
Breathing is the focus in Pilates, guiding a long nasal inhale and an exhale through the mouth to boost energy, calm the nervous system, and improve oxygen use.
Learn rib placement through breathing, lock the ribs to activate intercostals and diaphragm, prevent neck strain, and engage the core for safe at-home Pilates.
Explore swan dive prep with two variations that isolate the upper back muscles, keep shoulders down and back, and tuck the pelvis to flatten the lower back.
Strengthen and round your lower back with rolling like a ball preparation to activate the deep transverse abdominis and improve balance before the full exercise.
Practice imprinting to stabilize the spine, keep the lower back on the floor, and engage the lower abdominals while avoiding glute-dominant arching in a controlled Pilates series.
Learn safe oblique crunching with controlled twists, using exhale and inhale cues, while keeping the back pressed to the floor and the legs at a 90-degree alignment.
Learn heel squeezes in a home pilates workout, focusing on squeeze and release with feet joined, a tucked tailbone, engaged shoulders, and coordinated inhale and exhale.
Engage the inner thigh with the side series, stacking the hips and lifting the bottom leg while keeping shoulders down and breath steady through inhale and exhale, with controlled circles.
Perform the soul exercise, a warm up movement akin to the spine twist, focusing on twisting with upright spine, controlled inhale and exhale, reach and center.
Engage your core and balance through a home pilates circuit, alternating ball, foam roller, bands, and weights for full-body rounds focused on breathing and control.
Guide students through a full body warm-up, loosening the neck, shoulders, chest, spine, hips, and ankles with mindful breathing to prep for class.
Begin the home pilates warm up with upright posture, arm circles, and controlled breathing to engage stabilizers, then flow through floor circles, ball work, and roll-downs to awaken mobility.
This course is homemade bringing my 21 years of experience to your home. Designed to take you through the A to Z of Pilates. It starts off with the introductory lessons of Pilates and then there are numerous workouts that you can do using equipment and a multitude of workouts that you don't need any equipment for.
Please note, you don't need to buy equipment, there are plenty of workouts using things you'd readily have at home included.
Workouts that need home based equipment include:
- Matwork
- Metabolic
- Weights (tinned food or water bottles will be perfect)
- Wall (A wall, door or cupboard door)
Workouts that include equipment are:
- Ball (stability ball usually 65cm or 75cm for taller people)
- Small Ball (10 to 15cm ball)
- Band (therapy band, any color that you have is great.. if you go get a band Blue is the average resistance) Grey or black are stronger and every other color is lighter resistance)
- Foam Roller (90cm or longer in length)
It is recommended that you have a mat or soft surface to work on, carpeting or using a couple of towels will be perfect.
Pilates is a type of exercise system where you place your body in the correct alignment for each exercise. By doing this you lower exercise related risks and improve the quality of each move is increased ten fold.
When you can hold the correct positions while performing an exercise, you start to work multiple muscle groups and those muscle groups are the precise ones that correct your posture. Do you want to make your workout more effective? This is the method for you.
There are Six Principles that oversee your Pilates practice. These include:
Breathing
Rib Placement
Shoulder Placement
Activating your Core muscles effectively
Head Placement
Lower Back placement
Better than just improving your Pilates exercises you can then start to use these Six Principles when you do any other kind of exercise as well - Optimizing any fitness regiment you do.
Once we've learnt these Principles we'll start to build the foundation matwork exercises (one at a time) incorporating all six optimizers simultaneously.
This may sound daunting but you will get the hang of it easily. You can then spend time repeating these steps to grow your confidence or go on to do the full workouts provided.
Once you are proficient in the basics you can start working with the full workouts. I hope you enjoy the workouts. Please remember that Pilates is slow and controlled. Movements are usually smaller and less quick than what you'd expect.