Is it hard because it's a challenge and it's a challenge that someone can meet? Or is it hard? Because fundamentally they can't do it. I actually got more of the physical results that I wanted than when I kept push, push, pushing myself. This week I am talking about a subject that I'm often being asked a lot of questions about on our teacher trainings. Why we're not always looking to just push people harder, why we need to look to teach them more intelligently so they can be smarter, so they can work out more efficiently, and how we can challenge them in a way that's actually really good for their body. So I'm gonna go into that in a little bit more detail. If I haven't met you before, I'm Nick Lenny. I'm a studio owner. I've got three studios in Bristol in the UK. I'm an educator for Soul Pilates education, and I'm your host for these conversations every week, exploring the big wide world of Pilates. You know, I get some messages every week. There's nearly one every week now saying, Hey Nick, I feel like through some of your conversations and these solo episodes, I've got a real sense of the style of Pilates that you teach. But you're often interviewing guests that maybe don't completely adhere to that, but you never really pull them up on it or quiz them about it. And I always go back and say the same thing, which is, well, a couple of things really. I trained as a broadcast journalist originally and never really did that much with it. But one of the things I remember really vividly about one of the trainings was around documentaries. When you make a documentary, you don't give people the answer. Instead, what you do is you put out there all the different kinds of thoughts and considerations and you want the audience to make up their own mind. And that was very much my intention going into this project was to say, actually, let's just explore the world of Pilates. And if I'm honest, at the beginning, where I never thought I'd be doing this a year in, I thought there would be certain people that I probably wouldn't talk to because I just fundamentally maybe don't think their Pilates is what I would consider Pilates. But actually, what I've realized in the last year is I've learned from every single guest in some way, whether it's their approach to business or the way that they deal with things, or maybe it is stuff on their teaching. And I think we can all learn from each other. And I remember my episode with Brent Anderson that was at the beginning of the year, and he said something to me which was, you know, really, all of us at the top get on very well. And in the last couple of weeks, there's been some little spats on Instagram about a few things, and sometimes I think, why can't we just all get along a little bit better? And maybe not take things so personally and just not be so angry. And I always think, and I've heard someone, I think someone said it on one of the episodes, around, you know, at the end of the class, how calm you feel, and that Joseph Pilates really felt that if everyone was doing my method, you know, the world would be a kinder place. And I think that's really true. Like I always think at the end of the class, you don't want to go out and fight anyone. So I don't really know sometimes why we're fighting each other. And I hope through these conversations, if I can do nothing else, it's that we can all learn from each other and pick up the things that feel like they resonate with us. Because I personally believe passionately about the method of Pilates. I don't personally believe it should never, never change or evolve. Like we know more than we knew when Joseph Pilates was alive. So why wouldn't it evolve? But I also think that sometimes maybe it is moving too far away and it loses the essence of what the method is. And I talk really passionately about that. But how people deliver the method, I think Michael King said in his episode, it's not the teacher training that makes the teacher, it's the person going into the teacher training. And I thought that's such a good point. I've seen this through my own teacher trainings. Teachers come out the other end, and I've trained them, and they've all gone through the training with me, and yet some of them resonate more with some stuff than others. They come out as different teachers. Some of them maybe were more athletic to begin with, some of them have different personalities, some are more mindful. And so they have the same training, and yet their approach to teaching is different. And I think that's great. And as a studio owner, I definitely don't want clones of me in my studio. I want people to feel like when they come to my studio, that there is an ethos that goes through, and there is a consistency in the way that we program classes, and the we don't use negative cueing and you know, things like that, the experience, but the teacher's personality brings it to life in their own way. I certainly don't want carbon copies of class plans. It's called Soul Pilates my studio. I want the teachers to be able to go in and read the room and be able to feel what people are looking for and give them an amazing class experience. And I always think there's me and one of our lead instructors. We couldn't be more different in some senses. I mean, she is so fun in her class. Like she famously has a little sing-along with