Untitled project from Captivate

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PE Heath Lander 9 April 2025: [00:00:00] Welcome to Pilates Elephants. I'm here with my friend, Heath Lander. Welcome Heath. Hi, ref. Thanks. So, uh, if you want to get good at a middle split, spend more time in a middle split.

Or why, why are you saying that? Right. Well, or another way of, another way of posing that same question would be why are Pilates educators teaching people and preparing them to teach in the industry of 1996?

And why are the ex, and consequently, why are the expectations out there in the industry and [00:01:00] expectations, you know, the Pilates police, the people who are saying like, oh, this isn't real Pilates. Or You need to be trained by a quote, reputable quote, you know, provider or you don't know the right exercises, or you don't understand the right principles, or whatever.

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,

well, I'm really passionate about large group reformer teaching because people love [00:02:00] reformer. Large group is the business model that makes it viable. Define large group. Define large group. Anything about, the way I think about large group is as soon as you're trying to teach multiple bodies the same program, and that usually has to happen at about five people or more.

'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.

Mm-hmm. It's like, oh, you know, more than six. No, that would be dangerous. That would be scary. [00:03:00] That would be, you know, I couldn't, you know, my clients wouldn't like it 'cause I wouldn't get enough personal attention. Uh, it's, you know, I couldn't really give people the results, you know, with that, that massive number of seven or eight people in, in the group.

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.

Because I, you know, you, you basically, your, what you are kind of all rolled up about is that people [00:04:00] in Pilates courses, apart from ours, don't learn to teach a group. They learn to teach one-on-one, and then they try and transpose that skill into a group format and they find they can't do it. Because it's a different skill.

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 [00:05:00] you can't teach the same e program to. 10 people and expect it to land safely. Right. But I think I, and I think that where that kind of distinction or the, where the kind of the, the threshold is around that sort of like six-ish people in the group is manageable for a lot of people is because at six people, five people in the group, if everyone's doing the same thing, but you don't have that skill of layering and dividing, you know, the, the level of effort you can kind of rush around to everybody and give them individual, you know, adjustments and, and variations and modifications and regressions.

Yeah. But once you start getting to 7, 8, 9, 10, but you just can't do that. Yeah. Yeah. I think we're aligned on that. So six, you know, like when I was running small groups on a, if, if someone showed up and they weren't booked, six was doable. But if you asked me to do seven individual programs, it was just, there were too many chainsaws in the air at once and then not so much that anyone was gonna hurt themselves, but you had [00:06:00] people waiting and that was what I never wanted and.

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.

Yeah. You know, but you kind of can, you know, keep one nostril above water, as it were. Yeah. And I think too, it's like a, what's the. Self perpetuates because if you don't do more, then you maintain that skill. But [00:07:00] there is, there isn't, there isn't capacity for more people. But then you also are so burned out, you don't have the space to reflect and think and discover maybe there's a better way to do this.

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.

But doing that at a group level, that's a different skill. And so the more you run around like a headless chicken, the better you get at doing that. But you don't actually build the muscle of, that's only gonna get you from six to seven participants or six to 12 participants. And. You, when you develop that skill to a high level, you can actually run a class of 12 people where everybody has a more [00:08:00] individualized experience than they would've got with five people in the room if you're running round, round, trying to customize everything for every, every individual client.

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.

You know, with Pilates program, praise education programs are tuning out people who are, who have learned how to teach one-on-one and then, but, and learn how to teach on all of the [00:09:00] equipment and learned like 500 plus exercises. But the, and, and so they're perfectly prepared to teach in a slow paced boutique studio with all of the equipment that you would find in most capital cities in the late 1990s,

but Right. Ill-equipped to teach in the group reformer studio with 12 beds. That is the absolute, you know, vast majority of all Pilate Studios in the world in 2025. Yep. And then because they don't have strategies or systems that allow them to give people the experience that they've been taught is important, shapes, all of those things that make Pilates, Pilates, then the, then the de, [00:10:00] the, the, the, the, the default position becomes you can't do it.

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?

Like you, you don't, and that was the thing. There's so many threads in my head. One of the things I came out of stock with was this sort of implied slash osmotic understanding that you didn't do the work to make the shape, you had to kind [00:11:00] of unlock the shape. Like you, you would, your body would kind of find it if you could find the right hack.

