Service Beyond the Session | Get Out!

In the process of moving from an apartment to a rented house, I'm going through all the things that I keep in my home office and one of the things I ran across is the subject of this article.

A few years ago I taught warm ups at a breast cancer fundraiser run.  When I include that as an example, along with tons of other outreach I've done, in my Service Beyond the Session segment of Pilates Excel, my finishing school, many people ask "what did you teach? how did you learn warm ups?  what should we teach as warm ups?"

Answer:  Everything you'll ever need to prepare the body for action is in Pilates.  Instead of thinking about formal exercises, discreet and complete, think segments, think fragments, think pieces of Pilates.

Today I ran across the file I set up for that event, and on the inside cover of the folder I'd written - like the good administrator I am - a list of the exercises I taught.  Not only did I list the exercises, but after each exercise name I wrote the muscle group the exercise would warm.  That way, I was sure I wasn't leaving anything big out of the picture.  For purposes of this article, I've added to the list a reference to the relevant Pilates exercises that correlate to the warm up just so you'll know there's precedent for every bit of it except those elbow braids which have Yoga written all over them but they're a great upper back stretch so I threw them in.  Did I digress?

It's important to keep complete records for many reason not the least of which you'll eventually forget almost everything and if you don't have a record of it, it's as good as lost to you.  You may have a pleasant memory but you'll lose the details.  I hate losing details.  That's where the devil lives!

Here's my list of exercises that form a brief but thorough full body standing warm up.