From Miss Mariana Bell of Charlottesville, Virginia
(isn't she lovely?!)
I met the Pilates Nun about three months after a massive horse accident. Prior to my fall, I had been a gym rat, yoga fan, competitive rider, and just started getting into pilates. A generally active 26-year-old, I am also a singer/songwriter, often having to lug music equipment to and from shows. However, being projected pelvis-first into a fence-post put all that to an abrupt halt.
I was x-rayed at the hospital, and, with nothing broken, given a couple weeks' worth of painkillers and anti-inflammatories and told to rest. "That's it??" I thought. For the first two weeks and as the drugs wore off, simply walking was an arduous task as I realized the extent of the soft tissue damage (and don't even ask about going up and down stairs...excruciating.) I saw an osteopath and began physical therapy, with the enormously frustrating prescription to "walk, no more than 10 minutes a day," which turned out to be exhausting and difficult physically, and beyond aggravating on my mental health.
Without my usual release of endorphins and only so many books or TV to keep me occupied, I was going a bit nuts. On top of that, I had to move. A proudly self-reliant woman, I had to beg, bargain, and helplessly watch my unfailingly wonderful friends shlep my belongings to a storage unit and my new place, without my lifting a finger to help. Throw in a particularly unpleasant and stressful breakup for good measure, and I was one crabby camper.
Over the course of a couple months, things were tentatively improving as I was in less pain doing normal day-to-day activities. However, still unable to lift anything heavier than my guitar, let alone get back in the saddle, I was eager to get this healing process in full gear. I had some of the tools to do it on my own, but was missing something.
My physical therapist and wonderful pilates teacher recommended I go have a private session with the "Pilates Nun" who came to Charlottesville where I live. She assessed my situation and told me I needed to bolt up! So, lying on the ground, pulling inward and upward from all directions with imaginary bolts, my pelvis was suddenly more secure than I'd felt in my life.
My ligaments had been all stretched out and no amount of additional stretching would make them feel better, but in fact, quite the opposite. Strengthening the muscles deep within, while tiring at first, turned out to be the closest to pain-free I'd been.
A little stretching now that my pelvis was stable actually relaxed the muscles of my legs and back, rather than my over-flexed joints and ligaments. We stretched one side at first just to see how wobbly and tight I was compared to the other, now relaxed and strong.
Through patience and the use of imagery, we stacked up my spine from the strong foundation of my pelvis right to the top. Although there was no satisfying sweat, no wildly athletic gyrations, I was walking around with my head appropriately atop my spine for the first time in months. My upper back and shoulders, which had been overcompensating for the weakness below, suddenly felt free and mobile.
I was astounded at how quickly it happened. It's been a couple weeks, and sometimes it's hard to remember my bolts all the time, but I am confident my road to recovery has become swifter and more smooth. Thanks Pilates Nun and Bolt Up everyone!!!
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Okay you guys, here's my process for figuring out what Mariana needed.
She was on my guest teaching book the day after my workshops at Tru Pilates in Charlottesville, Virginia ended. Although I love working with all types of folks in guest teaching sessions, I prefer to work with people who are stuck somewhere in their bodies, people who can't do a particular move or have a recurring failure like they have no scoop or they can't figure something out, which, by the way, is always the teacher's fault, always. Or they hurt - these are often my favorite clients to work with and without a doubt the most satisfying to help - and haven't found help anywhere else they've looked.
I call these guest teaching sessions Developmental Privates because they're definitely not a regular session but rather, they focus on developing the client's education about the issue at hand. My Developmental Privates are what an athlete would call "style work" or "technique work" because we get to the bottom of the problem, we build a new approach to solving it and usually, we make what seems to the client as extraordinary progress but to me, a teacher who specializes in problem solving at the very foundation of movement, seems logical and simple. Developmental Privates are $150 USD.
I saw Mariana come into the studio while I was finishing up with the client scheduled just before her and as I was saying goodbye to the client leaving and grabbing my water to chug a quart between clients, I watched her as she lowered herself gingerly to the floor and began doing external rotation hip stretches, folding her body over itself, never staying too long in any one position. When it was time for Mariana's session to begin, she was still down on a mat, rolling around, trying to find a comfortable position.
