A Love Letter To Mat Pilates

It's March Matness and there's so much to love about mat Pilates! I share podcast updates and to learn how the flexibility, adaptability, creativity, realism, and historical importance of the mat repertoire make mat Pilates a joyful adventure for clients and Pilates teachers alike. Tune in!

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Episode Music:

Tracks: Tobu - Good Times, Tobu & Itro - Sunburst 
Tobu Official YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/tobuofficial
Itro Official YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/officialitro
Released by NCS 
https://www.youtube.com/NoCopyrightSounds

Transcript

[00:00:00] Welcome to Pilates Teachers' Manual, your guide to becoming a great Pilates teacher. I'm Olivia and I'll be your host. Join the conversation and the Pilates community on Instagram at @PilatesTeachersManual and visit buymeacoffee.com/OliviaPodcasts to support the show. Today's chapter starts now.

[00:00:56] Hello, hello, everybody. Welcome back to the [00:01:00] podcast. Before we dive into today's episode and share all of my love for mat Pilates, of which there is so much and is especially appropriate during the month of March, where the international Pilates community on social media celebrates all of the mat repertoire all month long.

[00:01:18] So before we do that, um, I do want to share a couple exciting announcements. One, Pilates Teachers' Manual: The Book will be available very soon. As a little bit of a teaser, before the book comes out, I do have a few sample chapters available for you to read. I've linked them in the show notes for this episode.

[00:01:38] And they're also available in the podcast shop, because second big announcement, there's a podcast shop! Whaaat? We've got merch! It's linked in my bio on Instagram, it's in the show notes, and the site is shop.oliviabioni. com. You can get podcast merch like some super [00:02:00] cool coffee mugs with the podcast logos or some nice stickers to put on your water bottles or on your laptop or wherever you want to put some cool stickers. Um, and that is also where the book will be available for purchase. The sample chapters also live in the shop. They're free. I mean, I guess you can add them to your cart and like order them in quotes, but it's just a link to a Google doc where the sample chapters live. So you can click the link from the shop as well.

[00:02:29] So that's very exciting. There's a shop. We will be adding more things to the shop, like the book. There's also some book specific merch that we'll be dropping soon. But that will be your one stop shop for all things Pilates Teachers' Manual podcast, Pilates Students' Manual podcast, and Pilates Teachers' Manual: The Book.

[00:02:49] So let's jump into today's episode. Mat Pilates is the bee's knees, and I want to share all the things that I love about it. [00:03:00] Some of the things I really love are the flexibility, adaptability, creativity of mat Pilates. That's three things, but I love those things. The realism of mat Pilates, and the fact that everything comes from the mat. Everything. All the things, all of the other choreography, all of the fancy exercises, everything that we have comes, in my opinion, from mat Pilates. 

[00:03:26] So let's talk about flexibility. I don't just mean the flexibility of you being a flexible person who can touch their toes and do mat Pilates, although that is very satisfying and fun.

[00:03:36] What I mean by flexibility is that you can do mat Pilates anywhere and you can teach mat Pilates anywhere. A lot of times we think, okay, we're Pilates teachers, we teach in Pilates studios, and that is true. But you can also teach Pilates outside of a Pilates studio. You can teach mat Pilates in the park. People can bring their own mats, BYOM. At [00:04:00] gyms, at community centers, in your home, in your clients' homes, online. The requirement to do and teach mat Pilates is much lower than the requirement of having a reformer or a chair or a Cadillac or a tower, right? More people have a mat or a towel on the floor than they have all of those other pieces of equipment.

[00:04:25] And this isn't, I love mat Pilates and everything else is not good. This is just, I love mat Pilates and everything else is also good. Like, it can be both things. We can have both. But mat Pilates, especially, I always joke with people, like, you never see anyone doing reformer Pilates, like, by a waterfall, because, like, how are you getting a reformer up to a waterfall? But you could do mat pilates by a waterfall in these, like, gorgeous, scenic backgrounds. I definitely had a moment where I posted a lot of exercises where I was doing exercises in beautiful places. And spoiler alert, I [00:05:00] was doing mat exercises because Uh, reformers do not travel well when you go on vacation.