people. It's such a different experience. My classes are definitely more mindful, more thoughtful, more considered. And yet, a lot of clients like going to both of us. And it's because I think they feel that the consistency is the same. Like, fundamentally, we both want people to walk out of the studio feeling amazing about themselves. But how we do it is different. However, we're not contradicting ourselves in terms of methodology or thoughts on core engagement or not, and things like that. And so I recently did a talk actually in London, and that's what I was talking about. I was talking to studio owners and talking about how I think as a studio it's really important that you have an ethos, that there is an element of consistency so that clients can go because people buy into people, and I won't be everybody's person, and that's often a hard lesson we learn when we first teach. It's okay to not be everybody's person, and you'll have people who absolutely love your style of teaching, and you'll have some people who maybe don't, and that doesn't mean that you're doing anything wrong. So, with that in mind, I wanted to talk about today's topic around this pushing harder, because this is something that I'm seeing a lot that for me is often making Pilates feel like it's possibly moving outside of the realms of what it was designed for. Whilst I'm not personally caught up in it must be done like this and it must be in this order and it can never change, and we should never have creativity. Like, I don't believe that. I do also think that in this world of a boom that we're in at the moment, there does seem to be this desire to keep innovating. And I'm not sure why we need to keep innovating. Because the method has worked. There's a reason it became the successful. The more people did it, the more they felt great about themselves. They felt great, they looked great. They thought, oh my God, this is the most amazing thing. I want to do this more. That's why it grew. And so I find it interesting that there is this need to innovate, not just innovate because the science tells us something different or because our lifestyles are different today than when Joseph Pilates was around. They make sense to me. But the innovation around let's blend it with other modalities, sometimes I'm not sure about that. Because I think in the desire to blend it, and I'm not saying I can't see the re the rationale for it, you know, we're time poor, why shouldn't I blend it with cardio and strength, for example? That would be a great, great hour of my time. But I think sometimes that can then lose the essence of what Pilates itself has become so well known for. And it's really interesting on the podcast because when I've asked a lot of the greats, like, you know, what gift has Pilates given to you? Tell me about your story, how did it make you feel? Nearly everyone has said something along the lines of, it slowed me down, it got me noticing myself, I realized who I was, what I wanted. And I think some of this desire to speed it back up, which is what I'm seeing, means that we're losing all the reasons that we all fell in love with this. So today I wanted to talk about my approach to this need to feel like we're push, push, pushing, and maybe why we could reconsider that. I truly believe that we as a human species have been conditioned in the last, I don't know, 20, 30 years to believe that harder is always better in every aspect of our lives, but especially in anything fitness related. And this was definitely my story. I think I feel like as a female, especially, I felt like I was always brought up to believe no matter how you did an exam, you could always have done more. Or when you started the corporate world in my case, how you know, be there late, do more, do as much as you can. And no one in my life ever really taught me about balance and efficiency and burnout. And burnout was almost being seen as a badge of honor that you could do it. And I definitely felt like that's how I that was how I understood it anyway, in my 20s for sure. And again, a topic often comes up on the podcast is people came into Pilates through burnout. Now, I came into Pilates through an accident, really. It was a physio who recommended Pilates to me. But I really felt that Pilates, and certainly my Pilates training with Polestar Pilates, really started to teach me that there was a different way to live life. I have been known to say Pilates changed my life, and people think it's because, well, you left your job and you opened a studio. But it was before that. So in my first Pilates classes, I definitely noticed that I felt calmer and it did slow me down. And I never felt too tired to go to Pilates, and I still felt like I was working out, but in this really considered way. You know, in my 20s, it was that era of sort of hating your body, going to the gym to contort and contract your body into a shape that probably was never realistic. And I think what Pilates got me to think about was my body's actually great as it is, and this is something I really try and bring into my studio's ethos to listen and appreciate my body and enjoy my body. And Pilates then became something I did almost every lunchtime. It was I stepped away from my desk, I went to Pilates and I came back. And it was through that enjoyment that I decided to