Each foot has 28 bones, 33 joints, over 100 muscles/ligaments and 200,000 nerve endings.

Over recent weeks we've been waking up our feet in class. Spreading our toes, wiggling them and even doing the odd bit of Toega. Doing a mexican wave with the toes creates some giggles and sound effects! Some of us have been spending a little time barefoot outside of class. Including doing crazy things like walking on pebbled beaches unshod. Or even playing tennis barefoot.

Why bother? If our feet aren't strong, flexible and responsive then this can impact our alignment and even cause pain up our bodies. Pain caused by weak and inflexible feet can be felt in our knees, hips, backs and even in our necks. As Daniel Howell points out in the barefoot book, research shows that going barefoot strengthens our feet, makes them more flexible and improves body alignment. Feet are our platform on the earth, without them we can't do much.

​Just to prove that our feet can be trained to do the most amazing things, have a look at the below. 

The photo is from one of my students Hilly, drinking a cup of coffee with her foot. Amazing!

The two videos are of Kim, another student. The first shows Kim tying a knot, in the air, with her feet! This is a late night party game in Kim's family. The second shows Kim picking things up with her feet. A skill she mastered when her son was little, enabling her to hold him in one arm whilst she still be able to pick things up. Brilliant stuff. 

So, set your feet free. It just feels great and may well do you a lot of good!

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A massive thank you to Hilly and Kim for allowing me to share the below. Superstars.

Following a recommendation from a student, I picked up a copy of ‘The 4 Pillar Plan’ by Dr Rangan Chatterjee to read over the summer break. The book is subtitled ‘How to relax, eat, move [and] sleep your way to a longer, healthier life’. What a cracking read, full of great practical tips and backed up by scientific research.

Dr Chatterjee is a GP/MD in the UK health system with over 20 years experience. What’s refreshing about his approach is that he tackles the root cause of many medical issues, rather than simply treating the symptoms. He’s found, through his own personal experiences and that of his patients, that very often the underlying cause of many modern ailments is our lifestyle. Problems such as type 2 diabetes, anxiety/depression, insomnia, high blood pressure and irritable bowel syndrome can be addressed by simple changes in how we live. He calls this ‘Progressive Medicine’ and states that the majority of patients don’t need a pill but a lifestyle prescription. In turn, this means that they can take control of their health and wellbeing as individuals.

Amongst the many great suggestions in the book, one that stood out to me as a movement teacher is the idea of ‘movement snacking’. I love movement and I love snacks, so what a great combo! As my students and readers of this blog will know, I’ve been increasingly encouraging us all to think more about movement throughout the day rather than only exercising at a predefined time once or twice during the week. The simple reason for this is that we evolved as a species to move in a variety of ways over the course of the day.

Dr Chatterjee quotes George Bernard Shaw as follows ‘We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing’. Movement through play is not only good fun but it gets our bodies moving in unpredictable and varied ways. It often means using joints and muscles that rarely get moved in everyday life. We’ve been incorporating some play into class recently. I’m going to continue this to provide more ideas for movement snacking.

For more information, please visit Dr Chaterjee’s website. He also has a really interesting podcast called Feel Better, Live More where he interviews leading thinkers in Progressive Medicine and associated subjects. I’ve been listening to it in the van whilst travelling. He’s given a TEDx talk too, which is linked below.

Right, I’m off to have a movement snack.

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Katy Bowman has been referred to in class a fair bit recently. Katy is a biomechanist by training and uses her science background to challenge our long-held ideas on exercise and movement.

One idea she challenges is that it’s OK to be sedentary a lot of the day and then ‘offset’ it by doing some exercise. The term Katy uses to describe this is ‘Active Sedentary’. People in this category aren’t getting much more movement than people who are sedentary all the time. Katy argues that we should be exercising less and moving more throughout the day. That is if we want to be truly active and avoid the risks associated with being sedentary so much of the time.

Another idea that Katy challenges is that we can get enough movement from doing just one or two sports. She suggests that practising a single sport uses a limited number of muscle groups, in limited ranges, and often results in injury. Katy’s view is that variety is more important and we should be trying to get more varied quality movement throughout the day to ensure parts of our bodies don’t get ‘sticky’ or stiff.

