The Quiet Part of the Exercise

I wrote recently about Single Leg Circles and the leg that apparently isn’t doing very much.

One leg draws the circle, so naturally our attention tends to follow it. But the exercise becomes considerably more interesting when we start watching everything else.

What is the other leg doing?

What is happening through the pelvis?

What has to occur through the trunk as the moving leg changes direction?

Stillness does not mean inactive.

Stillness in Pilates is often not the absence of movement. It is an organised response to it.

That distinction matters.

If the instruction is simply to “keep the pelvis still,” for example, it is easy to imagine stillness as something rigid: hold everything down while the leg moves independently.

But the pelvis is part of the circle. The movement of the leg creates forces that the rest of the body has to respond to. What appears externally as stillness may actually involve a great deal of organisation.

Once you start looking for this, you see it everywhere in the work.

In Corkscrew, the movement of the legs makes the organisation of the rest of the body visible.

On the Reformer, the carriage and springs continually change the forces the body has to respond to.

On the Wunda Chair, movement of the pedal can reveal a surprising amount about what appears to be the quieter part of the exercise.

This is one of the reasons I think it is useful to occasionally shift our attention away from the most obvious movement.

Watch the part that isn’t moving. It may tell you more about the exercise than the part that is.

Knowing When to Leave It Alone

Early in teaching, it can feel as though a good lesson is one in which you caught everything.

You saw the pelvis shift. You noticed the shoulder. You corrected the foot. You adjusted the spring. You remembered the thing you wanted to work on from last week. And because you have spent years learning to see these things, it is understandably tempting to demonstrate that you have seen them.

Experience tends to complicate that.

The longer you teach, the more you see. But you also begin to realise that noticing something doesn’t automatically mean it needs correcting.

There is a difference between observation and intervention.

A student may be doing several things that you could change, but that doesn’t mean changing all of them will produce a better lesson. Sometimes one well-chosen correction changes the organisation of several exercises that follow. Sometimes something you noticed at the beginning of the lesson resolves as the student moves through the work. Sometimes the thing you leave alone today becomes much easier to address next week because the student has understood something else first.

And sometimes it simply isn’t the most important thing happening.

This is where teaching becomes considerably more interesting than identifying deviations from an ideal shape. We have to decide what deserves attention.

Is what I’m seeing preventing the exercise from happening?

Is it affecting something else?

Is there another exercise in the sequence that may address it more effectively than my explanation will?

If I interrupt now, am I actually going to improve what is happening, or am I about to replace the student’s experience of the exercise with my commentary on it?

That last question is one I find particularly useful.

Pilates gives us an enormous amount to observe. The apparatus gives us information. The springs give us information. The sequence gives us information. The student gives us information. Our job isn’t necessarily to respond verbally to every piece of it.

There is also a danger in assuming that a busy teacher is an attentive teacher. They are not necessarily the same thing.

Restraint isn’t passive teaching. Leaving something alone doesn’t mean you didn’t see it.

Sometimes it means you did. And decided that something else mattered more.

A Practical Studio Question: What Are We Actually Providing for One Another?

Last month I looked at the real value of a teaching hour.

A £70 private lesson isn’t necessarily a £70 teaching hour. Once studio hire, payment processing and the direct costs of delivering that lesson are removed, the number looks rather different.

There is another side to that calculation that is harder to put neatly into a spreadsheet: where does the value in that hour actually come from?

The traditional studio arrangement looks relatively straightforward.

The studio provides the premises, equipment and infrastructure. It may advertise, handle enquiries, manage bookings and bring new students through the door.

The teacher provides the lesson.

But mature studio relationships are rarely quite that simple.

A good teacher also creates continuity. They build relationships. They retain students. Their reputation may bring people into the studio. A student initially acquired through the studio may, several years later, be arranging their week specifically around seeing that teacher.

At some point, the balance of what each party is providing may have changed.

That doesn’t necessarily make the original arrangement unfair. It simply means it may be worth looking at again.

There is a tendency in our industry to reduce these conversations to percentages and hourly rates: What am I paying? What am I being paid?

Those numbers matter, of course. But they don’t tell us everything.

A more useful question for both sides might be:

What are we actually providing for one another?

If a studio is consistently generating new clients, handling administration, maintaining excellent equipment, providing a strong professional environment and taking responsibility for the considerable work involved in running the business, that has real value.

If a teacher is bringing their own clients, retaining them for years, contributing expertise and reputation, and requiring very little administration from the studio, that has real value too.

And those two teachers may reasonably have very different relationships with the same studio.

Perhaps the mistake is assuming that because an arrangement made sense when it began, it must continue to make sense indefinitely.

Businesses change. Teachers develop. Students form relationships. Studios evolve.

Occasionally, it is worth looking at the arrangement with fresh eyes.

One Thing to Try This Month

Take a familiar exercise from your own practice and deliberately interfere with it less.

Choose something you know well. Rather than immediately correcting, improving or trying to reproduce what you think the exercise should be, do it and pay attention to what is actually happening.

What do you notice when you aren’t immediately trying to change it?

Try it again, but this time choose just one thing to address. Then see what else changes as a result.

Does something you noticed the first time resolve without being directly corrected? Does changing one part of the exercise affect another? Is something you have been routinely “fixing” actually useful information about how you are approaching the exercise?

The point isn’t to practise without intention.

It’s to leave enough room to notice what the exercise is telling you before deciding what to do about it.

Looking for the Connections

One of the things I find increasingly interesting about Pilates is how much more you see when you stop thinking about the exercises as entirely separate things.

We necessarily learn them that way to some extent. The Hundred is The Hundred. Footwork is Footwork. Pumping on the Wunda Chair is Pumping on the Wunda Chair. Each has its own starting position, action and place within the order.

But the longer you spend with the work, the harder it becomes to see them only as individual exercises.

Something you encounter on the Mat appears again on the Reformer under different circumstances. An idea that is relatively easy to recognise in one exercise becomes much less obvious when the orientation of the body changes. Footwork on the Reformer can make you think differently about Pumping on the Wunda Chair, and Pumping can send you back to Footwork noticing something you had previously overlooked.

The connection doesn’t always need to be explained or even named.

In fact, I think there is some value in resisting the temptation to explain it too quickly.

If we are always told what one exercise is supposed to teach us about another, we can become very good at repeating the connection without necessarily seeing it for ourselves.

It can be more interesting to ask:

Where else have I met this before?

Not because every exercise needs an equivalent elsewhere in the system, or because there is necessarily one correct answer, but because it changes the way we look at familiar material.

An exercise we have taught hundreds of times can suddenly become interesting again because something elsewhere in the work has changed the way we understand it.

And then, of course, we take that new understanding back with us.

Perhaps that is one of the advantages of working within a method for a long time. The material doesn’t constantly need to become new.

Our perspective on it does.

Perhaps that is the theme this month?

We spend years becoming better at seeing the work. The next part is deciding what deserves our attention once we do.

Until next month,

Dawne

Private Lessons • Teacher Mentorship • Studio Consultancy