The Pre-Nun Fix & What Was Wrong With It
Short Answer:
1. The advice didn’t work
2. None of Miss B’s 2 – 3 teachers kept after it by recognizing their advice didn’t work and none of Miss B’s 2 – 3 teachers refined the progress plan
Long Answer:
Let’s dissect the advice Miss B was given.
Miss B was given some good advice, albeit incomplete; she was encouraged to do Roll Ups and she was encouraged to stretch. The logic in that advice was that the ascent on Teaser is a Roll Up and the hamstrings must lengthen if the lever of the legs is to be long. However, Miss B did those things and they didn’t help very much. Maybe they didn’t help at all.
Miss B was also given some less than good advice; she was told to reach and breathe.
ALERT! Nun with a Ruler! Diatribe Ahead! Tangent Approaching!
Open another beer. This is going to take at least until Idaho.
I assure you, reaching and breathing will never ever deliver a remedy for the kinds of problems Miss B was experiencing. In fact, it so grossly oversells what reaching and breathing can actually accomplish that everything is diminished in the process.
Reach and breathe is a refinement that happens quite beautifully once we’re at or near the top of our Teaser; it is not a path, nor a remedy, nor does it constitute substantive help to fix improper form and/or weakness/tightness that prevents us from getting up on Teaser.
There are many instances in Pilates where, from the beginning proficiencies of an exercise, to reach and breathe are marvelous queues but not for Miss B’s Teaser. No way for Miss B’s Teaser.
Folks, if we’re hanging in our backs on Teaser, as Miss B was, and we think the struggle is in coming up from there, we will be sorely disappointed and often for a very long time. When we don’t have what it takes to get up, the strength, control and command that it does take to get up aren’t magically delivered to us while we wait, hanging in our backs where the struggle is mighty and the disappointment is huge.
If you know of a time or two when this very thing did in fact happen, where someone went from hanging back in Teaser to pulling up out of it into a proper form, what you saw can best be explained by “teacher error.” That’s where we, as teachers, don’t say the right words in just the right way in order for our client to make sense of it. The client’s strength and poise didn’t dramatically increase – it was there all along - it was just waiting for that magic combination of words and touch in order for it to be applied to the exercise at hand.
The biological work of building new strength, the release work to break up stuck strength and the commitment it takes to put flexibility into a tight muscle are often difficult and long processes.
Progress is made over time, sometimes it takes years. It’s an absolute certainty that the delivery of new strength, the release of stuck strength and increased flexibility in muscles are not delivered in their entirety and in an instant while we hang back on Teaser.
There are no Pilates miracles.
Sadly, the odds of Miss B going from her structurally flawed laid-back Teaser into a properly designed form were virtually nonexistent. With severe structural issues like Miss B’s remaining unaddressed, Teaser will never be ours.
You simply cannot get there from here.
Here’s clarity for you: We do not get Teaser by reaching and breathing. We will never get Teaser by reaching and breathing. At no point will Teaser come through reaching and breathing. Period.
Please don’t use reach and breathe queues under these or similar circumstances, okay? Okay.
Structural repairs/corrections needed to happen in order to fix the catastrophic issues Miss B was having before the nudges to breathe and reach would make any sense at all.
More clarity ahead!
Everyone who can perform a proper Teaser has walked through the same door –this is one of the most beautiful uniting qualities of the work - and there’s no way around it.
They all have 3 things in common;
1) a strong and supple spine that also fixes against the long heavy lever of legs
2) complete control over their strong and long hip flexors
3) muscles that will lengthen to permit the form
If you can’t punch those tickets then you can’t do Teaser. Period.
In order for us to be good teachers, we must understand what it takes to properly perform any given Pilates exercise and we must be able to transfer that knowledge to our clients so we can actually teach them how to properly perform Pilates. We must do the work of doing it right ourselves - in our own bodies – and we must do the work of understanding how to teach it so that others can perform it properly.
We must find the answers.
We must move ahead.
If we don’t keep trying and eventually succeed, the wrong advice never becomes the right advice. It never takes root and grows into something it wasn’t. It isn’t. It can’t.
It just keeps on being wrong.
I exist in the Pilates world to help all teachers who want to learn, exactly and precisely and forever more, how to deliver results.
Miss B’s Teaser was fixable and it was fixable over the internet, as you’ll see in a bit. But before we work, step by step, through the fix, let’s finish up adding some options to your toolbox for how to handle situations when you don’t know what to do.