Thankfully Pilates gives us a lot of movement variety. However, just doing it for one hour a week puts us in the Active Sedentary category. Instead, we should be trying to sprinkle little bits of extra movement throughout our day in how we sit, move, wriggle, stretch and play (yes we can play at any age!). Katy calls this movement vitamins. It doesn’t have to mean finding more time in our day, just move more often and keep it varied.

Katy’s work is causing a bit of a mini-revolution amongst a lot of Pilates, Yoga and movement teachers. It just makes sense! Joseph Pilates was influenced by many schools of movement to find the best answers to the movement problems he found. I’m sure that if he was with us today, he would be extremely interested in what Katy has to say.

Katy’s work has also made me realise personally that for a long time, I’ve been an Active Sedentrist. But I’m in recovery now, trying to move more and move well throughout the day. I'm also trying to introduce more variety including putting up a slackline in the garden (super challenging but fun) and also trying to master the monkey bars for the first time!

Katy’s approach is called Nutritious Movement. The YouTube video below gives a great introduction to it. I also recommend reading one or more of her books like Move Your DNA or Alignment Matters or Movement Matters.

Exercise less, move more. It just makes sense.


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​"Pilates is all about core strength, isn’t it?" 

This is the answer I sometimes get when I ask beginners what they know about Pilates. My response is usually a hesitant ‘sort of…’.

Like many Pilates teachers, I have mixed feelings about the link between Pilates and this mythical thing called ‘core strength/stability’. On the one hand, it’s a good thing as it brings people to Pilates in the first place to build their core strength. Often after a Doctor, Osteopath, Physiotherapist or similar has told them that they need to do so. On the other hand, there’s so much more to Pilates. It moves us, relaxes us, tones us, improves our balance, strengthens our whole bodies, builds our self-awareness and challenges us to do things we never thought possible.

But, I now think that part of the reason I’ve been reluctant to give a clear answer like “yes, Pilates certainly can help build core strength (and do other things!)”, is because I didn’t have a clear and crisp enough definition of what core strength is or isn’t.

I’m currently reading Katy Bowman’s excellent ‘Alignment Matters’ in which she brilliantly describes core strength like this:

“Core strength does not mean abdominal exercises! It is the ability to stabilize the bones in the upper body, rotate the torso with proper spinal curvature, and maintain pelvic position while sitting, standing, and exercising! It's the ability to control the bladder, stabilize the ligaments of the knees with the lower abdominal wall, and breath correctly while doing all of these!”

Amen!

I like Katy’s definition so much, I may just put it on the wall in the studio.

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A very big thank you to Clare Askham, who came to Wysall last week to do some special one off classes for some of my clients.

I did many apprenticeship hours with Clare during my initial training. Her calm and super positive style helped me immensely. Clare's background as a sports therapist and personal trainer adds a unique special twist to her classes.

Clare has worked in the fitness industry since 1988, qualifying as a sports therapist and personal trainer in 1997 and as a Body Control Pilates teacher in 2002. She is particularly interested in the health of the spine having suffered from prolapsed discs due to an unfortunate and sudden evacuation at speed from her horse! Her practice at The Barn Studio Edmondthorpe works with clients predominantly who have suffered injuries and are keen to take their rehabilitation to the next level, Pilates is the answer!

Both classes focused on exercises that 'lengthen your spine and make it happy' using small equipment.

The feedback has been great. It's always useful to get a different Pilates teacher's perspective on things. Photo below from the first class. Apologies to the second class that I didn't get back to the hall in time to take a shot of you.

Watch this space for a workshop later in the year on the classical repertoire with another great Body Control Pilates teacher Rosy Clark, who also happens to my teacher.

A few years ago, a cycling friend told me a little story about Bill whilst we were out on our bikes. Bill was in his 80s, still very active and liked to keep busy. One day, one of Bill’s neighbours noticed that Bill was at the top of a ladder fixing the roof on his house. The neighbour asked Bill why he wasn’t taking it easy, watching the television and letting others do jobs like this for him. Bill’s response was brief and to the point, he simply said ‘Beware the chair’.

I often think about this story and find it inspirational. Why should we stop doing things just because of our age or convention? Bill certainly didn’t think so. Having recently read ‘The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health and Disease’ by Daniel Lieberman, I was reminded of Bill and ‘Beware the chair’. Lieberman argues that our lifestyles today are out of sync with how our bodies have evolved. This has led to a dramatic increase in what Lieberman calls 'mismatch conditions' such as diabetes, myopia and some forms of back pain.