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.

So what are the different skills in your [00:12:00] view,

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.

But just say you did want to teach quote unquote more Pilates, you know, traditional. Pilates type moves, like teasers and hybrid example. Hybrid, yep. Yep. Back splits. All of those fun, you know, things. What, what are the, what are the, [00:13:00] you know, contrast for me the different, you know, the, the different, the key differences in the skillset required to teach that stuff one-on-one or in very small groups versus a group of, you know, 10, 12, 14 people.

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.

We do a lot of demo, we do a lot of manual adjustments. What is the, what is the correlate of that in that allows us to teach 12 people? Okay. And I suppose the other, the third point in that would be also an overemphasis on the muscles that [00:14:00] create a movement like muscles that are working and that you should be feeling back, back up a second.

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.

Put your hands on the shoulder pads, press up and maybe you [00:15:00] pause for a moment on the crown of your head, heaven forbid. And then push all the way up and make a full bridge. And then if you've got it, you take one leg off and try and touch the ceiling. So you end up with one leg, vertical, the other leg theoretically straight.

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.

But I've called that to a group of 10 none times. But that's not to say that I don't think about it and I'm not planning for it. Right. And so part of the skill is actually layering up to that and giving people like the version they can do today that builds up to that. Right. So, all right. So just say we wanted to, but, but [00:16:00] just on that quickly, just, I think, 'cause this is something that I've been talking about with a few people that, so when we say the version that they can do today, and a lot of people go, yeah, totally go and get the short box.

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.

Okay. Yeah. If I'm using a lot of demos, a lot of manual. Corrections. And now I want to translate to be able to teach a much larger group. [00:17:00] What different strategies do I need to use to cue people? Okay, great. So the strategy is probably better expressed through a smaller movement. So let's say something like chest expansion.

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.

Make sure neutral. You've got your rib to hip connection happening. Don't let the ribs float up too much. Breathe laterally into the sides and, [00:18:00] and lower lobes of the of the ribs. Now as you exhale, I want you to gently engage the muscles between your scapula and down below the scapula. Draw the shoulder blades gently down your back and make sure they're sitting flat and flush on the ribs.

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 [00:19:00] that it's part of the same family, you mean that it's got that essence of thoracic extension, is that what you mean? Yep. Yep. And if it's down stretch, then what you're doing in Downst stretch to make a bigger downst stretch would be hips forward. Chin, shoulders back, big chest, try and put your hips on the foot bar.

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.

Your chest is up, you're looking up. And so essentially if you, you know, take that same [00:20:00] shape with the legs straight, you know, the, the backend extension, it's the, that's the high bridge shape, but just flipped upside down relative to gravity. And it's, if you take that shape in the thoracic. It's the same as the chest expansion shape, but the chest expansion is just way more mild.

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.

It's basically the same, you know, shape. It's just a milder version of it. Yeah. Which is what I was saying before is like the idea that you think about. Indivi exercises as [00:21:00] individual things is, should be redundant. If, if we're gonna think about groups and then if we even think about them in blocks, like, okay, I'm gonna get highbridge off the short box.

Like, that's redundant. It should, you should be able to think way, way, way further back. Yeah. And so this is, goes back to the episode where recorded back in like 1973 I think it was called. There's only three exercises in the world and cat stretches two of them. Right. Spot on. Right. Like especially if we're talking about Pilates.

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.

And then you've got the, the desk bound worker hunching over his computer at the end. So I'm thinking of like that and it's like, okay, high bridge is like one end, and you know, chest expansion is at the other end and [00:22:00] you've got all of these like intermediate kind of shapes in between. And so I love that.

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.

And, uh, that that is true. That is true. Um, when we heath, when, when you and I started out, I was, I taught you Pilates, you were my Pilates client, then I taught you to become a Pilates teacher, and you've worked for me ever since that day in 2009 or oh eight or whenever it [00:23:00] was. Yes. And I can well and truly say a hundred percent hand on heart right now.

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.

And you have just refined that process down to a very, very fine art. And, uh, I can yeah, say hand on heart that you are by far the best Pilates teacher I've ever come across. Uh, and so yeah, folks, if you haven't done one of Heaths classes, like there is another level beyond what you've experienced. [00:24:00] Um, and, uh, anyway, so.