What To Do When We Don’t Know What To Do
Lingering in technique limbo for years is enough to make anyone flat out give up, isn’t it?
Seriously.
It’s important that we realize the full impact of our actions as teachers and when we cannot deliver results, our clients have every right to fire us and when that happens, everyone loses.
Most of the time, the firing comes in the form of the client just slipping away; they don’t re-up when their package expires, they don’t survive a schedule conflict and more often than you’d think, many actually they leave even with paid sessions on their account.
The reason they come to us always has something to do with getting stronger and to feel and look their best. When we don’t keep them moving toward that end, they know it and they’ll eventually disappear.
Have you ever worked with athletic coaches? At elite levels their jobs, entirely and completely, revolve around delivering results and when their athletes are no longer performing to an expected level (winning, improving at an expected and declared rate, etc.), the coach gets fired. That’s the harsh reality of athletic competition at elite levels.
The same type of objective should guide our work.
Our clients should progress under our instruction – progression is, after all, evidence of increased strength and flexibility, fitness and conditioning, proficiency working toward unconscious competence. It is the very essence of success in the work and without it, we are the opposite of successful; we have failed.
You may not consider this type of failure to be substantial but consider this: your work with individual clients is your one and only chance to change their lives by delivering the promise of this work. Your client has wasted their time and money, they may develop opinions about Pilates in general based on their experience of being taught Pilates by you, and they may never give anyone else a chance to make it right. When this happens, Joe & Clara’s work is held a little less securely in our hands, in our minds and in our souls.
See, it’s true; everybody loses.
Let us pray.
Lord, when I don’t know what to do to make a situation better, please help me find the words that will earn my client’s patience because I will need time so that I can figure out the right thing to do and I need that grace to be asked for and offered without me suffering a loss of esteem, without me feeling like I’ve failed or that I’m not good enough to teach this work. Help me take advantage of the opportunity to increase my skills, to show my client that I care tremendously about their progress, that I respect their commitment of time, effort and money and, above all else, that I respect the trust they’ve placed in me to guide them. In Joseph’s name we pray, Amen.
Should you find yourself at the intersection of No Progress Boulevard and No Ideas Avenue, think of this potentially confusing place not as a dead end but rather, eagerly embrace it as a perfect opportunity to set off in a new direction, one that will show your clients how much you care about their success and how hard you’re willing to work to help them.
There’s absolutely no shame in saying, straight up, that you don’t have a clue how to teach an exercise to someone who can’t do it and there’s no shame in saying that what you thought would help obviously didn’t. Shame only comes when we realize we’re failing and we don’t do anything about it.
Repeat after me: I’m not sure why that’s happening, let me think about it and we’ll talk about it again when you’re in for your next session.
Or
Repeat after me: I can’t do this exercise either. I’d like to be able to do it and I’d like for you to be able to do it so here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to make some calls to folks who are more knowledgeable than I am about this and I’ll have a few more things to try when we’re together again in a couple of weeks. I won’t give up if you won’t give up.
Basically, you can’t go wrong if you don’t ever stop trying and you don’t ever stop learning. And that’s the truth.
Now follow me through this and if you don’t know how to fix a Teaser, after reading the rest of this you may be able to in the very next session you teach. Wouldn’t that be just the greatest thing? I think it would.
The Fix
Miss B is extremely intelligent and her communication skills are excellent which was fortunate indeed, because we scheduled a phone call to help us along the way, in addition to exchanging pictures over the internet.
In the end, she only needed a few pointers to create the foundational structure upon which the full Teaser form could eventually be placed. In the end, she only needed to understand a couple of basic biomechanical realities. All she needed was some truth, some direction, some freakin’ substantive help. Can I get a witness!
I think you already know this but I did not include in my suggestions to Miss B anything about breathing and reaching as primary sources of resolution.
Tangent Over. I promise.
How I Figured Out What’s What: The Fix Is On!
I asked Miss B if she could grab her legs and pull herself up into a full Teaser position.
Lookie there! She could!
That tells me her hamstrings and her back will both lengthen sufficiently for her to make the shape of Teaser. The bones will go, we just needed to replace the hand hold by beginning to develop muscle strength and muscle flexibility to deliver the bones to those positions without the hand hold.
Okay, So Now What?
These next few paragraphs are a whole bunch to swallow; I’m sorry but I don’t know any other way to say it.