When it comes to sitting, Lieberman says that doing so in a comfy chair is unusual from an evolutionary perspective. When our ancestors rested it was more likely to be in a squat position or lying down. When they did sit down, it tended to be on the floor with limited or no back support. Lieberman states that we were simply never meant to sit down as much as we do. There are two problems related to prolonged sitting that Lieberman highlights in his book. Firstly, core muscles in the back and abdomen switch off and begin to atrophy. Secondly, imbalances in the muscular system start to happen such as the shortening of our hamstrings.

So what has this got to do with Pilates?

3 things:

1. Pilates builds awareness of how we can sit better by teaching good posture habits
2. Pilates helps to address muscle imbalances by training the whole body to work as a system
3. Pilates enables us to keep moving and do the activities we love, be that fixing the roof, taking part in sport or just staying supple and strong

Joseph Pilates wisely said ‘Change happens through movement and movement heals.’

Beware the chair and keep moving, whatever your age.

We've been practicing getting up and down off the floor with control this term. This is an essential skill that a lot of us need to work on (myself included!). The techniques that we've been using are based on the work of Philip Beach and his Archetypal Postures. If we lose the ability to sit on the floor plus get up and down off it safely, as our ancestors did, then we are limiting our movement potential. My clients will recognise some of the sequences in this video.

The BBC YouTube video below suggests that there's a link between getting up and down off the floor and our longevity. 

Thank you to all of my amazing clients who've embraced the getting up and down off the floor thing.
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In January, I invited all of my clients to enter a competition to design slogans to go onto an Opotopo Pilates t-shirt.
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​This followed a bit of fun I'd had with a client last year designing the first ones (see below). 

A very big thank you to all of my clients who took part. There were over 50 entries. 

These 50 were shortlisted down by a judging panel of Body Control Pilates teachers to select the best 10 ideas to go forward to a public vote. 

The winning t-shirt slogans were as follows:
1st       Adore your core 
2nd     Shaping your future 
3rd      Simon says ... do Pilates 

The following seven runners up were:
​Align your spine 
Explore your core 
My spines fine
Posture, Inner awareness, Lengthening, Alignment, Tone, Energise, Strengthen (spells PILATES)
Re-align your spine 
Spine aligned
Strength from the inside out 

Congratulations to all the winners who won a limited edition 'Contrology is the future' t-shirt (see below).
1st and 2nd place also won studio time.

10 people from the public vote, selected at random, also won a 'Contrology is the future' t-shirt.
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A massive thank you to everyone who joined in with this little bit of fun to start the year
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On holiday last year, Claire and I met Thomas and his family. We were staying at the same Air BNB in St Foy en Tarentaise in the French Alps. Both families were keen to get out skiing each day. I still have first lift fever after 35 years of skiing. That said, there was always time over breakfast to have a chat about the conditions, where we'd skied the day before and life in general. The homemade bread and strawberry jam delayed us a little too.

After a couple of days, the conversation turned to what we all did for a living. Thomas was a Neurosurgeon, his wife a GP. When I mentioned that I taught Pilates, Thomas responded very quickly that he always tells his clients to invest in their spines. He recommended Pilates as a great way to do so. I of course found this very interesting so asked Thomas to elaborate. His response was simple. In his view, it was far more important to invest in your spine versus stocks, shares and alike. He added that 'without your spine there's not a lot you can do!'.

On the last day of skiing, over another great breakfast, I told Thomas how much I liked his phrase 'Invest in your spine'. I asked him if he was ok with me using it. His response was rapid again, he said 'of course, please do'. Hence, 'Invest in your spine' was born as a tagline for Opotopo Pilates. 

Karen Grinter is an amazing Pilates teacher and she very kindly agreed to come and teach a one off class this week. 

I did a large amount of my apprenticeship training with Karen and was consistently blown away by her knowledge, teaching skills and relationship with her clients. Her classes are always a lot of fun with the right balance of concentration, challenge and laughs. 

Karen is the studio director of Northants Pilates and has been teaching Pilates for 20 years. You can read about the amazing depth of experience Karen has here: www.northantspilates.com/meet-the-team 

A lot of fun was had by all (look at those smiles below). Many classic Karen one liners and unique teaching cues were experienced. Thank you Karen, you're a star.

More guest teachers in the future....

​Simon