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

add one, one movement where there's a focus on. Doing [00:25:00] something as opposed to feeling something. So chest expansion would be shoulders back, big chest. 'cause what's this thing called? Chest expansion? So I want shoulder retraction, thoracic extension. I'm not gonna tell you that I want, I want the biggest chest you can make and then press the straps back and, okay.

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.

There's like 15 things about it that theoretically. Polish right from the toes aren't pointed the right way to maybe their hips aren't quite rotated perfectly to their thoracic alignment, to their head position, to the, you know, there's lots of different little [00:26:00] things we could tweak on that movement.

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.

But I wouldn't say hips forward because people are nervous about that. So they're, but you would say push your, try [00:27:00] and get your thighs to touch the shoulder pads and if, if you can move back. And So I break one of the cardinal rules. I often teach chest expansion with knees against the shoulder pads rather than going to the toe hooks straight away.

'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.

And it's like, oh look, everyone's doing a long back bend that starts at their knee and goes to their collarbone. All they did was say, big chest, shoulders back, try to touch the shoulder pads with your thighs. Okay, so when you have. The, you have the map in your mind of the, the evolution of man. Where we are thinking, you know, high bridge is the end of the evolution in this particular stream [00:28:00] and chest expansion is the now ancient 7 million year old chimpanzee, you know, ancestor.

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.

Maybe. Well, well, Highbridge is extension facial cat stretch. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Um, so maybe cast stretches all three of them. I don't know. But [00:29:00] so when, with, when we are looking at someone in their chest expansion and we're thinking like, what are we correct here? Head position, fingers, elbows, knees, toes, feet back, thoracic, shoulder blades, collar bones, abs, ribs, breathing.

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.

You know, shoulder bridge is another part of High [00:30:00] Bridge. 'cause it teaches you the lift. But, you know, but, and I don't think that everyone should necessarily know all of this. I mean, I spent a long time practicing this stuff as well, but it's like the way I think about, it's like a Google pin, like it's like the evolution of man thing.

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.

Yeah, so we, we put the pin in the map and say, we want to get there. It's, it's not gonna be a straight line, right? It's gonna be squiggly line. You're gonna have find different roads. You find the roadworks is there, that doesn't work. You go around. So there's lots of paths that get you there. But if, if you don't have a thing that you're thinking about, you thinking's not organized, you're just wandering around or, you know, put another way in, I guess more tactical terms, you could say like, okay, to achieve high [00:31:00] bridge you need several things.

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.

Okay. And then we know, okay, well the pulling the courage into the stopper as you lift, that's not gonna, you're not gonna learn that in chest expansion, right? But you are gonna learn that in shoulder bridge. [00:32:00] And the shoulder strength you Yeah. Are not really gonna learn that in chest expansion or 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?

Well, it's about the lift of the hips and pulling the carriage into the stopper, right. Because those, that's. That's when you get those, both of [00:33:00] those things, if your hips are high and the carriage is on the stop, it's like that's a pretty good shoulder bridge and it starts to look, you know, minus where the arms are a lot like high bridge.

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.

Okay. Now shoulders into the bed, chest to your chin and it's like, ah. Now the whole back's working [00:34:00] because then you're sort of building in chest expansion into the high bridge. Right? That's where there's ancient ancestor, like you've got a bit of Neal DNA still floating around in there. Yeah. And like we were saying, what I was saying before is, you know, we've practiced that enough.

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.

So it's not a silver bullet, it's a thousand [00:35:00] golden bbs that, um, unlock it. It's just like, yeah, you just gotta do the reps, but you've gotta do the reps, the reps of the right thing in the right way. Just doing shoulder bridge for 10 years isn't gonna make you. Magically do high bridge, right? If if you, you're not, if you wanna lift a sho, if you wanna lift a high bridge on two and a half springs, I want you to be able to do single leg shoulder bridge on a one if not a half spring, which shows me that that hamstring is super strong, ready to do the lifting.

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.

You've only got a range of one to one and a half. Yeah. So, and it's like, well, hold on a minute. Shoulder bridge on a half spring makes my hamstring stronger. Why wouldn't I do that when I can? 'cause that's gonna make the lift to [00:36:00] high bridge. Inordinately easier, right? Well, I mean, it's so, it's so silly going, okay, shoulder bridge is on whatever it was, two to two and a half springs, I can't remember in the stock world.