Pilates is the essence of functional movement. I teach fundamental concepts of functional movement and I teach the processes for achieving them; I don’t teach Pilates exercise by Pilates exercise.
Miss B’s Teaser problems, in conceptual form and in order of their importance to the exercise, are the angle of hip flexion, the strength and fixing of her spine against the lengthening lever of her legs, the straightening of which are dependent on hip flexor strength and hamstring flexibility.
I set out to fix those concepts and if I was successful, I knew that Miss B would pretty quickly have the foundational form of her Teaser and the spine strength and flexibility to finish it off would come as she earns those enhancements.
Why do I problem solve at the concept level?
Doing it that way fixes everything that can go wrong with any Pilates exercise, and by “any Pilates exercise” what I mean is any Pilates exercise. Any. Pilates. Exercise. Period.
I do it that way because nobody gets very far teaching exercise by exercise. Not a single true Master of Pilates teaches discreet exercises.
Teaching discreet Pilates exercises makes you the Bill Murray character in the fabulous movie Ground Hog Day only your repeated reality is “bad form Pilates” and you’ll keep getting “bad form Pilates” because you’ve tolerated it, perhaps you’ve been instrumental in creating it, and until you change direction even by a single degree you’re never going to get a better result.
Remember, we cannot count on a miraculous Pilates healing. Clients will not just magically, one time and out of the blue, go from not being able to do the thing to being able to do the thing. They won’t. It just doesn’t work that way.
You’ll achieve your potential as a teacher if and only if you thoroughly understand and are able to teach concepts and processes.
Perspective is Everything: Might I Be Overreacting?
Might you be thinking . . . “Sheesh, lighten up Sister! It’s just a Teaser. Let it go.”
Well, here’s another Pilates truth.
Bartender!
Everything Counts, You Can’t Let Anything Go & You Can’t Skip Any Steps
Every good teacher eventually realizes that everything counts and you can’t let anything go. You can’t let even little things go, and you certainly can’t overlook form like Miss B’s circa August ’07.
Here’s why.
Pilates is based on functional movement well within normal ranges of motion (unlike Yoga), so it transfers easily and quickly outside of the studio. When clients say they feel taller for a day or two after a session, that’s because they’ve patterned length in their spines during the session and that carries over as they move through their next couple of days. When we teach well, the carry over factor is a beautiful thing.
When we teach poorly (improper hip flexion, shortened spines, tucked pelvises) we actually help our clients carry improper and unsafe movement outside the studio. When we teach improperly, the carry over factor is a horrible thing.
Therein lies the rub.
In our Miss B, when we allow her to grip in her quads, when we allow her spine to sink on exertion, when we tolerate a 6 pack over a TVA, when we tolerate cording in her neck (which is happening to help hold her chest up) when it should be floating on top of her cervicals, we’re patterning her for those tendencies outside the studio.
We can’t have that. Cannot. No.
Learning this process, this way of teaching, and putting it into everyday use is the very essence of my finishing school, Pilates Excel. www.PilatesExcel.com. Check it out!
A Perfect Teaser
Teaser is made up of the strength and articulation of a Roll Up ending in the strength and endurance to hold a fixed spine against the most costly resistance and vectoring of hip flexion. You won’t fix your spine against that resistance without a strong transverses; it’s the only abdominal muscle attached to your spine (think about that for a million years, would ya?!) and it’s the major muscular connector between the big heavy bony pelvis and the big heavy bony rib cage.
I repeat: You cannot get Teaser without a strong unifying TVA holding firm between the bony behemoth of your thorax and the bony behemoth of your pelvis.
At the top of Teaser with the spine lengthening toward neutral and the pelvis not tucked there is no placement of the legs that is more challenging to support than out there at a 45, taunting gravity, separating the work of the Rec Fem, the black sheep of the hip flexor family, from the kingpin Iliopsoas as cleanly as a yolk slides away from the white.
In summation, here’s a simple Pilates truth; you will not get your Teaser if 1) your spine is not both supple and strong enough to fix against the pull of lengthening legs and this includes if your TVA isn’t strong enough to unify in fixed strength and length your pelvis from your rib cage, 2) if your hamstrings are tighter than your quads are strong and 3) if you are not the absolute authoritative boss of your hip flexors.
Oh my! It’s a lot, I know.
