Goals and needs teaching Pilates clients
What are your goals as a Pilates teacher? What are your needs that seem to be missing in your teaching skills? What is your purpose with your Pilates clients when you teach them?
This is a subject that we deeply dive in with my students as they go through my Teacher Training Program. It is something that should be forefront of your teaching mind the minute you begin teaching that body in front of you. As a teacher in training, a new teacher out in the world, and especially as an experienced teacher.
It should be something we never forget each time we teach a client.
Clients come into the studio and to Pilates for many reasons. To get fit, help with an injury, after rehab, to get more mobile, to move or to be challenged and get stronger. The list goes on and on.
Every new client fills out that initial assessment form and gives their movement experience, injuries, and what they are looking to get out of their Pilates with you. T
The question is do you keep that in your mind even 3 months later with that client? Do you just then begin to think “oh I need them to be able to do this or that?”
I was chatting with a Pilates teacher with over 15 years of experience and she was so frustrated and feeling that she wasn’t doing a good job as she had a client that wasn’t able to do what she asked and wasn’t improving in certain ways. She wanted to know if was it her cueing. Did she need to use more props? What was wrong with her as a teacher that this client “wasn’t getting it right?”
The feedback though from the client was not the experience that the teacher was having.
The client kept coming every week
The client said how good she felt after every session
The client said they felt so much stronger.
Interesting right? This client was feeling and getting out of the session everything we want for our clients. Yet, the teacher didn’t “see” this.
A lot of times teachers put their own expectations on the client. Thinking they should be able to do this and in this way. They look at not seeing some big changes or moments of “aha” as a failure in their teaching or that their client “just doesn’t get it”
I love talking about this moment when I was working with a student. She was teaching her client and she kept telling the client to curl more in their lumbar. She used every cue she could think of and just wasn’t getting what she wanted from this person.
I told her next time to cue her client to get more rounded and then gently place her hand on the area she wanted the client to round more and see what happened. When the student did this she said that she could feel all the muscles reacting and firing and yet there was no real change in her shape.
What does that mean?
It means that we are not inside the body of our clients. We can not feel what they are feeling. Just because we can’t see something happening or see changes doesn't mean they aren’t happening. Of course not.
This client was working, trying to round as best they could, and even though visually there was no change they were learning, and activating those muscles needed and that is what we are working for with our clients.
Whatever their goals and needs are we just keep guiding them as best we can and don’t put what we want for them as a success or failure.
We are always looking to improve our client’s mobility and strength and to get them into their full range of movement and the key part of that is THEIR full range, not what we think it should be.
We need to remember our purpose and what skills we use to give our clients what they need each session. Not what we think they should get. Notice what their body is missing in terms of full range for them, notice what is going really well for them, and always remember why they came to you in the first place.
Our clients will always “feel” changes in their body before noticing any physical changes and that is good. That means we are doing a great job!
They are learning how to use their body, and in a way that they are feeling it for themselves. What it feels like to lengthen, to engage, and to be balanced as best they can in the full body movement.
Taking our egos out of teaching is the first step and then listening to what that body in front of us is saying is next and then we just guide it along for the session. Each and every time!.
Check out the 2 Pilates Chicks podcast “Teaching to the body in front of you” to dive even deeper into this subject!