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?

Yeah. It's, it's, it's just, it's, I mean, when you think about it, it's just comical to think that. Two people are gonna [00:37:00] be like in a room of half a dozen people, even that you're gonna find that the, you know, the weakest person to the strongest person is gonna be two to two and a half springs. You know, it's like, it's, it's insane.

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.

Um, alright, so the core skill here is going from using demonstration and manual correction to understanding the essence of the movement, where it sits on the evolution of man. And then once you understand the essence of the movement, in this case in say, chest expansion. It is thoracic extension, [00:38:00] and then we can actually build that into some hip extension and even some lumbar extension there.

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, [00:39:00] it's unambiguous, right? It's just like, it's a very concrete, you know, like you could stand in the room and look and say, okay, did that person, or did they not lift their chest? Lift their chest, right? Where we say, say something like, you know, connect your ribs or engage your lower trapezius.

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.

Continuum and therefore what this exercise is about, what the essence of it is. And then, so that's part one. Part two is communicating that verbally. And you, you know, to be fair, you can use a bit of a [00:40:00] demo of, you know, what do you mean when you say lift your chest? You can actually lift your chest.

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.

Yeah. No, it could be chest dancing, hip dancing, foot dancing, you know, whatever. But you don't need a bed. You don't have to be in context because you're speaking clearly and showing them what you mean. Right. And so you would say something like, lift your chest and you would [00:41:00] demonstrate lifting your own chest at the same time.

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.

You know, it's like someone got the puzzle pieces and just like scattered them on the floor. It's like, okay, there's your 500 exercises. Go for it. It's like, fuck which one goes where? And, and so what you've done and is take all of the [00:42:00] exercises that build up to, you know, an end point, let's say high bridge and map them out.

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.

Yeah. And so you've really put those exercises into columns and said, okay, high bridge is at the top of this column [00:43:00] and here are all of the exercises in the high bridge column. You know, and cat stretch would be in there and chest expansion and down stretch and shoulder bridge and, yeah. Yeah. And that, those columns, if I had them, which I don't, but 'cause my brain's a bit more haptic than that.

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.

So let's, so let's, let's, let's, let's move to that then. 'cause I think that is something that people, uh, is a very, very simple concept that missing, it's very hard to apply. Yeah. Which is missing from essentially 99% of, of Pilates, which is these dimensions that we've talked about before, of every exercise of re human [00:44:00] movement can be viewed or really just broken into or rated on the scale of strength, range of motion and control.

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 [00:45:00] levels of capacity, so we've got a beginner, someone who's advanced, someone who's got an injury, someone who's pregnant, someone who's got a sore back, whatever it might be, it's like, well, what does it mean to say there's diverse levels? It means like people have different levels of strengths, different levels of range of motion and different levels of control.

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?

Alright, well, so for all of the talk we've done of Highbridge, I should flag that. I, I, I, I went through a patch about eight, nine years ago where I sort of thought, okay, my mission is to get everyone that I teach to do these big moves, star, high bridge, [00:46:00] tendon stretch. Um. Horseback front horseback back, you know, the, the, the flashy moves.

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.

Well. So being good at Pilates isn't why people do Pilates. To a [00:47:00] level it is. But if you say that Highbridge is the indicator, people are like, yeah, you know, I'm not sure that I'm that motivated. But they love understanding the machine. They love getting a sense of their own progress. They love seeing change over time and maybe that gets to High Bridge, but it's just a very narrow percentage that want to be pushed to that constantly versus push people in their current capacities where they can see and taste the change, rather than be like, yeah, I'm never gonna get to Highbridge.

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.

And they work well with, they're scalable. So they're layered so that I can juggle all of these different capacities. And they're also exercises that lend themselves to either one or [00:48:00] more of those dimensions really easily. So we had that conversation about long stretch. It's like I always teach long stretch with a low foot bar, knees down one spring on, like, I call that my meat and potatoes long stretch.

'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.

And if I say take a half spring and I'll, I'll cluster that with lunges. So we step up and do lunges with a light spring. I get to see the strength of the front leg. [00:49:00] So there's simple movements that I use a lot, so I'm really, what's the word? Brain sharp on what people are doing in them. And I'm quite effective, reasonably effective, I think most of the time at making predictions about what I can do with people along that continuum.