train. Now, my educator, Diane Nye, she has been on a couple of episodes of the podcast. They are all in the top three because she is just amazing. I was so lucky to have her as an educator. But through my experience with her, I think honestly, what Pilates taught me was that in order to do the advanced repertoire, your body needs to understand the fundamental repertoire to perfection. And not just to perfection, but to ease. She really got me to start thinking about how easy could this movement feel? And if it feels easy, what's you know, do you then think that that's working you harder or more efficiently or better? And it really was an interesting idea for me because I did start to feel movement feel easier. And you know, I often bring this into my teaching, you know, we're doing bridging or something. Okay, this time could you try and do this bridge and make it feel the easiest thing you've done all day? And it's really interesting how that lands with people because people are like, Oh yeah, I could make it feel easier. And why wouldn't we want to do that? And through learning, you know, when you're doing your exams, you have to be able to do these big moves. I had to learn, I had lots of pain in my body from this accident, I had to learn absolute efficiency. I had to make the easy things feel easy. Why is lifting my leg really hard? It should feel easy. I do this every day, and I think I started to really have this appreciation of efficiency in my body. If my body was efficient, I still had something left in the tank to give, which I could then challenge. I also realized that I could think about that something being left in the tank as how that impacted my life in reality outside of the studio. And, you know, I will say I don't do Pilates to be good at Pilates, like we do Pilates to be good at life. And I think that's so true. And not just from a movement perspective, but from a nervous system perspective. So what if in my life I realized maybe I could learn to be more efficient? What if being more efficient got me more? What if doing less got me more? It's not about the not getting more, but it's about what if it did it in a different way? What if this push, push, push mentality isn't actually helping me get more? And in my case, it definitely wasn't. I was getting sick. I was really renowned in the corporate world for being quite an emotional person, which when I tell people about now, they're like, I can't even believe that, Nick. But I was just exhausted and I don't think I could manage my emotions at all. And so I started to think about, oh, actually, that's really interesting. Yes, I've done this approach in movement, and it has enabled me to do these big crazy flip yourself upside down things. And what if I took that into real life? Eric Franklin says, you get good at what you practice. And I definitely think that myself and my client base, many of you perhaps, certainly many clients out there, we are very, very good at being busy. And we're so practiced at being busy that being busy feels comfortable. This is what my therapist helped me understand. We seek out what we feel comfortable at. And so, however we like to be, however not good that might be, we might be able to say, I appreciate this isn't good for me. That's what we seek out and that's what we do. And I definitely noticed this in COVID that when times were tough, like I would open my laptop and tap tap tap, even if I was just absolutely wasting my time. And so I like to talk about this on my teacher trainings, I like to talk about this with my clients. What are we practicing? Are we practicing being busy? Are we practicing burning ourselves out? Are we practicing burning the candles at both ends? Are we practicing just being exhausted and then wondering why all those things play out for us? And I think this shows up a lot in life. I think it shows up in many of your lives listening. It definitely shows up in our client base. That's a kind of big part of our client base. 30 to 50-year-old burnt-out women. I think type A women love Pilates. They absolutely love it. Not just as a fad, but this is something that changes how they feel, changes how they move, changes how they think about life. And they never want to leave you. And so efficiency is one of the principles in my teacher training. So part of the soul Pilates principles, efficiency is one of them in there. Because I truly believe that what Pilates does brilliantly is efficiency. And I've not written down the quotes, I'm not going to get it quite right. But Joseph Pilates did say, you know, if we learn to get all the minor muscles working, then all the major muscles will work with ease, and that we can live our life. I'm not sure if this is where he said the spontaneous figure and zest, but he definitely talked about this. If you look at his book, Return to Life, he does talk about that we want to be able to live life with ease, with vigor, with zest, with spontaneous pleasure. And we don't do that by burning ourselves out. And I think so much of the fitness world is very much, and the marketing around it is very much flipping that. It's saying, do more, more, more. How sweaty can you be? How exhausted can you be? And that's fine. Like there are modalities where that's the challenge. And I'm definitely not saying we should never do that. I've recently