Do you teach the hundreds in mat class?

Do people want the ab burn but it hurts their neck ?

Does your class try to lower their legs to get the ab burn but their lower backs hurt?

As a teacher you see all of these problems going on while teaching the hundreds. At the same time you are trying to get the timing and the 5 breaths in and out with the arm beats, the lifting and lowering of the legs, and basically it’s too much to handle….so you end up not teaching it at all.

So my question is? Do you teach the 100s in a mat class?

If you stopped teaching it because of these issues, I can help you to teach the hundreds in a way that won’t hurt necks and backs and still give them the burn/results they want.

Look, you're are a smart teacher and I’m sure you've fixed these problems by dumbing the exercise down here’s the problem, now you are not a hard teacher.

Clients that have been doing Pilates for years aren’t getting their burn. They think they aren’t getting their results. Clients that have been working on their hundreds longer than you’ve been teaching it, don’t get the opportunity to shine in their Pilates skills. Your beginner clients don’t get the burn and classes begin to thin out.

Lets fix this. This post is part 1 of how to fix the problems of the hundreds. I will follow up with future posts to fix the other issues.

Do you have the chutzpah to kill neutral spine? Okay, maybe not kill it but rethink it?

We know, Joseph Pilates was very clear on the matter of neutral spine and now you wanna kill it?

Yes and no, and kind of…

Let me explain.

Neutral spine is an interesting concept. First, as a student teacher this concept has to be taught to you. You have to understand it the way we think Joseph Pilates wanted it taught. You have to practice it yourself in all its pain and glory. Then you have to pass this knowledge onto clients.

Here’s where the problem starts, imparting this knowledge to your students.Your students are all different.

We don’t have the advantage of seeing any MRI’s or X rays on our clients. So we have to assume that we are dealing with a lot of undiagnosed herniations, scoliosis’s, spondylolithesis’s, stenosis’s, and many other conditions inside of what we can see on the outside.

We have to take into account diastasis recti, weight around the middle, heavy or large legs, really long limbs tight upper backs and necks, the list goes on and on.

Neutral spine is not a position to be conquered. It is a position that should be individually assigned for that day, for that exercise for that person.

Your students need to know tuck they need to know arch of the lower back first, the extremes. They need to learn neutral passively first before they experience it with torso flexion and holding leg weight.

Once they know their boundaries of arch and tuck, they can settle in the middle to find their spot for that day.

I call this search pre work. Taking a piece of an exercise and really teaching it so your students understand it on their bodies not your eye.

Teach torso flexion with feet down maybe even holding onto the outer thighs and practice the breath. Practice it in a lower back tuck, arch, and neutral.

Practice the same thing with the head down. Then try with cushion, pillow, or mat under the head. This gives them non- weight bearing flexion which gives them an opportunity to understand the abs and how they react to all three lower back positions. Teach them understand what they are feeling. Let them experience things so they can know what works well for them and what doesn’t.

Most important, repeat this every class for a few weeks because they are coming into class different everytime.

There are also some mat exercises like the hundreds, where teaching in a tuck can be helpful to some students, sometimes especially when you get into the advanced leg lift and lower.

The tuck can help clients to understand how to pull their abs in deeper especially if you add keeping the head down. Once they get the feeling they can slowly intedgrate a more neutral position.

Next post to fixing the problems of the hundreds...Off With Thier Heads. We got into it a little in this post, next we will dive deeper into the concept of holding head weight.