Miss B, sweet Miss B, said she had a Roll Up but I bet it featured some throwing up, instead of flowing up. Her tight runner hamstrings presented her with an “either/or” situation with either her back being up or her legs being long but she just couldn’t have it both ways.
I hate that.
And in her pictures, did you happen to notice her 6-pack? It’s gorgeous, indeed, but it’s not helping her back stay long on Teaser, in fact, it’s doing what it always does, the only thing it can do, it’s pulling her sternum down toward her public bone which causes compression on the front of her spine and causes stretch in the ligaments on the back of her spine.
This is not good. It’s not only bad form but it’s absolutely horrible for your back!
Think about it.
That descent of the front of the rib cage with the pubic bone tucking up to meet it is precisely the bad-posture position we sit in all day and that, dear Pilates people, is precisely what wrecks our backs.
We cannot let ourselves create within the studio the very postures that we know are bad for us outside the studio.
I repeat:
We cannot let ourselves create within the studio the very postures that we know are bad for us outside the studio.
That’s dangerous. That’s irresponsible. That’s bad teaching. We’ve all done it but none of us should ever do it again! Please don’t do that!
Passing thought: Apparently I’m incapable of writing anything less than 6,000 words.
Heidi took pictures of my Teaser to show Miss B the proper hip flexion angle and the difference between being scooped (emphasis on TVA) and being pooched (emphasis on that vanity pull down of a muscle, the rectus abdominus, a/k/a the six pack, or in my case, the pony keg).
Muscle definition note: Although well-taught Pilates will not rip and roll the six pack down the middle, it will rip the adorable parenthesis outer edges of it. See?
Note to self: My head's too far forward in these Teaser pictures!
Step by Step Teaser Repair
To begin fixing Miss B’s Teaser, I had to bust her back to the basics so I could figure out what was going wrong and when.
Her first assignment is what I call “sneaking up on a Teaser” and I use this so I can figure out the first point of failure. What’s weakest will fail first and that’s the best place to start with her basic strength building.
Setting aside the ascent (the Roll Up part of Teaser), I asked Miss B to do a seated 10-10-10, and here’s a picture of our girl giving it her best shot.
You can see that her tummy’s still not in - it’s pushed out - so the separation of her ribs and hips won’t be sufficient until she starts squeezing the tube from the middle with that TVA tightening.
You can see the cords in her neck still working overtime for her.
But as far as her hip flexion angle goes, this looks much, much better.
By starting seated, we’ve spared her the struggle of coming up from supine and that’s preserved her strength so she can begin to feel what it’s like to have proper positioning, albeit one leg at a time.
Next, I asked her to go to a “double leg bent leg 10-10-10” so I could see how far she’s able to straighten her legs before her back begins to lose length.
And here’s our girl once again going for it.
In the above shot she’s got her knees too close to her chest but her overall form looks oodles better than where we started. Look how long her back looks, her upper body is in really good position here, notice how she’s not rounded into her spine and she’s a little more relaxed in her neck.
This is the basic structure from which she will work to lengthen her legs and strengthen her back so that, eventually, she'll earn her full Teaser.
This is progress! This is worth popping a cork! This type of immediate improvement makes the Teaser seeker tingle with delight!
Miss B’s Homework
You’ve absolutely got to assign homework. You know that, right?
Here’s why.
It’s how we learn things. Think back to your school days. Even as students in school for all those hours every weekday, we still had homework. How can we expect clients, the most dedicated of whom are in the studio only 2 or 3 hours a week, to make progress learning a concept if we don’t ask them to work on it outside the studio?
We can’t.
Goal setting is meaningless without homework.
If you’ve studied for the PMA exam, you know that goal setting is a big part of our jobs as Pilates professionals. It’s unprofessional to expect progress (remember – there will be no Pilates miracles!) without setting reasonable goals and working toward them.
Deciding the very next thing to work on is reasonable goal setting, making a plan for achieving it is homework. They go together like vodka and ice. I digress.
Here’s what I assigned as Miss B’s Teaser homework.
Continuing to work from a seated position, I taught her what I call “Separation of Church and State,” described in detail below, and it’s a fool proof way to feel the difference between your quads and your primary hip flexors, and I asked her to do a bunch of those every day. I asked her to stretch her hamstrings with PNF every single day. I asked Miss B to scoop like she’s never scooped and to slowly lengthen her legs only to the point where her form began to shift away from excellent. Going about it this way, we were going to ease into the position without sinking on her anterior discs.