taken up strength training. I'm loving pushing myself. I do a lot of cycling. I've played tennis quite a bit. Like there are modalities where we push. I went and did a Hyrux class the other day. I found that really fun. Like they are designed to challenge you. But that's not really what Pilates was, in my opinion. Pilates was this way of educating your body. And I truly mean that. I had a previous episode where I was talking about Pilates teachers versus Pilates instructors. Like an instructor is just educating you, it's not educating, an instructor is just showing you exercises to do and running you through them, whereas a teacher is educating you on how to do them really well. And I think that's what we as Pilates teachers are doing. We're trying to teach people intelligent movement so that then when they want to challenge themselves, they're challenging themselves and they're not just struggling. Because I think we can make anything hard, but I think we have to ask ourselves as teachers, is it hard because it's a challenge and it's a challenge that someone can meet, or it puts them just on their edges and maybe they can't quite do it, but they're working at it. Or is it hard because fundamentally they can't do it? And if I'm honest, that is what I'm seeing more and more of in the Pilates world. This desire to put some crazy stuff in to make it super, super hard. And people kind of like that because they're conditioned to think that's good for them. But if you really break it down, it's not really educating them about anything in their body. And it maybe is bringing them more into their burnout, more into their sympathetic nervous system, more into cortisol overload and all the things that go with that. And so I think if you go back to looking at the exercises in Pilates, and especially more of the fundamentals ones, like for those of us who are teaching a lot of privates and rehab-based privates, this is the stuff that we teach day in, day out. For me, they are the absolute building blocks of this system. And I do think, you know, the classical system of there was a beginner set of exercises and it was repeated, repeated, repeated, and then when you could do it, we moved on. We could learn from that. I'm often talking in these episodes about a little bit more repetition, I think, is needed in our classes to get people learning these moves and learning how to do them with more ease, with more efficiency, so that then we can challenge them. And they're only going to do that if they have time to practice them. And I think if we look at the fundamental movements in particular, you start to see that every one of them is designed to educate the body about something. And I asked this question in my training. I was just doing a training this weekend in the Cotswolds in Oxfordshire, a reformer teacher training and weekend two, and we're looking at exercises on the reformer that we've already looked on the mat. And so I'm saying to the students, what do we think this exercise is about? Because I think if we understand the purpose and the focus of an exercise, we can then get really clear on our cueing, clear on our imagery, clear on our tactile cueing. Because otherwise, what I see is people kind of go all over the place with their cueing and they forget the essence of an exercise. So, what is the purpose of this exercise? It might have other bits added in, but is the purpose of this exercise to educate the body on how to have really efficient and balanced spinal flexion or spinal extension or weight-bearing strategies or hip disassociation? Like, what is it about? And I think once you understand that, then you can think about okay, how do I do some verbal cues that help me get the basics of this movement out there? How do I get them literally to move from A to B and probably back to A? Like make it really simple. And then how do I layer in some imagery, some ideas that will help them do it better? Again, I'm going to reference Eric Franklin. He talks about this NUF principle, you know, the necessary. What's the necessary information somebody needs to do this? And then what is useful? And then the F is kind of the fluff or the fun. But sometimes I think we need to think about just that necessary. How do we help someone set themselves up for success and do this well? And then how do I get them to do it better? But we need to understand what the purpose is of an exercise. So if I understand the purpose of an exercise, I can then cue it really well and get them to find the ease in it. And I challenge you this week, pick some exercises that you know your clients know and say, could you do this again and could you make this feel as easy as possible? Like it's really interesting to look around the room and see what shifts in people so that they can find the ease in the movement that they know already. Very common that when something's new, we do it all a little bit too much. And as Brent Anderson from Polestar says, we want people to do as much as is necessary, but as little as possible. And I think that's such a great way to think about this. Yes, they have to do what's necessary, but most of the time we are doing more than we need to, and we don't need to. So how can we educate our clients? And I go back to that word educate because I do think it's about educating them. How can we help