Pilates

Never have I had so many responses to a blog post as I did to my September 28th blog Last month I turned 65. Many of my participants wrote about their own ageing process, and that of their parents and people around them. Some shared their own experiences of turning 65. One shared the details […]

As I was re-reading Greg Wells’ excellent book, Rest, Refocus, Recharge, (reviewed in last week’s blog), I remembered a trip I made to Italy early in my teaching career. I’d wanted to see where the fitness balls I used were manufactured. The factory was located near the small town of Udine, in Northern Italy, five

Lately I’ve been dipping in and out of a book I loved the first time around: Rest, Refocus, Recharge by Toronto-based performance physiologist Greg Wells, PhD. A former athlete, Wells studies the science behind rest and recovery in exercise, and in life. His subtitle is A Guide for Optimizing your Life; and the book covers

In August, my sixty-fifth birthday approached and passed. So? Age is just a number, and many of my students and friends are older than I am. Both of my parents are almost thirty years older. And how much can I comprehend from my experience of ageing, as compared to someone in their mid-nineties? Was this

Every human being has his pet areas where he “grabs himself”—the back of the neck, the jaw, the knees, the abdominal muscles, the coccyx; no matter where the grasp takes hold, the muscles are held as tightly as possible, to keep the bones “fixed,” to give a sense of security in space. —Mabel E. Todd,

Recently, near the end of one of my classes, I recited to my students the following quote– If you are in your fifties, you need to stretch five days a week.  If you are in your sixties, six days a week. And if you are in your seventies or older, seven days a week.  I

For over twenty years I have been telling my students when to breath in and when to breath out. And this has not been easy to do. Not for them and not for me. But I never questioned it. Not until I took a Body Harmonics Master Class called Open the Torso to Free the

Twenty years ago, my Russian friend Liuda fractured her hip on an icy pavement in Moscow near the end of December. The break had been in the neck of the thigh bone, the place where the long bone fits into the socket. It had not been a horizontal break. The doctor in the hospital who

My friend, and former student, Cindy underwent a hysterectomy at forty-five because of suspicious irregularities in her uterus. Up to that point she had been a very active women who spent hours a week at the gym running on a treadmill. I knew, because I often joined her there. Eight weeks after the surgery Cindy

Two months ago I asked my students about their bones and their T-scores, since the information I received from them would help me design safer and more effective Pilates classes. T-scores are the results of a bone density test, a rating system that describes the density of your bones (hip and spine are tested) as