Get those legs ready to rock ‘n roll that summer wardrobe!!

The regular host was away at a funeral and Jennifer the weather gal was kind enough to step in and do Pilates while wearing a pencil skirt. Thank-you, Jennifer for being such a good sport! It was really fun!!

Your Beach Butt Workout! Get your summertime legs ready for those short shorts. A quick workout to burn calories and tone the legs. And best of all? Stronger legs give you more endurance to do what you love to do. That’s how you can Healthy Your Way to Sexy! Enjoy!

Your arms have been hiding under long sleeves and sweaters for too many months. Dare to be bare and shape up the shoulders, biceps and triceps. And because it’s Pilates? You’ll be working your abs at the same time. Enjoy!

You’ve been sitting too long and your back is aching. Go for a walk later but for now, with deadlines pending, take a few minutes (5 to be exact) and give your spine some TLC. And a happy spine is also a strong spine, so in case you need to get into something strapless soon it’s good to start with Healthy Your Way to Sexy!

Another desk workout for you. This one is for getting your legs ready for all those itty bitties that we love to wear when the weather turns steaming hot. Short Shorts?? HA! Bring ‘em on!

Filmed this the other day in a friend’s kitchen.  Do it now, it’s only five minutes. AND your short shorts will thank YOU!

Jungian Psychoanalyst and Pilates elder, Mary Bowen, joined us on March 14th to share her wisdom and joy of 82 years.  Listen to the entire show or enjoy a few of the quotes from the show below.

I want to hear the entire show>

Quotes from Mary during the show:

“Happy habitation in the body.”

“More spine, less mind; more experience, less performance.”

“Things that are wrong with the body challenge us to change them.”

“You have to be your own true self, you can’t be a clone. That’s your journey.”

“Sensations teach us. The things that are wrong with us teach us cause we’re challenged to change that”

Quotes about the show:

“It was marvellous,could have listened for hours! Thank you!”– @HartPilates

“OMG awesome I was scribbling notes, but can we listen again?”–@DianeMulholland

“I heard a few minutes. Amazing!! I can’t wait to hear the entire thing.”– @PolasPilates

“This is like when u go to church and u r sure the message was just for you”–@PilatesLounge

That’s what I have always told everyone.  Even when I’ve seen therapists, the therapist asks: “Do you or have you ever had an eating disorder?”  I answer in the positive with the usual caveat: “Yes, but it wasn’t serious. It was just a way for me to control my weight when I was dancing. Once I stopped dancing I stopped the disorder.”

Then today I saw an article about new health guidelines for models being presented this week in New York City at Fashion Week.   The article on CNN Health calls eating disorders “an illness that has the highest mortality rate of any other mental illness,” –Lynn Grefe, president and CEO of the National Eating Disorders Association.

Wait? What?  This is the first time I have ever heard eating disorder and mental illness used in the same sentence. Which explains why they are treated at psychiatric hospitals. Okay, I’m a little slow… but was I mentally ill? I wasn’t. I was dancing.  I was keeping my weight where it needed to be.  Except…

I remember the time I took too many diuretics and blacked out and almost collapsed.  Somehow I remained conscious as the world went black.  And I also remember the time I had a heart attack at age 19. Also because of the eating disorder. You know, the whole electrolyte imbalance thing. Hm.

So was it a bigger deal than I thought? And like anyone who has a mental illness, unless it is healed or managed do you (did I?) move on to just another way of practicing mental illness?  Too scary to think about. Let me wrap my head around this one first.

In the meantime, I guess it is time to start talking about that experience as more than a ‘weight loss method’.  Maybe talking about it in terms that “Beauty should equal Health”. That’s another quote from the CNN article.  But truly.  When someone is healthy we intuitively know that and are drawn to him/her like magnets.  The healthiest people, physically and mentally, have droves of people who want to be near them, who want to try to get a piece of that, who are aspiring towards a different way of living and being in this world.

That would be my aspiration.  Not to draw people to me for what I appear to lack but to draw people toward me because I am healthy. Healthy people have a lot to share: their passions, their joy, their dreams.  And that’s contagious.  One happy person can infect a room much more quickly and effectively  and certainly more positively, than one sick person.

Be Healthy.

I saw these kiddos practicing on the beach about a week ago. Actually, I see them every weekend.  They pull tires, jump cones and just generally kick up a LOT of sand.  Every time I see them, I think of the study that physical therapist, Andre Labbé, relayed in a continuing education course last August.  Labbé teaches at Tulane University and he and his colleagues looked at the performance of varsity football teams from 5 local high schools.  Four schools were from wealthy areas and one was not.  They measured performance in terms of two categories. The first was a measurement of how much weight can these kids lift, how fast can they run, etc.  The second measurement was a measurement of function.  How quickly can they change direction, recover from a fall, rebound or avoid a tackle, etc.  So, to me, the non-football player it seems the second measurement would be much more important to how the team actually plays.  Who cares how much weight you can lift if you can’t scoot around a tackle and get the touchdown?

The wealthy schools excelled in the first measurement. They had all the fancy gym equipment at their schools and they used it.  The kids were strong. They were fast.

The kids from the poor school didn’t fare so well on the first measurement but knocked the socks off the other schools when it came to function.  Labbé spoke to the coach: “How are you doing it?” Labbé and his team expected the first measurement to correlate directly to the second measurement and it did not.  Lifting more weight did not mean better performance on the field.  So how were the kids that didn’t have any special equipment excel on the field?  Here’s the coach’s answer:

I train the kids on the beach.  First they run in the hard sand by the water’s edge, then they get moved to the soft dry sand.  After that, they do drills an ankle deep in water, then knee deep.

Makes sense why these kids aren’t toppling as easily when they are getting pushed around by linebackers. They are used to it.  The sea, as anyone from New Orleans will tell you, is unpredictable and won’t flinch because you might look tough.

Labbé went on to talk about the importance of working all of our post-rehabilitation clients on unstable surfaces.  He even had a sandbox in his clinic for a period of time.  My next studio?  It’ll be on the beach.  Best therapy in more ways than I had ever thought.