them learn this skill so that they can do it with more ease? So when I'm putting a class together, I'm really liking to think about what is the journey that I'm trying to take somebody on. And I did a previous episode on how I plan my classes. It's been quite a popular episode. So thank you so much for listening. And talking about that journey that I'm going through. So my methodology, we start always starting supine, we finish standing, and then in the middle, we want to have some seated work, some spinal articulation work, some weight bearing work, and some full body integration. And how much of each depends on the level, but each class wants to feel like it hits those categories. So that's the journey from lying down to standing. And that's really useful as a journey for me because it when we're lying down, we have the most amount of feedback in our body. So our nervous system can have more feedback. And if we think about burnout and we think about too much energy exhaustion and energy expenditure, then lying down is also a really great place where I can start to calm the nervous system. And I think a big part of our work is that we get to tap into people's nervous systems and get them to calm down. Now you might not teach a demographic like this, I get that. But if you do, and I think there will be people in a lot of classes that do think that's what Pilates, you know, attracts people like that to. I think we have an opportunity in that supine part of the class, whether it's Matt, Reformer, Tower Chair, group, privates, to get them to notice. For me, this is a really important part that I was educated on. And I think this was a big part of what shifted something in me. Slow down. Notice. Notice the ground. Notice the weight of the head, the weight of the ribs, the weight of the pelvis, the weight of the feet. Feel on your exhale that everything can drop. Get them to spend some time, maybe doing some breath work here. I also think it's an interesting opportunity for someone to check in. How do you feel? How does it feel in your body? How do you feel in your energy? How do you feel in your emotions? How many times in your day today have you checked in with yourself on how you feel? And I think that's such an important part of this work. For me, almost the most important. And it's funny because guests mention it again and again and again, especially these people who've been in Pilates for a long time. I notice myself. Brent talked about this again in his episode, where, you know, when someone's in this state, we could go even deeper with this and ask bigger questions and go and listen to his episode when he talks about that. But what if we just got someone to tune in? How do you feel? And could today's class nourish how you're feeling? Because if we're trying to unpick some of this conditioning that harder is always better, I have to, I can't just lecture about that. Someone's not gonna get that. But if I give them a chance to slow down, breathe, notice how do you feel? Today, could you look at picking a movement experience for yourself that allows you to nourish and support how you're feeling? We know, we know through science that we feel differently every day. As women, we feel different on every single day of our cycle. I read Kate Northrop's book on cycles and business, it's very interesting. And she talks about how, you know, the world is built for men. So a man goes through his hormone cycle in 24 hours. That's why, you know, the working week is the way it is, and every day should be the same. But if you were to look at a woman's cycle, that every day we are different. And there are times in the month where you're more productive, there's times in the month where you are more tired, there's times in the month where you finish work more. And it's a really interesting idea because I bet you, if you think about it, you'll be like, yeah, sometimes I sit down and I just can't do something. And other times I can just get something done. But that also goes for our energy level. So there are times in the month where we want to move more or move less. Let's allow people to just notice that. We might have also had a bad night's sleep. We're just coming off a heat wave here in the UK, everyone's exhausted. Someone said to me yesterday, I feel like this week of heat, bearing in mind we have no AC in the UK, pretty much anywhere in any of our homes. She said, I feel like we've all feel hung over. I thought, so true. But don't you feel like that if you've got young kids or you've had bad night's sleep or you suffer from insomnia, you feel exhausted. Why not nourish how you're feeling? When I learned to do that, something shifted in me. And interestingly enough, and if you look at the bioscience of this, you'll understand more. But when I did that, I actually got more of the physical results that I wanted than when I kept push, push, pushing myself. Because if you're a person who runs at speed, you're working long hours, you're not sleeping very well, you've got a lot of pressure on you, your body is full of adrenaline and then full of cortisol. And the thing is, those more high-intensity workouts, spinning, more high-intensity hit type stuff, running, whilst all very good for you. I'm not dissing it, but they do produce more adrenaline in your system. So they push you more into