Pilates teachers are trained to see.
We notice the shoulder that rises as load increases. The breath that changes when effort arrives. The foot that becomes lighter. The pelvis that shifts. The strategy a body returns to when something becomes more demanding.
Learning to observe is part of becoming a skilled practitioner. Experience sharpens that observation further. Over time, we become very good at noticing things our clients may not yet notice themselves.
That matters.
But there is a distinction inside that skill that I think is worth paying attention to.
You can see your client move. You cannot feel their body for them.
It sounds obvious. And yet somewhere in movement education, the line between observing another person’s body and becoming the authority on that body can become surprisingly thin.
We see something, so we name it. We interpret what it means. We offer a correction. We tell the client where they are working, what is compensating, what needs to switch on, what needs to let go.
This is a natural extension of expertise. We have learned to observe, interpret and respond, and our clients come to us because those skills are useful.
But something subtle can happen when our observation consistently becomes the conclusion.
The client begins looking outward for information about what is happening inwardly.
Am I doing this correctly? Is my pelvis straight? Am I using the right muscle? Where should I be feeling this? Does this look right?
Eventually, a practitioner can become more than a teacher. We can become an interpreter between a person and their own body.
And that raises a different question.
What is our expertise for?
If expertise gives us the ability to notice more, perhaps its purpose is not simply to tell the client what we see.
Perhaps it can help them notice more too.
This question became one of the foundational observations behind the SomaFlow Method™, the movement methodology I developed after years of teaching Pilates. Within SomaFlow, practitioner expertise and client autonomy are considered alongside broader principles of support, capacity, organisation and adaptation. In this part of the work, the question is simple: how can what we see increase a person’s participation in their own experience?
One way we approach this is through capacity-based observation.
Rather than looking at a movement primarily to decide whether it is being performed correctly, we can become curious about what that movement is revealing.
What support is available here?
What changes as the demand increases?
Where does effort appear?
What options does this person currently have?
The exercise becomes less of a test and more of an environment through which capacity becomes visible.
That changes what we do with our observations too.
If I see a client’s shoulders rising, I can immediately tell them to pull their shoulders down. Sometimes that may even produce the position I was looking for.
But I could also use what I have noticed to create an opportunity for them to notice.
Perhaps I change the load. Perhaps I offer more support. Perhaps I ask what changes through their neck and shoulders when that support becomes available.
I am still teaching. My observation still matters. My experience is still informing the choices I make.
But I am not required to own the answer.
This is the difference between using expertise to direct a body and using expertise to direct attention.
The second allows something important to remain with the client.
They begin to recognise their own effort. Their own support. Their own strategies. Their own changing capacity.
And that matters because their relationship with their body continues long after the session ends.
A client can become extremely good at following instructions while remaining uncertain without them. They can know exactly what their teacher thinks about their movement and still have very little confidence in what they themselves perceive.
For a movement practice, that is worth questioning.
Autonomy does not mean leaving people alone to work everything out for themselves. Nor does it make practitioner knowledge less valuable.
It asks us to use that knowledge differently.
Our external observation and the client’s internal experience are two different sources of information. One does not need to defeat the other. In fact, some of the most interesting teaching begins when we allow both to remain in the room.
I can offer what I see.
The client can offer what they feel.
Together, we may discover something neither perspective could have produced alone.
Perhaps that is a useful way to reconsider expertise in Pilates.
Not as the ability to become increasingly necessary to someone’s understanding of their body, but as the ability to help make more of their own experience available to them.
We can continue to observe closely. We can teach with precision. We can bring everything our education and experience have given us.
But we can remember the boundary that makes that expertise useful.
We can see our clients move.
We cannot feel their bodies for them.
And perhaps the purpose of seeing more is to help them notice more too.
Madonna Gott is an Australian Pilates instructor, movement educator, author of The Dual Helix of Healing, and founder of the SomaFlow Method™. Through SomaFlow, she offers practitioner education, training pathways and studio workshops for movement professionals across Australia.