Big digression! Warning! Detailed exercise instruction immediately ahead!
Separation of Church and State
Separation of Church and State is really simple, I’ve had teachers cry, and by cry I mean literally weep, when I’ve taught them this, it’s a super quick way to teach someone to feel where their primary hip flexors are and how those muscles work versus the quads and that black sheep of the hip flexor family, the rec fem.
When I say I made up Separation of Church and State, I’m aware that there’s nothing new under the sun, and I’m absolutely positive that someone has used this identical technique to teach this identical concept (proper hip flexion) but, that said, nobody taught it to me, I certainly didn’t learn anything like this in Romana’s year-long program (no problem solving, absolutely none!) but as a caring, resourceful Nun I’ve come up with a ton of stuff like this to help others figure out their bodies.
Make (safe) stuff up! Solve problems! Never give up!
Here’s Separation of Church & State by Rebecca Leone.
1. Sit like you’re in launch position for Rolling Like a Ball only place your forearms under your knees with your forearms crossed and your lower legs draped over your forearms. Hold up the weight of your legs with your upper body strength. Let your legs go gushy. Your lower legs should dangle.
2. Slowly, and by “slowly” I mean slowly, withdraw the support of your upper body, leaving your forearms in place but slowly dialing down the support until your lower legs are dangling off the knee but your iliopsoas has come on board to do the work of holding the femur in flexion. Sit quietly for a moment and with your lower legs dangling, trying to sense the feeling in your lumbars of the working psoas. You won’t sense much in your iliacus because the darn thing is glued down tight to the insides of the illiums which don’t really move but, hey, that psoas connects to your highly mobile low back and you’ll definitely eventually be able to sense its work. It feels like a nestling in, a hug, a warm sweater gathered around your low back. It’s a good thing.
3. Resume support of the legs with the upper body, make sure the legs dangle, and now slowly, and by “slowly” I mean slowly, straighten one leg only until you feel the grip of those quads. The main job of the quads is to extend the lower leg and they’ll show you here just how hard they’re willing to work for you. If your hamstrings are tight, you’ll reach a point sooner rather than later when your quads won’t be able to lengthen your hamstrings and they’ll start to tremble and you’ll have precious few seconds of position left before the beasts fail.
a. After one leg lengthens, bend it again and make sure you check your form before trying it on the other leg. Lower out of that, form check, ready, set, go.
b. Then, for your big finale, slowly slowly straighten both legs and you’ll get a little taste of the work of the quads in Teaser, Corkscrew, Jack Knife, Roll Over, etc.
Here’s the Pilates 411 on your quads: Best used to extend and hold the lower leg; not intended for use in flexing the hip.
Back to Miss B’s Homework.
To work on her ascent, I asked her to do what I call Roll Up & Shakes and Roll Down & Shakes (see my article in Pilates Style magazine, September 2007 edition). I asked her to do Knee Floats and Stirs until the cows come home (she lives in Geneva, that could take months!).
And I promised her that the day would come when everything would slide together so easily and so beautifully that she wouldn’t be able to even remember what her August ’07 Teaser felt like.
I think we can all agree that Miss B’s progress was impressive.
Bonus: she’s a dear and I absolutely love working with her. And guess what?
Right after she wrote in August ’07, I was headed to Venice for 2 weeks of writing and planning and I told her to come down for a swim but she had a better idea so instead of her coming to me, I went up to Geneva and did a workshop at the studio where she works, and then they asked me back for another week of guest teaching and workshops in April ’08 and they asked me back to teach a full Pilates Excel in August ’08.
Thank you Miss B!
See how the world works? Isn’t that fantastic? I sure think it is.
And, to close, I want you to know the first draft of this was in fact written aloft back in early September, a second draft was worked on the exact same route, Atlanta to Seattle on Delta, a week later, it was preliminarily finalized on a flight back east through Minneapolis on September 30th and finally finalized (I swear, I mean, I pray) on a flight October 7th.
I can’t help but realize that so far, I’m still only writing while flying but since I have been traveling every week since early August, I’m happy with my progress. I swear, I mean, I pray and ask for strength and wisdom to properly allocate my time so I can write every single week – once I finally come off the road and resume my studio life - about all things Pilates albeit most topics will be shorter and less complex than Fixing Miss B’s Teaser. Thanks for hanging in there with me.
God Bless America. God Bless Joe & Clara. God Bless you.