that burnout, not less. So, yes, you get the endorphins. But if you understand the science of it, we've got an opportunity through Pilates to start to slow people down, to notice themselves, to tune in with themselves and to do something for them that really no other modality or certainly life does for them. That is powerful, very, very powerful. It allows people to figure out who they are and what they need. And if in that they realize, wow, this is making me feel so good. Like I had a client years ago say, I came for my bad back and I stayed for my mental health, then people start to see so much benefit from this work. So that beginning part of the class is so important. Now, how long I spend on that really does depend on the group of people I've got and the time of day. And we realized that when we were teaching 6:30, 7:30 a.m. classes, that people didn't need as much of this. They'd just woken up. So they kind of came, they'd made the effort to come to the studio. They wanted to get going a little bit quickly. So, yes, we still did unraveling from a, you know, balancing the body out, because that's another big part of our studio's ethos. We unravel before we strengthen, whether that's in your nervous system, in your energy, but also physically. So I accept in an early morning class, you may not want to go as deep on this. But if someone's rushed at lunchtime, then isn't that going to really help them in the afternoon go back to work? And certainly at the end of their day. I also notice whenever I cover a Saturday or Sunday class, again, you need less of this. People tend to be just in a much better place on a weekend. So whilst it's still there, it's it tweaks how long. Sometimes it's like three minutes, sometimes it might be five or six minutes. And I'll often do things like the pre-Pilates work as part of this. Some clocks, for example. I love a pelvic clock to start with because it sort of does a lot of things, doesn't it? It unravels the pelvis. It starts to balance out. And what I see is, and I kind of learnt this from the osteopaths that I work with, if we can get the pelvis into a really nice balanced place, then everything above and below it is on a bit of a winning streak. Whereas if the pelvis is a little bit twisted, a little bit tucked, whatever's happened from the week that you've had, then really everything else is fighting it. So we can do that. And the pelvis, the pelvic clock is just such a nice one where we can bring in some breath cues, some mindfulness, some thinking about the anatomy, what the bones are doing. And it gets people really focused and mindful in what they're doing. And I think that's what's really interesting in Pilates. If you cue it in the right way, it becomes this very mindful process where you're so concentrated on what you're trying to get the body to do that you can't think of anything else. And that's a huge reason why this work is so powerful. And so if we think of our beginners, then we can think about, you know, footwork is about can they keep the pelvis quiet as the legs are moving? So it's hip dissociation. And yes, we could think about how we're organizing the legs as well. But if you remember the first time you ever tried to do that, this was really hard. And if you are somebody who had the chronic lower back pain, then you will know even more like how much concentration that took. I also think that when we move people up levels and they're more experienced, we have to give them that level of mindfulness. And one of the things that slightly gets on my nerves a little bit at my studio is where I see teachers just make the same type of class feel physically stronger or weightier or meatier. Okay, that's more of a challenge for my body, but it's not as much of a challenge for my mind. And I love those classes that make my brain work as hard as my body. For me, that is how Pilates changed my life because it got me feeling differently. And suddenly in that hour, I'd done meditation mindfulness. Yes, I'd done strength and toning. I'd also help to rehab my shoulder. Like that is a real good use of an hour if I'm a really busy person. And I walk out and I feel calmer and I feel more present and I feel more able to take on the day. And then, yeah, a few weeks in I noticed that my jeans are feeling looser and everything's toning up. And I remember in that moment, even in the early days of my Pilates, just going to classes, I thought, I've been lied to my whole life. This just feels relaxing. This thing I'm doing feels so relaxing. And yet my body is starting to change. And so it's for us to think about if we have felt that ourselves, where is the drive to ramp it up coming from? Where is the drive to make it faster coming from? We know scientifically that if we're looking to reprogram our nervous system to be more balanced, to find more ease, you know, our posture is part of our nervous system, it's part of our subconscious system. For everything to just work, then we know that we need to slow down in order to pick up new movement skills. We can't learn new skills fast. We just can't. Now that doesn't mean that everything should be slow forever. Life is at pace, and I get that, and we need to sometimes ramp it up. But a big part of my studio's ethos is this idea that we set people up for success. So, how can I teach you the strategies