My
Articles
This is where I share my thoughts, lessons, and experiences with Pilates, shaped both by my own practice and by working with my trainees. Not polished theory, but real insights you can bring into your training, inside and outside the studio.
What I Think About When I Do Pilates
I love talking about Pilates. The more I teach and speak the language of Contrology, the more I realize that talking about it is part of my work. I need to understand what I do, to put movement into words, to understand how it feels in my body and how it lands in someone else’s.
I’ve always believed the choice of words matters more than anything. Like the method itself, the language has to be precise, intentional, meaningful.I’ve been teaching for about ten years, and I’m still learning to understand this method. Pilates keeps surprising me, sometimes with a question, sometimes with a contradiction.
It’s not a place I go to “find myself”;it’s a place where I notice things I didn’t expect. The body is direct. It doesn’t negotiate or overthink. It shows the truth long before the mind admits it, and I’ve learned to trust that.
I discovered Pilates in 2013, in a small studio where I met the teacher who later became my mentor. What pulled me in wasn’t the promise of a better posture or a “balanced life.” It was the clarity of the work.
The method felt engineered, precise, stripped down, logical. It matched something in the way I like to think: straightforward, exact, practical. When I think of Pilates, Contrology, I think about accuracy, timing, tension, release, and the kind of honesty that shows up whether you invite it or not. The body doesn’t negotiate; it tells the truth. Over time, I’ve realized that the way I move often mirrors the way I’m living: the places that grip, the places that collapse, the habits that run in the background. Nothing hides. And honestly, I appreciate that. I’m a straightforward person by nature, and the method meets me with the same bluntness. It shows me what’s there,
not what I wish were there.
There are moments, both when I practice and when I teach, when everything sharpens. The breath, the focus, the work. A student finds a small shift they’ve been trying to find for months, or my own body organizes itself in a way it couldn’t last week.
These moments aren’t dramatic, but they matter. They’re real, and they’re earned. I try to practice most mornings. I don’t always succeed. Some days I begin easily; other days I’d rather skip it altogether. But even on the days when I drag myself onto the mat, something shifts once I start. Not a miracle, just a quiet reset. Enough to feel like I’ve returned to something steady.
Pilates has taught me discipline, but not the dramatic kind people like to talk about. It’s a quieter discipline, the discipline to pay attention. To repeat something and actually notice what changes. To admit when something isn’t working and try again without making a whole story out of it.
The method rewards consistency, not perfection. It teaches you how to stay with the process long enough for the details to matter.
Teaching is where the method becomes tangible and real for me.
Watching someone discover their strength, or move without the pain they assumed would always be there, never feels routine. It reminds me that movement is information, and attention can change a life more reliably than any big promise or dramatic transformation.
Pilates/Contrology - mirrors life in a simple way: if you stop moving, you stop progressing. Change demands effort, curiosity, and repetition. It’s never instant, and it’s rarely comfortable. But it works.
Movement doesn’t reveal who I am. It reveals where I’m tense, where I’m avoiding, where I’m stronger than I thought, and where I’m still learning, just like in real everyday life.Keep being in motion will always create change. That information is enough. It keeps me coming back, and always keeps me going.
The Teaser: Learning to Tease Gravity
The Teaser is one of the most demanding exercises in Pilates, however still one of my favorites. At first glance it seems straightforward: you lift your legs and spine into a V-shape, balance, and hold. But the simplicity is deceptive.
To do it well requires a deep conversation between strength, control, and patience both in the body
and in the mind.
I’ve always thought the name is perfect. The Teaser is exactly that: an invitation to “tease” gravity, to suspend yourself against its constant pull without collapsing. And that’s where the challenge lies. This isn’t about forcing your way through with brute strength. If you try to muscle it, the body caves into the lower back and the exercise is lost. What it asks for instead is precision, alignment, and something more subtle: the ability to organize every piece of yourself into balance at once. That means legs and arms, spine and breath, focus and intention- everything working together, or not at all.