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?

And yeah, it does make sense. And I just want to kind of draw a distinction out there, because you know, a minute ago we were saying like, uh, poo poo, you know, uh, teaching the, the everyone this exercise in the same spring and now you just said like, I always teach on one spring. Yeah. And I, I, you know, I understand why you said that, and it's because basically you've found that that setting is the lowest common denominator where literally everybody who doesn't have like massive shoulder injuries or whatever [00:50:00] can do it.

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.

Right. And then we scale it up from there. Yep. Now there is even a way to scale it back, like you said, by bringing the football up. Right? So if you go from football down to football up, it actually does make it a bit easier. But basically you start with the easiest setting and then you watch people move and that tells you, okay, do we need to go harder here for this person or this person, or are we at the right level?[00:51:00]

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,

but, well, the thing, I mean, but if we think of long stretch as the traditional version, right? So foot bar up feet on the, on the headrest, [00:52:00] straight knees, you know, thoracic flexion, pressing out until your arms are fully flexed. Right? Well. Foot bar down one spring, knees on the carriage, feet on the shoulder blocked.

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.

That will give them some kind of sense of like, yeah, I'm doing something here. [00:53:00] Totally. And then the other part about the programming that I use and we teach is. I am absolutely confident repeating a movement multiple times in a cluster, in a session. So I'll do that one. We'll do a bunch of reps, we'll do some holds, we might add pushups.

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.

I'm making these shapes. And you know, man, that class was a killer. And it's like, yeah, great. Alright. So I [00:54:00] wanna, I wanna pull out of this now and kind of wrap up to try and bring this back to the question that we started with, which is, you know, I started with like, well if you wanna get really good at middle splits, what should you do?

A lot of, and the answer is middle splits. Mm-hmm. And another way to kind of pose that question or say that same thing is, well, we want to teach, you know, we're trying to help people teach Pilates and make a living and change lives. And how, and how does that, how, how do you do that in 2025? Or you teach large group reformer classes?

'cause that's what people are like. If this was like. 1985, it would be, well, you'd do individual, you know, one-on-one sessions in a fully equipped studio. We're moving the Cadillac to the ladder barrel to the chair, to the [00:55:00] spring wall, to the ped pool, to the whatever. Okay. But in 2025, those jobs don't exist at scale.

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.

And that's teach group reformer. And so if you want to get good at teaching group reformer, you know, what would you study? Would it be teaching group reformer, or would it be. Individualized one-on-one sessions that move between the Cadillac, the spine corrector, the petal, blah, blah, blah. And the answer is, most Pilates educators are still teaching like it's 1985 and they're preparing you perfectly to [00:56:00] work at video Easy, you know, giving out Beta Max tapes of, you know, avenge of the nerve.

Whereas John Cusack films, right.

Um, actually does John Cusack film, uh, called The Shore Thing, which is from the eighties, like 86, 87, something like that, which my wife, Jules and I, it was one of the, it was like we really connected over that movie when we were like just dating. This was back in the. 1990s. So like we were much younger. The world was a younger place.

We probably did watch it on VHS, but anyway, um, go watch it folks at home, the sure thing, great movie. Um, so the answer's self evident, right? If you want to be good at a thing, go where they're gonna teach you how to do the thing that you're gonna be [00:57:00] doing. And, and then if we're thinking about like what the, the elements of that are, well, you've got the, what you don't get from one-on-one in small group is like what I call the convoy effect.

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 [00:58:00] abstracts or heuristics, but it sims down to a fairly constrained group of exercises that scale simply and easily using the machine and body positions and then pick them. Make, like get stuff that works. Like get talk to someone you trust that no has done it before. That's a good plan.

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.

And I'm thinking, okay, do they have the lift and do they [00:59:00] have the pull in their legs to achieve those things? In which case, if they don't, well that's what they need to work on. In order to progress. And when we are doing maybe, I think you said kind of prone on the long box hand on the foot bar, doing like presses off the foot bar.

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.