that you need for the challenge that's coming? And if I understand that as a teacher, then I can give someone a really great class experience. Another part of this, and I get lots and lots of questions about this, so thank you for sending those questions in around engaging muscles. Now, listen, it's a big topic and it takes a bit of time. But all of the movement world out there and the anatomy of movement world all agrees on the fact that we should not be cuing engagement of muscles. The problem is, in order to explain it, it takes time and it takes depth. And so if you've done a shorter course or you did a course, say 10-15 years ago where they didn't quite know this yet, then there might not have been the time or there might not have been the knowledge to explain this. But where some of this engagement piece came from was that study around core strength. So they looked at people who had chronic lower back pain, and they had a group of people who didn't, and they asked them to lift their arm above their head. And in the group that did not have lower back pain, their core muscles had some spontaneous contraction. Spontaneous being the really important word. And those people who had chronic low back pain, they did not have spontaneous contraction of their abdominal muscles. And so this then led to the belief that core strength was the answer to everything. And that if we taught people to engage our core, then it would solve all this lower back pain. Well, having been one of these people, I remember this. I remember being at the physios and they said, like, imagine you've got a corset on, like, put it on 100%. I mean, what does that even mean? And then release it 50% and then walk around with that 50%. My lower back pain did not get better. And what we now know about that kind of idea is that someone can't breathe fully, therefore their diaphragm isn't expanding fully, therefore their pelvic floor is not responding. We're getting hypertonic pelvic floors as a result of this. And so if our goal as teachers is to teach spontaneous engagement of muscles, then why are we teaching conscious engagement of muscles? It doesn't make sense. We're teaching people Pilates to be good at life. We're not teaching people Pilates to be good at Pilates. And I got heard this story the other day from this very, very experienced personal trainer who really understands this and she also teaches Pilates. And someone went to her class, and then in the class, she was saying, zip up and hollow and pull your navel to your spine. And this person who's also a Pilates teacher said to her, like, Well, why? Why are you teaching that? You've just told me in the gym that we need spontaneous engagement, and you, you know, you're talking to me about let's think about the organization of the bones and the muscles will do their job. And she said, Yeah, yeah, but this is Pilates, that's what we say. That just doesn't make sense. This is all movement. We're all trying to teach people to move well. So if we want to teach people life, then life is full of tasks. If I said to you, can you go and make me a cup of tea? Or could you walk upstairs and grab me something? There's your task. Not once in doing that task will you think about a muscle or an engagement or a single part of your body. You just won't. You will think of getting from A to B and back as easy as efficiently as possible, maybe as quickly, depends how much you want to do this for me. And so if we want people to do that better, which I think we do, then we need to just teach them the efficiency, the ease, the balance in their bodies so that they can do that. If we're teaching people engage cores, engage glutes, you know, notice that your hamstrings are engaging, how does that educate them to go and get a book from upstairs from me? It doesn't. So how can we think about the way that we structure our lessons and our cueing so that we can sprinkle in some ideas of how we can get them to do it better, how we can get them to do it with more ease. And then when they can do it with more ease, how we can add on some more challenge, whether that challenge is load or pace or positioning. Like we have so many ways to play with this work in Pilates. But like I said, the anatomy queuing thing, I mean, I talked for an hour the other day in my course specifically on this because people can get very, very focused on, but that is how I was taught. Now I was educated in a way, and I feel really lucky that my educator Diane always made me feel like ask the why. Like this isn't the gospel according to me or the gospel according to my educator. She was like, this is how much I know now, and I'm gonna educate you as best I can, but ask why. Like, why do the hands have to be under the shoulders for quadruped? Why, if it felt comfortable, could it not be slightly above you or to the left or to the right? Like, why? So think about the whys. Why are you saying some of the things you're saying? Now, when I do do this in my courses, I do get a lot of teachers saying, it's like you've taken all my language away. And so there is some time where we have to unravel, just like we do with our clients, like unravel some of these ideas. But maybe this week you could play with some of these ideas. Maybe you could bring in a period at the beginning of class that's got a bit of checking