Issue #319 – December 2, 2020
What is Circular Pilates™ ?
by Patti Kreiner NCPT
Circular Pilates™ is a choreographed workout incorporating visually simple, but physically intensive, seated and standing exercises. The flowing, circular movements, combined with a certain symmetry and familiarity fueled by the breath, will free the body, providing the opportunity for more rotational movement. The class begins with a ten minute warm up and Tye4® wrap show and tell, followed by four ten-minute sets of seated/standing movements, and finishes with a cool down. This is a perfect counterpoint to the constraints imposed by the traditional Pilates Matwork.
Circular Pilates looks simple, but it’s really challenging. Better yet, one feels alive, aware and alert afterwards. One of the reasons is that after the fifty minutes of movement energized by music without VOCAL cueing, the teacher leads the group through PMI Clinical Advisor Marika Molnar’s BRAIN Connector exercise which she developed to connect the right and left sides of the brain. This is a powerful sequence which one cannot do without a trained leader.
Circular Pilates teaches a continuous routine of moving through rotational exercises in sitting (aka “perching”) and standing configurations. Some of this sequence incorporates standard Pilates exercises such as Saw while others are new movements. But this is not just choreography – the process of repeated rotation helps individuals feel the sequencing in their own bodies. As teachers, we know that people often injure themselves when they twist doing everyday tasks such as parallel parking or reaching high or low to grab something. Most people are weak in rotation. They don’t know how to move the upper body off the lower parts. Circular Pilates addresses these issues while building strength and improving coordination and balance.
Angela Sundberg, Certified Pilates Teacher and owner of Bodyscapes, says:
Circular Pilates makes the body feel alive. The flowing, spiraling movements fueled by breath, free the body and the soul. But, most of all, Circular Pilates provides opportunities of movement to many of my students who were restrained by the linear precision of conventional Pilates.
Joan Breibart demonstrate Circular Pilates Standing
Joan Breibart of the PhysicalMind Institute provides this insight:
I created Circular Pilates because we are at a point in time when the public doesn’t want to be critiqued or instructed. People are tired of generic cues that they have heard for decades. They NEED music-driven workouts. They want fun and distraction not form and correction. And, of course, we all know that less supine forward flexion and more weight bearing exercises with lateral bending, rotation and extension is what today’s bodies need.
The full effect of Circular Pilates can be realized with PhysicalMind Institute’s patented Tye4 – a sleek, “wearable reformer” which adds up to 30 pounds of resistance to your own body. You WEAR the means to actively work with resistance in order to feel your whole body at once and Tye4 is proven to help burn at least 15% more calories – not just with Circular Pilates, but with ANY workout.
“With TYE4® you can work with your body anywhere. It can also be useful as a rehabilitation tool, even for those who can’t walk, providing an experience of engaging the whole body through resistance in bed or standing. TYE4 is a creative intuitive tool for accessing, using and assisting anybody’s body” – Mary Bowen, Pilates Elder / Jungian Psychoanalyst
Tye4 fires the muscles on your entire body. Much better than just dyna-bands or rubber tubing. As a teacher, you will be able to talk less and get clients feeling and moving. When you remove this device, you feel renewed, regenerated, and refreshed because your body has been worked and massaged properly.
Wearing Tye4 makes deep connections in your entire body, working your body and brain in ways you have never done before. It’s fun, it’s different, and it is all in one. It lets you be endlessly creative so you will never get bored. As Eve Gentry, Joe’s first teacher from the 40’s, said: “A bored teacher makes for a bored client.”
Tye4 is a great tool for you, your clients, and your students to teach them how to move their muscles deeply all around the bones, from the top of their head down to their toes, with coordination, control, concentration, fluidity, mindful movement for better posture – providing a balance, strengthening and stretching workout. It gives cognitive feedback that stimulates and connects deep within your entire body. It involves sensory & motor integration feedback directly to your body for elongation for concentric/ eccentric movement in a closed chain environment. It can also be a fabulous rehabilitation tool – firing the entire brain/body muscle/fascia connections.
Joan Breibart demonstrate Circular Pilates Seated
Circular Pilates™ : 3 PMA/NCPT CECs.
ACE CECs coming soon.
The entire Course taught by Patti Kreiner is on the PMI website
To learn more about Circular Pilates® and Tye4™, please visit PhysicalMind Institute.
Tye4™ is available here.
Patti Eppolito Kreiner NCPT
National Pilates Certification Program
Tye4® MINIS™ By Parasetter® by PhysicalMind Institute.
Balanced Body Master Instructor Pilates,
Anatomy in Three Dimensions, MOTR™ Instructor for BOHDI™
Balanced Body Barre, CoreAlign™
Arcus™, Buff Bones®.
Alumni of F.A.M.I. (Functional Anatomy Meets Injury@Mount Sinai)
American Bone Health Peer
GYROTONIC®Awarded Certification
Circular Pilates™ : 3 PMA/NCPT CECs.
ACE CECs coming soon.
The entire Course taught by Patti Kreiner is on the PMI website under Pilates tab. ( link provided in a week)
To learn more about Circular Pilates® and Tye4™, please visit PhysicalMind Institute.