[00:05:06] So that flexibility, the fact that most people have a mat in their homes already, just really expands your reach as a teacher because you can connect with people and they don't need anything else other than themselves and that mat and your instructions, you know. So that flexibility really sets mat Pilates apart from other pieces of equipment, other apparatus, because very likely everyone has one, or if you had to travel somewhere and bring them, it's a lot easier to fit a bunch of mats in your car than it is to fit a bunch of Exo chairs. You know what I mean? So that comes in key. 

[00:05:42] Mat Pilates is also, like, the key, like, adaptability, progression, modification. Get to, like, the core of it, and dial an exercise up and down. Because in mat Pilates, especially if you're doing mat [00:06:00] Pilates without props, because you can add props, and you know I love props, and you can make it amazing and creative and different in those ways, but even if it's just you doing mat Pilates exercises, In some ways, the constraint of not having a ton of equipment is a freedom because you can really get to the heart of what makes an exercise challenging and what could make the exercise more supportive for someone who needs more support, but also more challenging for someone who needs more challenge.

[00:06:32] So, I talk about levers a lot, and then I know that Americans say levers, but now levers sounds weird because I think I talked with a bunch of Australians about levers a lot, but talking about, like, a long leg versus a bent leg in the hundred, like, of legs in tabletop, or knees even hugged into your chest, like, closer to your chest than tabletop to, like, really work the compression, for example, like, you get to play and kind of DJ the challenge of exercises [00:07:00] in, like, its truest sense, its least complicated sense.

[00:07:04] Not that it isn't complicated, but there's less moving parts. There's actually no moving parts. We are the moving parts in mat Pilates. So you can adapt a lot of what you do on the mat to kind of a pre Pilates space where you're building up strength because like Joe's version of the hundred is not for the faint hearted. That is very difficult: to hold a chest lift, to hold your straight legs, like a couple inches off of the mat while pumping your arms and maintaining abdominal engagement. And maybe you're also breathing. I've heard that that's great. Like, all of those things, you can build up your clients, you can build up those exercises themselves.

[00:07:49] And because so much of the shapes and the work in Pilates echoes later shapes and work, like, you can show those patterns, [00:08:00] show those overlaps, and really help the person that you're working with, like, develop a greater understanding of Pilates, which is really beautiful. 

[00:08:07] And then also, like, the adaptability of the exercises to go even further than Joe's exercises. And I know for a lot of us, and for like the average person that we work with, it's likely that mat Pilates is going to be a really high level of challenge for like a really long time. But maybe for yourself as a Pilates teacher, or if you're working with fabulously strong and capable individuals, you can take mat Pilates and then adapt it beyond mat Pilates, whether that's incorporating props, which again, if you're traveling places, like it's difficult to bring 18 little stability balls or whatever with you, but you can take it further by, you know, adjusting those same dials.

[00:08:50] We talked about lever length, doing long legs, like what's that? more challenging than a long straight leg, like a long straight leg that has ankle weights on it, you know, [00:09:00] something like that, or without adding anything new, like what's harder than Joe's push up? Well, doing that push up with one hand, or doing that push up with one leg lifted. Can you put push up and leg pull together into a Frankenstein exercise that has mat Pilates components and kind of ran with them? 

[00:09:22] Like there's so much that you can adapt that it's never going to be boring. Like it's never- you can't be bored if you're engaging with mat Pilates because it's such a colorful canvas to kind of play on. 