in, a bit of unraveling physically, mentally, emotionally, maybe spiritually if you're that way inclined. Maybe you could think about bringing in some ideas. So let's say hip dus association was your idea in class, and you had some like dead bugs and footwork and feet and straps, and then you had some quadruped and you had some scooter, and you had these things that keep linking together, then you could keep bringing in a similar idea to see if someone could keep meeting the new challenge. So we're doing it lying down, now we're doing it in all fours, now we're doing it standing up, now we're doing it with one leg here. So we could bring in some ideas that suddenly make that class feel like an educational thread. Now, of course, you'll have other moves around it. We'll have some flexion, extension, rotation, other things in there. But you could keep bringing back the same ideas, the same setup that maybe you spent quite a bit of time talking about, say, in your footwork. So maybe you could do that. And maybe you could pick an exercise just to play with it this week. An exercise that they know, I quite like the bridge for this. It's really interesting to see. Could you make this feel as easy as possible and just leave a little bit of silence and see how it lands and ask them, how did it feel? And it is interesting. The other thing I really like in bridging is that when they come down, for them to make sure they have an off moment because we don't, do we? Watch your clients, they're kind of ready to go again. But we need to help people practice switching off. I say this in class. I say, hey, who's really good at being busy? Everyone puts their hand up. Who's really good at being tired? Everyone puts their hand up. Okay, today we're gonna try a little different approach. We're gonna try and make a class that I know you know feel delicious and easy and see how it feels. And it's so interesting. And then at the end of your class, also have a moment of check-in. Take some time to breathe, to notice how it feels. I truly believe that a huge part of this work is a reprogramming of our nervous system. And if we reprogram our nervous system so that it can pick up more information, all the information that the equipment, the props, the balls, whatever we've used has given us, that's why we all feel different at the end of a class. Because we've got so much more information in our nervous system, but we need some time to notice because if we don't notice, about 60% of the benefit of your class has been missed. So there needs to be a point at the end of your class where we stand and we notice and we breathe and we check in. And how do you now feel? I often say to clients, what's shifted? What can you feel in your body that's different? There's no right difference or wrong difference, but just change. We want change, we want to create change in people and give them a little moment to feel that. And how powerful has this hour been? You've rushed here. How powerful has this hour been for you that you've taken the time? Maybe I get them to place their hands on their heart and thank themselves, give themselves some gratitude. Thank you. Thank yourself for taking the time to come here and look after your body and support your body. So, why don't you play with that in a class this week and see how it lands? Maybe more than one class. I find this really interesting when teachers who are already teaching and come on my courses come back and you hear amazing feedback. And it gives you as a teacher a little bit of space too. So I hope this has given you some ideas on how we can still challenge our clients intelligently. I'm not saying we make it easy, easy, easy. Absolutely not. But how do we educate them to have intelligence in their movement, then challenge it in a way that's intelligent so that we can create intelligent movers? How can we do that? And I hope today's podcast has kind of given you some ideas. These are my ideas. Do tell me how this has landed with you. Come over to the uh beyond underscore reformer underscore pod on Instagram. So beyond reforma pod with underscores. I do, I pick up all the DMs. I reply to everyone, even if some people are a little bit criticizing of what I'm saying, I reply. Listen, I am doing this, you know, I'm very open and I love hearing different people's thoughts. I love when you share guest recommendations. I'm just in the middle of planning a New York trip in September. So tell me who I should go and meet in New York, who would be an interesting conversation. And I will see you next week on the pod. If you haven't already, it is so helpful if you could like, subscribe, and share. It's what helps keep bringing these conversations to you every week. It's what helps keep bringing them free. It makes a huge difference to do that. We're on YouTube if you want to watch, we're on Spotify Video, we are on Apple Video. Sometimes we're trying to get it working a little bit better. But it's so amazing to be building this community. I looked the other day, 129 countries. The numbers are insane. There are thousands of you listening every week. But if you've got a Pilates friend that isn't, do share the episodes. Thank you for sharing them on your Instagram stories. It makes a huge difference. And I will see you next week for another guest episode of Beyond the Reformer.