Level up your teaching with Amy Taylor Alpers

In July of this year, Amy Taylor Alpers will be heading to Australia to help Instructors further develop their teaching skills. The Pilates Journal caught up with Amy to discuss what she will be focusing on when she heads down-under.

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So what is a uniformly developed body? Have you seen one?

Ask Co-Founder of The Pilates Center and teacher trainer Amy Taylor Alpers what this means to her and you’ll get insight into her teaching focus and style. “When I’m teaching Pilates, the goal is to uniformly develop the body in front of me. To not only make the body strong and flexible, but to help bring it back into its ideal alignment, balance, and organisation; the way nature designed it well before civilisation took its toll on it,” said Amy.

“Mr Pilates believed that human health lay in returning the body back to the way it was originally designed - to its natural and normal way of moving. He felt we should emulate the way babies and animals move so innately before they have been taught anything or ruined by things like sitting in a chair all day,” she said.

This concept flows perfectly into Amy’s upcoming session called ‘Finding Your Centre through your Feet and Hands’.  “Of the 206 bones in our bodies, 106 of them are in the hands and feet, and 75% of our motor cortex is used just to move them. Making sure the hands and feet are used correctly during the Pilates movements, ensures that the information coming to and from our brains is fully activated and reaches through to the ends of our bodies, incorporating all of us more functionally,” said Amy.
 

“Our nervous systems are still designed around our original four-footedness, so the connection from our hands and feet directly activates the abdominals correctly.

“Ideally, when we move normally and naturally, the abdominals should simply do what they are designed to do when needed rather than being manually contracted or held. During exercises, we may have to strengthen them back to that, but then we want them to operate automatically.

“Just look when you watch a cheetah run you see that with her eyes locked on her prey, her brain must then instantaneously calculate exactly where each paw (hands and feet) must land with perfect timing. This is what enables her to run so fast and accurately. The rest of her body – for example, her spine, abdominals and the like – must respond accordingly, naturally and normally, to support this action or else she will lose speed, miss her prey, and/or even hurt herself,” said Amy.

Amy will also be presenting another session called ‘Timing is Everything’. Here she explains why it is so important that Pilates teachers have the skills to know when a muscle is firing.

“This is what teaching Pilates is all about to me. How do we know if the movement timing was right or not? For me, it’s simple to explain but takes a lot of practice to recognise. It must look like the way nature designed it. Human movement is made up of an inexplicable series of neurological communications. If one muscle fires out of sequence, the movement will be uncoordinated or ineffective at the very least, dangerous at worst. If you watch nature moving enough, you will see what natural and normal should look like. We will be talking a lot about how to develop this ability.

Finally, we take another look at one of Amy’s other sessions about spinal extension and how we should feel confident as teachers when working with the spine.  “Our modern lifestyle is not good for the human spine – especially all the sitting. Spines today are filled with tightness, weakness, injury and pain, as well as scary beliefs from the media and other factors. Pilates teachers are not immune to this fear. We must realise that as movement teachers, we hopefully believe that it is always better to move something than to not move it.

“Pilates teachers have basically had the fear of god put into them when it comes to moving spines. However, if we move spines in the exact way in which they are designed – in other words, return them back to their natural and normal movement sequence, timing and balance, they will heal themselves. We must be careful, but not fearful.

“It’s important that we help our clients remove fear and tension in the spine.Our nerves run through every vertebral joint – going to and from all parts of the body (from the organs, to muscles, to systems and more) to send and receive unfathomable amounts of information. Every spinal joint that’s not moving in its ideal design will weaken, stress, if not disable, this vital communication. To me, it is essential to one’s health, that every part of the spine move exactly as it’s designed – to the best of its ability today – for optimal health.

“Each spine has its own unique path to take. Depending on the history of that unique spine, we must watch with care, how it moves. There may be pain, trauma, fear, injury, surgeries, fusions and more going on. So we are always and only want the very best possible movement that a specific spine is willing to do today. We must encourage and enable, but not force or assume. In this workshop, we’ll explore how we can do this with care and confidence. Because movement is life after all!” said Amy.

Amy Taylor Alpers is a Co-Founder of The Pilates Center (TPC) and started The Pilates Center Teacher Training Program (TPCTTP) in 1990. She is based in Boulder, Colorado, USA. You can join Amy for her Australian tour with PilatesITC. To find out more visit here.