[00:09:35] In that same vein, the creativity, you know, putting those exercises together can be a way of adapting exercises to meet the needs of the client in front of you, but also like the creativity with programming and I say this knowing full well that if you teach mat Pilates in a classical way and you follow the order, you will not be going in any direction. You'll be going in very specific directions the same way every time. But [00:10:00] if you allow yourself to deviate from the order, suddenly the world's your oyster. You can go in any direction. You can emphasize any movement. You can put together the class in so many unique ways and delightful ways, both for your clients, so they get to be engaged and excited, but also for yourself, you get to be engaged and excited about what you're teaching.

[00:10:26] The mat exercises are building blocks for each other. And if you really wanted to focus on like the rolling up action, and then you take like, okay, well, I'm going to do all the rolling exercises. We'll do rolling like a ball, or sometimes called rolling back. We'll do rocker with open legs. We'll do rocking, do some rolling on our front. We'll do our roll up and we'll do our roll over and we'll do our neck pull like you can start to group exercises together so that your class starts to have a theme. That's one of my favorite things to do where you're emphasizing [00:11:00] a shape or a movement of those exercises. Rocking kind of stands out because that's like a super extreme extension exercise. But then like throw it into swan dive as well. Like we can rock on our fronts, we can rock on our backs. You know what I mean? 

[00:11:14] And the transitions I love in mat. I think that is something where I said I wasn't going to make a hierarchy or say one's better than the other. But I do think that the transitions in mat Pilates are like peak, like pinnacle, amazing, incredible, because you can get from one body position to another in very cool and wonderful ways, like rolling one of my favorite transitions, we can go from seated to supine where we're lying on our back. Just rock and roll. You can go from supine lying on your back up to standing, just rock and roll, plant your feet and tada. Now you are standing up. You can get from standing to a four point kneel through a cute little reverse lunge. You can go from your four point kneel to lying on your stomach very [00:12:00] easily. And then you just get to standing: reverse push up yourself out of it, you're back in that four point kneel. There are so many great transitions. Ooh, I love lying on your side, to lying on your front, to lying on your other side, which is really nice if you're teaching in a room where you can change where you are.

[00:12:16] It's sometimes difficult on camera because if you do side, back, side, or side, front, side, then you're facing away from the camera, which is not always best practice. But if like you're in a room with people, that can be a really fun transition. Um, I've seen, like, really dancy transitions where, like, it's a leg circle that, like, spins you onto one side, and then you, like, one leg circle your way out of it.

[00:12:39] Like, there's just infinite ways to put the exercises together, and because you don't have to worry about equipment settings and what springs are on, and whether the box is on the Reformer, or, like, what height the springboard springs are on, or, oh, let me get the roll down bar and attach that to the Cadillac.

[00:12:55] Love all of those things, and recognize that those transitions are just [00:13:00] like part of using the equipment, but the fact that you're on the mat and it's just you, it's incredibly freeing. You can go anywhere and do anything in any order, and that's neat. 

[00:13:12] I also think there's an element of realism that mat Pilates has that other apparatus does not have which is the fact that for most of us, for the majority of our life, it's just us moving our body weight around. We aren't standing on moving platforms, we aren't pulling springs, we aren't grabbing, you know, the chair and like lying on our side and doing a side bend, you know? For the majority of us, we use our bodies and just our body weight. So the fact that that's what you play with in mat Pilates is like very realistic also connects to a lot of other movement modalities. So when you're connecting with clients and you're trying to draw parallels between the things that motivate [00:14:00] them and that they're passionate about, and then link that to Pilates so that their Pilates session feels meaningful, you can do that on the mat, like so easily. There are so many clients I work with, especially for older adults. We're like, the challenge is like getting down to the ground and then getting off of the ground. And we do that all day, every day in mat Pilates, and that's like a life skill. 

[00:14:24] It's, you know, lunges. And I know that a lunge is not like a traditional mat Pilates, but like while you're on the mat doing something like a lunge is going to very closely mirror, like, climbing stairs or coming down stairs, things like that. These, like, activities of daily life where it is just our body weight on something that doesn't move, like, that parallel is huge. That connection is a lot easier to make for some people than doing something on the reformer, which feels very foreign and strange, or it can feel foreign and strange.