And I'm thinking like, okay, well maybe I've got the shoulder bridge thing working, but I just don't have the shoulder strength. And when I'm doing my, my presses off the bar, it's like, I can do on one spring, but I can't [01:00:00] do it on one and a half springs. It's like, well dude, you're not gonna lift your body weight.

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.

And in this case, it's lifting my head off the ca, off the headrest, using my shoulders, using my [01:01:00] shoulder strength, and starting on a box just basically is a get out of jail free card, which is fine and great, but it, it's not gonna get me there. Well, it does just, just before anyone sort of says. Because I mean, I teach that a lot in my ref pack.

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?

So it's not that it's redundant, it's just, it's, if that's all you did, if, if I said high bridge and you had, oh yeah, I do it off the long box, but I can't seem to get anyone to full high bridge, it's like, yeah, 'cause you're only doing that bit, right? And you need all the other bits. And so if I've got, if, if I've looked at all of those other intermediate movements and I figured out that where this particular client is blocked in this movement is they just don't have the strength to lift [01:02:00] themselves off the bottom position.

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.

Managing challenge with other exercises. Now it's, [01:03:00] it's funny and it's ironic here that, okay, so just say, I did have this full skillset, or, you know, you've got the skillset here, right? So just say I'm your client and I, we do, we're working one-on-one in your fully equipped Pilates studio, right? And it's 19 five, right?

But you've got the, you've got your, you back to the future. You've got your 2025 skillset, okay? And I come to you and I say, you know what, Heath, I really wanna do Highbridge, but I've never been able to do it. Can you help me learn to do highbridge? It's like you'd be like, yeah, fuck yeah, I can do that. No problem.

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.

So, okay, here's our program. I know what we're doing for the next six weeks. Right. And you know, you could do that on the reformer. You could probably go, oh yeah, we could probably whack in this [01:04:00] thing on the ladder barrel or this thing on the Cadillac or whatever, to, to address specific, uh, you know, components, the strength and range of motion, the control that I need to develop.

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?

They're like, because I'm not faffing about with manual cues [01:05:00] and manual adjustments, and I've got a sense of where everyone's going and everything works in a layered continuum. And they swapped from one muscle group to another muscle group without moving. I mean, when I first started doing small groups, holy crap.

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.

Right. And over weeks and months. Right, right. You're just like, okay, go do your second set of, uh, you know, shoulder bridge now. Yeah. Yep. Okay. So, um, but just say I can do all of that, but I don't know the history of Pilates or the principles of Pilates or [01:06:00] how to adjust the springs on the stability chair, which is still a mystery to me.

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.

Right. And I, what I mean is that I assumed they knew everything that I thought I didn't know about teaching Pilates. And then I worked with an osteo and he was asking me questions about movement and I said, didn't you learn this? He [01:07:00] said, we don't learn any movement, dude. We learn all. I was like, oh, and I understood that this is the different thing.

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.

Because language just evolves over time [01:08:00] and pronunciation changes and the meaning of words shifts over time. I mean, this happens in our own lifetime as well, that, you know, there are words that change their meaning. You know, like, uh, the example that leaps to mind is, you know, words sort of take on sort of a negative connotation.

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?

So it's just a, it's just a descrip, it's a neutral, you know, emotionally neutral, descriptive term of what's going on inside their body, right? But it came to me to be kind of an insult. Ah, you spastic. Yeah, so then we didn't call them Spastics anymore, and we started to, you know, spastic became like a, a, an insulting [01:09:00] term, whereas like 50 years ago it wasn't an insult, it was just a description.

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.

You know, the three, you know, whether it's W-H-E-R-E-W-E-A-R or, or what w apostrophe re you know, they try and police [01:10:00] this like, language is some kind of static thing that we need to do correctly. Whereas in reality, language is a cultural phenomena evolves over time as a culture changes. Right? And Pilates is the same, Pilates is the same, and LA language evolves, right?

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.

And I see the parallel with Pilates is, what was Joseph Pilates trying to do? He was trying to make sedentary people stronger, more vital. And that's exactly what we're trying to do. And we've got an opportunity to do it at scale. So saying, no, you should do it like this because [01:11:00] this is how he did it, or however, whoever did it, whoever taught me did it in a way that's completely unscalable and expensive.

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.

It's like I'm changing more lives, being good at large group than I am being good at one-on-one. Yeah.[01:12:00]

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.