I could see that her hips were really loose and I could tell she was in pain.
She'd only had one session with the owner of Tru Pilates, Robin Truxel who's also a Physical Therapist, so Robin didn't have much information to give me about Mariana prior to me working with her. Mariana's Physical Therapist had come to 2 of the 3 full-day workshops I'd just taught at Tru Pilate. I love being part of a team and with Mariana, because I knew both her Pilates teacher and her Physical Therapist, I was absolutely confident she'd have excellent ongoing care.
As her session began, Mariana told me the sequence of events that led her to her current state of painful frustration. It was clear that her life was not proceeding according to plan - she's young, smart, gorgeous, talented, a performer, and has much to accomplish, none of which mattered because she was hurting - and she felt like perhaps there was no easy fix since she'd tried several avenues of treatment with no measurable results.
Dear Readers, that's pretty common. Pilates teachers are on the front line of injury, if we know what we're doing we can fill a huge gap in the care chain and our skills, completely within the scope of teaching Pilates, can often be the very thing clients cannot get from PTs, Osteopaths, massage, etc. Get this: One of my favorite students is an Osteopath in England and not only is she almost not practicing medicine at all anymore because she can help more people more ways with Pilates, but she's also morphing into Clara by still wearing her medical whites as she teaches. I love ya Jacqui!
Back to Mariana. I asked her to tell me what positions she instinctively felt she wanted to get into in order to make herself feel better and her answer was, without exception, positions that would stretch her back and hip muscles. She kept chasing that instinct by getting into all those folded up positions, sometimes going to Yoga class, but all to no avail.
I knew two things at this point that would help Mariana tremendously.
I could tell by how loose she was in her hip joints that her ligaments were loose and I knew, as a result of that, muscles that are not cut out for the job were trying to stabilize her pelvis and spine and that's why she felt this undying need to release her back and hips. One caused the other and both were compounded by the fact that not only had her horse thrown her and she hit a fence post with her left ilium, but he'd also thrown her more recently and she'd landed on her back. Trauma on top of a lack of stability and strength is a recipe for pain.
And who was it that said, if you make a friend of pain you'll never be alone? I think I read that quote in Born to Run, but I'm not sure where I read it and I'm not sure who said it but what I am sure of is that if Mariana didn't learn daily maintenance skills to manage the daily use of her loosy goosy joints, she'd have more pain coming; she'd have an interstate of pain running through her, a transcontinental highway of pain.
And, even more tragic than the thought of that, she'd have it unnecessarily. She was an easy fix.
Again, here's what I'd figured out: her more superficial muscles were pulling double shifts trying to stabilize her wonky pelvis and that's why her back and hip muscles were tight and I knew she was loose-ligamented, or hypermobile.
I explained to her that from how she was moving, it appeared to me as though her ligaments were more stretchy than most peoples, I taught her about how ligaments connect bones to bones, I described what they look like and I made hand, arm and finger puppets of joints (a show in and of itself, reminiscent of the Fed Ex commercial from 50 years ago where the presentation materials didn't arrive and the presenter is making hand puppets in the spotlight of the overhead projector - like that but different). I taught her how, when the joints come apart so easily, the muscles never really get a chance to stretch and that's one reason why she felt tight and I taught her that because she's not strong in the muscles that connect to her bones - the ones that have to compensate for how loose her ligaments are - muscles that are not designed to do the work of stabilizing are trying to stabilize and getting overused and spasmy as a result.
If we'd been in my home studio in Seattle, I'd have a full skeleton to use plus lots of pictures of ligaments, pictures of muscles as they attach to bones including pictures of cadavers to show her but even without, I got the point across.
I always approach the body through the brain and this made sense to Mariana intellectually.
I asked her to please not ride for a while. I asked her to please not go to Yoga until she masters stabilizing her joints so in a Yoga class she can work safely and without further stretching her already loose ligaments.
