Pilates Intel Online Newsletter for the Pilates Teaching Community

On March 16th of this year, my husband and I packed our kids, pets and enough clothes for 2 weeks into our car and headed upstate to our house in the Catskills. We purchased the house in 2004, two years after our first child was born, out of post-9/11 fear and the idea that “if anything else happens, we can get out of the city.” If anyone had told me that in March of 2020, I would find myself heading up to our house to escape a worldwide pandemic for two weeks and then end up living there for the next 6 months, losing most of my private clientele income, creating an online Mat Certification, continuing education content and livestream classes, I would never have believed it!

During 2019, I hired a videographer to film my classes as well as my Steele Pilates mat certification course with the intent of increasing my library, which was modestly online via my website. Juggling my private clientele, live classes and family never left me much time to pursue my goals of increasing my online content. There was never enough time, space or energy to get that work done. As we realized that this pandemic would be lasting much longer than a few weeks, I reached out to my clients to re-establish our schedule, albeit online.

I have always known how lucky I am that most of my clients have been with me for more than 25 years. This, however, became a major issue, as many are over 70 years of age which put them at heightened risk for the contracting the virus. I was saddened to hear that they were separated from their children and grandchildren and most of them lacked the desire or courage to adopt the new technology and apps necessary for one-on-one sessions. I went from teaching 12 hours on most days to almost nothing. My emotions around their decision to stop training were plentiful – from worrying about their health, safety and wellbeing to worrying about my income and my future.

At that point, I had successfully taught one class live on Instagram – the last class I taught in the city before leaving town – so my husband and I both decided that we would keep our “regular” teaching schedules and teach online. The initial phases of teaching online were challenging, from finding enough space and ceiling height (both my husband and daughter are upwards of 6 ft (183 cm) tall and took out quite a few light fixtures) to windstorms in the mountains knocking out our internet in the middle of classes. My husband and I are both extremely specific about the atmosphere and quality of our classes, but there have been many unavoidable factors and we, and our students, have learned to go with the flow and allow for life to just happen.

One of the largest unavoidable factors in my online classes has been my pets. We have one cat and three dogs. At first, we tried to keep the pets out of the classes, but Winston (my 165-pound (75 kilo) Saint Bernard) would always come bounding into the space where I was teaching and try to lie in my lap. I was mortified at the time, but much to my surprise, people loved it. He is a very handsome dog and such a love. My students enjoy seeing him as well as the reality of the situation. Never in my 30 years of training clients had I felt so “unprofessional,” so this was a shock to me that my pets – behaving or misbehaving – would be such a source of levity and pleasure for my viewers. I believe his presence and our relationship also “softens” my image and shows a side of me that not many people are aware of. I fear now that people are tuning in just as much to see Winston as they are to take my classes!

I also embarked upon a project that combines my love of Pilates with photography and Barbie dolls. Initially to distract myself from the problems of the world, I found myself moving the Barbies into Pilates positions and then had an idea to recreate common improper patterns I see in class as well as the proper pattern created by fixing the movements. I photographed Barbie doing both a “bad job” and a “good job” and began to post one exercise per day on my Instagram and Facebook accounts. Much to my surprise and delight, many Pilates instructors and enthusiasts found them fun and informative, so I kept it up as long as I could get the Barbies to move into the positions I was seeking. I used an orange for a stability ball, asparagus for foam rollers and grape tomatoes for small balls. It was incredibly fun, and I have since reached out to Mattel to seek approval to use the images to create a book or flash card series for studios or instructor use. On weekends, I posted outtakes that, of course, resulted from my pets.