Katie Leaver Pilates

 This is the point where we take everything we have learned over the past 5 months and combine it together.  Breath: The fuel for your power house  Pilates key principles: Breathing Concentration: Connecting your mind and your body  Pilates key principles: Concentration Centre: Your core, connecting to it and letting it power your movement  Pilates key principles: Centre Control: Using the exact alignment, avoiding excess tension, isolating muscles  and  Pilates key principles: Control Precision: The exact way the action is executed.  Pilates key principles: Precision We then add Flow so that the movement can flow smoothly and gracefully.  Combining all these essential elements into my Pilates practice is something that I am still working on.  I'm not sure I will ever hit the perfection target.  It is really important that everyone knows that their best is good enough.  However Pilates is bigger than turning up and waving your limbs around by copying the person next to you. 

 Before I trained as a Pilates teacher I attended classes for years.  I was always trying to speed through exercises to get extra repetitions in and prove to myself that I was really strong.  However I was not really strong and I was not aware of the key Pilates principles.  Precision in movement is the exact manner that an action is executed.  When you are completing a Pilates exercise you are using your breath to power you movement, your concentration, your Centre, your control and finally your precision.   The greater the precision the more likely you are to find the muscles that should be exercised and then to achieve your goal.    When exercising I am thinking of the muscle that should be working, isolating it and being precises in my movement.  Precision can make the difference between accessing a muscle or not.  Next time you are in a class, slow down and connect with the muscle your working.  Use all the Pilates principles to control your movement and don't be preoccupied o

 In Pilates we aim to maintain a high level of control over the movements that we make.  As you will have completed some Pilates with me, you will be aware that a small angle change in leg positioning or increased stability through the pelvis can suddenly increase the intensity of an exercise.  When thinking about control it is very closely related to precision and you could say that these key principles come hand in hand.  You will find that control is improved once you have made multiple attempts at an exercise.  Muscles will increase in strength and your muscles will remember the movement of an exercise.  Therefore when taking part in a class, stay at a level where you can maintain control.   If you work at too high a level you will find it harder to master the control of position and movement and then perfect the exercise.  When we have control over a movement we are also able to make the movement using only the muscles connected with that motion.  An example of where things can go

In Pilates your Centre refers to the core of you body and the body's Centre of gravity. For anyone who may have forgotten what exactly makes up the core, please read  Your core muscles are like a tin can .  When thinking about the body's Centre of gravity.  This is an imaginary point where the body's weight is equally balanced, and around this point the body may rotate freely.  As we are all individually built, our Centre of gravity is unique to us.   You will find the the Centre of gravity for a man is slightly higher than for a woman.  Lets think about completing the perfect roll down:  Starting sat up, knees bent to ceiling, legs and feet hip width apart on the floor. You squeeze your core, roll your pubic bone towards the ceiling and your back pockets start to come closer to the mat.  You place your back pockets, then your waist band, each of your ribs and finally your shoulders and head onto the mat in a controlled sequence, keeping your head in line with you torso.  I

 In a world of attention grabbing, Pilates is a 55 minute window of calm.  As a teacher of small group and solo Pilates I can tell if my clients are having a busy mind day. When the mind is elsewhere, movements are not as exact and clients ability to complete a challenging move is compromised.  It is OK to have a busy mind, we are not robots, however letting go of your thoughts and concentrating on the movements your body is making will help your Pilate practice to develop.  These are my top tips for concentration: 1) Be present, use the repetitive nature of the warm up to connect with every part of your body.  Try to visualize each part of your body, be selfish and only focus on yourself.  2) Pay attention to the alignment of your body.  The beautiful line from your toe, through your ankle, knee and then into your hip.  Maintaining correct alignment will increase the difficulty of an exercise.  Why not challenge yourself to completing level 1 exercises with perfect alignment.  Difficu

 Breathing, or the way you breathe is an important part of the development of your Pilates practice.   As a Pilates teacher I meet lots of clients, all at different stages of their Pilates journey.  When your journey starts, your focus is on core activation and generally just getting through a lesson trying to understand and translate the instructions from your teacher into movement.   Once your core strength begins to develop and all your concentration is not used up in surviving your Pilates class, it is time to start thinking about your breathing.  In Pilates we use a technique called lateral breathing.  When you take in a breath to power movement we ask that you breathe into your ribs raising your chest up and out.  But why?  To take a large breath in you can either breathe into your tummy, or breathe into your ribs expanding them up and out.  It is very difficult (possibly impossible) to breathe into your tummy and engage your core muscles at the same time, therefore we use latera