Pilates People, I'm telling you the truth here: Yoga classes are dominated by two types of people: 1) people who have loose ligaments and who feel tight - that's why they keep going to Yoga, to try and get a stretch which they won't get until someone who knows what they're doing teaches them to stabilize their joints so the more superficial muscles can actually get some attention and 2) people (like I used to be until Kit Laughlin's work came into my psyche, my body, my life - I love Kit! www.KitLaughlin.com, come to the Caymans in November with me! Umbrella Drinks!) who are seriously strong and tight and desperately need to stretch but can rarely get into the "go" position to even begin to release. Those tight folks usually miss all the good stuff because they're so tight that they can't position themselves properly to be able to begin to perform the pose.
I got Mariana to lay down on her back, knees bent, and I taught her my interpretation of Ron Fletcher's bolts. I've adapted Ron's bolts to a more intricate vision that causes deeper muscles to fire. To help you learn how to do that, I'll film me teaching it and get the video up on the Nun site really soon, I promise - I'm THIS close to going video on this site and believe me, that's going to help you a whole lot more than reading all these words ever will. I digress.
After teaching her how to bolt her pelvis, the look on her face changed, she felt the pain diminishing as if it were a light being dimmed and finally turned off, and she began to do one of the most glorious things I ever witness - she began moving slowly, tentatively, into positions that mere moments ago were pain producing but now, bolted, were not. The look on her face was positively lovely as she began to re-acquaint herself with the old pain-free version of her that hadn't been around for a while.
Once she was confident in holding her bolts, I had her stand, then walk, then sit all while bolting.
Confident she had it and could keep it, we moved up the food chain to her spine.
I taught her my elevator shaft image, which I'll also film for you, that is a fool proof way of engaging ever so slightly the multifidi so she could begin to unload her pelvis by using the right muscles for the job. I use the image of a 26 story building, a floor for each vertebrae, one for the basement (which pulls weight up off the sacrum) and one for the penthouse (which floats the occipital skull bone).
Once she was living in the penthouse in the highrise that is Mariana Manor, I again had her walk around to get the feel of it and again, she was delighting in the freedom from pain, the pain that had been her near constant companion up until just a few minutes before.
I told her about Kit Laughlin's contract/release flexibilty work and with her pelvis stable I performed a couple of assisted pnf or contract/release stretches on her hamstrings that helped her realize just how tight her muscles were and how little flexibility she really has when her pelvis is stable. I told her she needs to learn how to stretch from strong stable joints and not by pulling her joints apart. I asked her to consider going with me to take Kit's workshop in November down on Grand Cayman and I promised her that if she did, she'd be able to use what he teaches her to help her get strong and stay strong and released for the rest of her life.
She's thinking about it. I'm hoping for it.
Mariana is an example of what happens in my sessions over and over again. This is what so many teachers marvel over and write glowing testimonials about and this is what is so simple to do, once you understand the basics. And this is what Michele Larsson means when she says "the system works, work the system." That's technically true but the problem is, if you don't understand the system, if you don't know that the pelvis has got to be stable before anything else good can happen in the body, then you're in some serious trouble with your teaching and all the slogans, all the concepts, all the formulas that exist above this fundamental level will fail you, over and over again.
Things are so simple and elegant in the body - they really are - but as my hero Ron Fletcher says, it's so simple it's hard.
And I get that. I really do. I understand the confusion on the part of teachers who haven't been taught the fundamentals of movement, who haven't been taught how to stabilize a body and I know it is really hard to find your way to teach successfully at this level when the cart's in front of the horse.
So you see, it doesn't matter at all how many cool exercises I know on Cadillac; Mariana needed help at a level so far beneath any classic exercise and any slogan about "keep them moving" and "movement heals" is frankly insulting when we think about how Joe & Clara intended this work to nurture people back to full function. In reality and often, movement hurts and if your school taught you to push clients through an order, even a basic order, you're going to be part of the problem and you will never be able to provide a solution to clients like Mariana.
If you don't know how to fix problems like Mariana's, there's great news - it doesn't take much to get you there.
Everything I teach centers on the simplicity of how I helped Mariana and when you work that way - at the lowest level of function - you really can change someone's life, in a single session, even without ever seeing them again. Except of course, hopefully, on the beach. In the Caribbean. In November. With Kit.
Never stop learning, teach well, care endlessly and you'll be joining me as I live in the spirit of Joe & Clara.