[00:14:58] It connects to other [00:15:00] movement modalities. So a lot of people find Pilates, but they also do something else. Like they do something like yoga or they do something where they move their body in a way that isn't using fancy pants Pilates equipment. And we know that we can draw parallels between what we do on the reformer and what we do while we're golfing or playing baseball or picking up our grandkids. But the fact that it's just you and most of our lives is just you, like, that's just a really easy connection to make for your clients. 

[00:15:30] There's a line in Joseph Pilates return to life that I'm paraphrasing that says like you don't need a fancy teacher or fancy equipment to do Pilates, you just need yourself, your mat and like the discipline to get on it and do the exercises. And that really speaks to me, especially in a world where there's always like a fad diet or a fad supplement or a fad form of exercise. And I know for us, Pilates is not a fad, but [00:16:00] to like mainstream land, Pilates is very in right now, which I love. Like I, it's great that it's in, I believe it's going to stay in as well.

[00:16:09] But there's something that's just like genuine, that it's just you on the mat and like the difficulty that you have, like lifting your leg, like it's your leg, you know, who's going to lift it? You're going to lift it. That really speaks to me. It's also the first introduction a lot of people have to Pilates is like a DVD or a YouTube video or going back to another technology time. It could be, you know, on a VHS where that was the first time that they did the hundred. That's the first time that they tried a roll up and yeah, there's just something that's so real and authentic about that. And we get to tap into that. Yeah. Every time that we do it, that we teach it. [00:17:00] 

[00:17:00] I think that mat Pilates is excellent. I think that we're all very excited about mat Pilates in the month of March, but I also think it's worth incorporating mat exercises, even if you teach on other forms of equipment or other apparatus. Because, you know, coming back to, like, what is Pilates, where does Pilates come from, like, Return to Life through Contrology, like, is the mat Pilates guide, and, you know, Joseph Pilates' patent for his reformer or his other equipment or any of the stuff with the springs, like the springboard, is like a new piece of equipment that's like a wall unit tower, right?

[00:17:44] All of that stuff comes from mat Pilates, and whether it was Joe on the Isle of Man leading exercise classes, like he kind of has told that story, [00:18:00] that, you know, he was leading exercise classes. Or whether he was imprisoned in a cell as a prisoner of war in the Isle of Man, and all he had was his body weight and this very small space to move around in while he was in jail as an enemy soldier in England, because he was German, like, wherever it originally came from, it is like the most stripped down.

[00:18:26] And I don't want to say things like pure, but it is like the most stripped down version of Pilates, that travels well, that creates really easy connections for our clients, that mirrors a lot of what they do in their daily life. I mean, I would argue you want to get people vertical, like a lot of mat Pilates is lying on the ground. And like, we do spend more time vertical, I think than lying on the ground, at least while we're awake. And it encourages so much creativity, so much adaptability. It is so flexible. [00:19:00] All of those things together make mat Pilates, even though I only teach a couple mat classes a week, I spend a lot more time teaching equipment. I'm always excited to teach mat because it's so, so awesome. 

[00:19:16] Huge thank you to all my supporters on Buy Me a Coffee. Thank you so much for supporting the podcasts and for supporting the creation of the book. You'll see yourself in the acknowledgments of the book when that comes out. And extra special shout out to Elizabeth, who is the newest member of the podcast. Thank you so much for joining this project. And I hope I get to connect with you in a coffee chat very soon. 

[00:19:40] I hope you have a great couple of weeks. Happy March Madness, everyone. And I'll talk to you again soon.

[00:19:55] Thanks for listening to this week's chapter of Pilates Teachers' Manual, Your Guide to [00:20:00] Becoming a Great Pilates teacher. Check out the podcast Instagram @PilatesTeachers Manual, and be sure to subscribe wherever you listen. For more Pilates goodness, check out my other podcast, Pilates Students' Manual, available everywhere you listen to podcasts. The adventure continues. Until next time.