This article came in a roundabout way, with a trip to a community charity fair with a friend, and some mini muffins. The cake stand volunteer, super-charged with enthusiasm for the venture, offered package deals on cookies and small bakes whilst simultaneously trying to auction a colossal meringue-y confection to the highest bidder. It was all for a good cause, so we each chose something sweet, and my friend mentioned in conversation that I teach Pilates in Essex. The stallholder said, as she packaged the goodies, ‘Well, those ladies do like their Pilates out there, I suppose. For me, all I do is just eat healthy and do lots of walking. But those ladies out there, they really do like that sort of thing.’

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Ingrid Lootvoet has been developing her Pilates work with children for over thirty years. She is bringing her Pilates for Children workshop to our Autumn Connection Weekend on Sunday 29th September 2019. Here is an interview we did with her recently.

Pilates Foundation member Susan Nash has happily settled in West Auckland from London where she trained Pilates teachers, managed two Pilates Studios and taught more than 20 classes each week. We caught up with Sue to find out more about her extraordinary background, moving to New Zealand and what keeps her moving.

Our feet are unsung miracles of bones and tissue. Each foot has twenty-six bones and over one hundred muscles, tendons and ligaments. Every day, they support (be honest with yourself) any excess weight. They propel us from place to place over
many decades. They run for buses, stand doing the washing up, go on tiptoes to reach things. They are remarkable feats of engineering. If you doubt, ye of little faith, just look at robots. Even with all our technological advances, we struggle to make a
robot with articulating feet. Feet are amazing.

My teaching and my writing is underpinned by a fundamental belief that a.) we are how we move and that therefore b.) we can change our movement to change our bodies. I might also add on a c.) which is that long term, sustainable change must be addressed through movement.

The key hip stabiliser is the gluteus medius. As you can see in the image above, this is the lateral buttock muscle. The ideal movement for strengthening this muscle is a combination of both abduction (lifting the leg sideways) and external rotation (rotating the knee outwards). The side leg lifts that you often see people doing in bum burning gym classes is actually just targeting the TFL, a short muscle that sits at the top of the outer thigh. What we’re after is a movement that takes the effort further backwards towards the back pocket area of the gluts.

The Hip Joint is one of the hardest joints to understand. This is partly because it’s buried deep in the pelvis, and surrounded by strong ligaments and muscles, making it difficult to sense what movement can be accessed through the joint. Like any other joint in the body, there are a number of structural variables that may enhance or reduce movement in the hip. These include the orientation of the femoral head and neck inside the socket as well as the orientation of the socket itself inside the pelvis. The joint is further complicated by its relationship to the pelvis and therefore to the orientation, asymmetries and rotations in the pelvic area.

Teaching children Pilates during the window age activates muscle memory. The children will start to use certain muscle groups consciously for certain movements thereby controlling their movements steadily and correctly both in and outside of the Pilates studio.