That level of control doesn’t come quickly. In fact, I’d say the Teaser is one of the best examples of why Pilates is built as a system. No one really learns it in isolation. Every Roll Up, every balance, every breath-to-movement exercise along the way is there to prepare you for it.
The Teaser shows you, without mercy, whether you’ve done that groundwork.
And if you haven’t, it will tell you immediately.
For me, this honesty is what makes the Teaser so exciting. I love teaching it because it reveals the truth of someone’s practice. You can’t fake it. Either you have the control and organization to lift into it, or you don’t, and that’s not failure, that’s information. That information is what makes Pilates powerful: every wobble, every collapse, every unfinished attempt points directly to what you need next. It’s feedback, not judgment. And with enough practice, those shaky beginnings turn into a Teaser that feels stable, light, and fully yours.
That’s why the Teaser will always be one of my favorite exercises. It’s tricky, yes. It’s humbling, often. But it’s also a reminder that control is never just physical. It’s mental, it’s emotional, it’s the discipline of not giving in when gravity pulls you down. To me, the Teaser isn’t just an exercise, it’s a lesson in how much more is possible when body and mind meet in control.
Progress
One of the most important skills I have developed as a teacher has very little to do with exercises, programming, or cueing.
It is learning to recognize progress.
When we first begin teaching, progress often
seems straightforward.
Someone becomes stronger. Someone becomes more flexible. Someone masters an exercise they couldn't do before.
These are easy markers to identify and celebrate.
The longer I teach, the more I realize that meaningful progress is often much quieter than we think.
A client stands a little differently when they walk into the studio. They move through a transition with less hesitation. They organize themselves before I even give the cue. They recover more efficiently from a challenge. Their relationship with movement begins to change.
These shifts are subtle, and because they happen gradually, they are easy to miss.
When we begin teaching, progress can be surprisingly
difficult to recognize.
And it is difficult to facilitate something we cannot yet see.
It is hard to say which comes first: the ability to recognize progress or the ability to create it.
I think that they develop together. As our eye becomes more educated, our teaching becomes more precise. As our teaching becomes more precise, we become better at recognizing change.
Neither can really exist without the other.
I have spent time talking with and mentoring many teachers at the beginning of their careers, and there is a particular stage that almost all of them go through. Their attention is consumed by the mechanics of teaching itself. They are trying to remember the order of exercises, find the right words, manage the equipment, project confidence, and somehow keep the lesson moving.
Looking at the client becomes secondary.
And even when they do look, they often don't yet know what they are
looking at.
This is completely natural.
Before we can truly observe movement, we have to become comfortable enough with teaching to free up our attention. Only then does a new phase begin. We start noticing patterns. We start recognizing habits. We start seeing not just what a client is doing, but how they are doing it.
For me, that transition marked a significant step in my
development as a teacher.
What is interesting is that I first experienced it as a student.
For a long time, I didn't realize I was getting stronger. My practice felt pretty much the same from day to day. The changes were happening too gradually for me to appreciate them. I was showing up, practicing, and doing the work, but I couldn't yet see what was changing.
Someone else could.
My teacher at the time, who later became my mentor, Yaron Lahav, noticed the progress before I did. He could see changes in my movement, my strength, and my understanding long before I was aware of them myself.
Looking back, I think that experience shaped the way I teach.
Because one of our responsibilities as teachers is to hold a perspective that our clients often cannot hold for themselves.
We create structure. We create clarity. We create a safe environment in which people can learn, explore, and challenge themselves. But we also serve as witnesses to their progress when it is still invisible to them.
Clients rarely have an objective view of their own process. They compare themselves to where they want to be, or to other trainees rather than to where they started. They focus on what is still difficult instead of noticing what has already changed.
Progress is rarely one breakthrough moment.
More often, it is a collection of small improvements, repeated consistently.
I believe learning to recognize those changes is one of the most important milestones in a teacher's development.
Once we learn to truly see progress, we become much better
at helping it happen.