My Pilates Story part 1: Why I Hated Exercise for the First 20 Years of My Life

I never expected to become a fitness professional.

You might guess that since I’m a Pilates instructor, I’ve probably always been a sporty, fitness-loving kind of person.

But the reality is… a bit different.

I’m sharing my story here because I think it’s actually a pretty common one, that many of you will relate to. And it reflects some kind of messed up views about physical activity that our society holds, which these days, I am on a mission to change!

How it started…

As a small child, I loved to move!

Running around, climbing on playgrounds and swinging on swings, riding bikes, swimming, rollerskating… All of these things were Very Exciting for little me. And the thought that they were “exercise” never crossed my mind – they were fun!

But then, PE lessons happened.

And to be fair, they started off kind of fun, too. Frolicking around chaotically, and sometimes getting to climb on stuff or jump on a springboard? Brilliant.

The thing is, I wasn’t ever very good at the activities.

Enthusiastic, yes. Skilful? No. I was a clumsy, uncoordinated kid, and it probably didn’t help that nobody had realised yet that I needed glasses (or indeed that I’m Autistic, which nobody worked out until I was in my 30s!). But I was still blissfully unaware of this, and I was enjoying myself.

That was, until I reached the kind of age where adults started to expect a bit more. Like, playing proper sports with actual rules, where people care about who wins. Or earning graded badges in things like gymastics and swimming, that used to be “just for fun”.

This was when it began to slowly dawn on me that I was not good at the activities I enjoyed – and that being good at them mattered to people. I started to notice that teachers were frustrated that I wasn’t better at things – or worse, angry with me because they didn’t believe I was really trying.

Feelings of shame and disappointment crept in.

Why couldn’t I just do the things, like skipping or catching a ball, that every else found easy? Why did the image I had of myself as strong and capable keep colliding with reality in such an embarrasing way?

And with the move to secondary school, things only got worse.

There were team sports, loads of them, which I was hopeless at. There was, for some reason, a cross-country run that we were expected to do once per year but were never trained for. And worst of all, there was the dreaded beep test.

There were some brighter moments too – all-too-brief periods of getting to do things like trampolining or dance, where it was still OK to let off a bit of steam without pressure to be any good or win anything – but they were few and far between.

The effect all this had on me and my equally-unsporty peers was a kind of learned helplessness when it came to exercise.

We were bad at sports, picked last for teams, and mostly ignored by PE teachers except to yell at us for not trying hard enough, and it just didn’t seem like something we could get better at. We were unfit, as our burning lungs during the beep test made painfully clear, but that didn’t seem like something it was within our power to change either, just an unfortunate fact of life.

By the time I left school, “excercise” to me had come to mean a combination of suffering and embarrassment

The desire to move was still there – I walked and cycled to get about, and was still up for physical activities, as long as it didn’t ever occur to me to think of them as exercise or sport (is going out to metal clubs and headbanging to Iron Maiden a sport? Opinions may differ…). But the world of exercise was distant and frightening, somewhere I didn’t feel I belonged at all.

Fitness, exercise, gyms, sports, running… Deep down I felt that those kinds of things must just be for a completely different kind of person. A fitness-y person – practically a different species! Not a person like me, with terrible posture, flaily limbs, and the reflexive urge to duck and hide at the sound of a ball being kicked.

Looking back, it’s pretty clear what went wrong

Somehow, the idea that absolutely everyone could get better at physical skills through consistent focused practise, or improve their fitness with a sensible training programme that didn’t have to be painful and miserable, was missing from my early experiences. And also missing from our wider culture at the time.

The opportunities to practice and improve and feel a sense of achievement doing something physical, if you weren’t already good at it and likely to win prizes, were missing.

And the idea that you could get to know your body and learn to move more skilfully just for its own sake – to feel better and move better and hurt yourself less often – was nowhere to be found at all.

But I found a better way, eventually

In part 2 of this post, I’ll be talking about how I went from fear and helplessness around fitness, to where I am now: a Pilates instructor, professional dancer, and someone who against all odds, genuinely enjoys running and strength training 😊

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Have you also felt disempowered and helpless when it comes to your own fitness, or as if exercise and gyms aren’t meant for “people like you”?

Do you want to get moving and build a better relationship with your body, but aren’t sure where to even start?

Well, I’m a Pilates instructor who has been there, and gets it. My classes are shame-free, non-judgemental, and an opportunity to explore movement at your own pace without pressure. Whether in a group, or with the detailed support and guidance that I can offer one-to-one.

Find out more about my classes and one-to-one sessions in Levenshulme, South Manchester.