At the end of June, I had the honor of presenting at the Pilates Style educational conference down in beautiful Hollywood, Florida. My topics were a mix of a couple that were back by popular demand from my Pilates Style appearance last August in NYC and we also added a new 3-hour pre-con called Go Forth & Serve! which helps teachers organize their objectives against conference content and hopefully, go back to the studio with a safe, reasonable and clear plan to serve their clients with their new wisdom.
This is the first year Pilates Style is expanding to a multi-city format and I gotta tell you, I love it. There's the big NYC conference in August and another one in Chicago in mid-October. I didn't get picked up for the New York event but will be in Chicago with yet another new offering in the mix, Balancing the Body Side to Side on Reformer. I can't wait.
A wonderful byproduct of going into new venues with these conferences is we're able to reach teachers who are relatively new to continuing education. The crowd at Pilates Style Hollywood was fresh, full-on positive and so very eager to dig in deep and figure it out. It was thrilling to work with teachers so excited about our profession. We need more. We need bigger. We need stronger. We need you!
On the last day of the Hollywood conference, I presented all afternoon right up until they turned off the lights. Closing the conference gives presenters who are generous with their time a bit of an advantage in being able to stay as long as necessary to answer all the thoughtful and inspiring questions without having to dash off to the next presentation or event. For over an hour after last call, a bunch of really wonderful teachers stuck around and we worked our way through a whole slew of excellent questions, cleaning up all manner of technical, business and historic questions of the "how?," "why?" and "really?" type.
I decided to write about one of those questions in my own Help Me Sister column. I get to do that. I am the Pilates Nun.
It turns out, there was another presenter at the conference who lectured on the need for clients to get out of their hip flexors. And I'm not talking about the ideal that hip flexors be strong, balanced and long. This presenter left teachers with the impression that hip flexors are not to be used. As in, find another way. As in, it's bad to use them. As in, you should be able to not use them. As in, if you're a good teacher you'll teach clients how not to use them.
As in, somebody shoot me.
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