My Pilates Story 2: How I Learned to Love Movement

In part 1 of this post, I told the story of how by the age of 20, I felt totally helpless and disempowered when it came to exercise.

Disappointed adults, unkind PE teachers, and a focus on competitive team sports, left my awkward and uncoordinated self feeling like fitness and physical activities just weren’t meant for people like me.

But happily, that’s not the end of the story – it’s just the beginning.

You see, I’ve always loved music, and I’ve always loved to dance.

Not in the sense of being sent to ballet classes – just flailing about to music for fun when I got the chance. And once I was older, going out to metal clubs and goth nights to flail about to music for fun in a situation where nobody cared if I looked weird (and occasionally, lose my glasses by headbanging too hard – fun times!).

Dancing didn’t count as exercise, in my mind – it was just fun, release, a way to feel alive…

And so it was that I saw an advert in a local newsletter for “Arabic dance” classes, while I was home from university for the summer. Interesting… I had no idea at all of what this involved, except that you didn’t have to dance with a partner or touch anybody (which sounded unbearably, toe-curlingly awkward), and it seemed like it’d be more artistic and creative than the other kinds of dance I’d come across.

Anyway, as soon as I overcame my shyness enough to go along to a class, I was hooked. This was The Thing I’d been waiting for! The music was amazing, the costumes were amazing, and best of all, I felt like I could actually do it!

Was I suddenly no longer the clumsy young person with wonky hand-eye coordination? No – I still got intensly confused about footwork, struggled with balance, and had very un-dancerly posture. It wasn’t easy.

The difference was the attitude of the teachers.

Where school PE teachers had shown me thinly-veiled disappointment, frustration, pity, or sometimes outright contempt, my new dance teachers were incredibly supportive and encouraging.

They saw the beauty in each dancer’s attempts to master the moves, and made us all feel beautiful too, even as they gently corrected us. They genuinely believed that each of us had the capacity to learn new skills.

I came away from each class feeling relaxed, poised, accomplished.

So where does the Pilates actually come in?

When I take up a hobby, I take it seriously (did I mention I’m Autistic?). Before long, Middle Eastern dance had taken over all of my free time, and I was determined to become a solo performer, maybe even a professional dancer one day!

Inevitably at some point there had to be a reckoning, where once again my enthusiasm and love of what I do would run up against the reality that I just wasn’t very strong, fit or coordinated. This point came a few years in when I entered a dance competition, and found myself WAY out of my depth surrounded by professional-level performers.

Talking to one of the judges afterwards, she told me the only way I’d ever be able to be as amazingly graceful and powerful as those other dancers was to go and work hard on my physical fitness. And that just going to lots of dance classes like I’d been doing wasn’t going to cut it unless I backed it up with suitable exercise.

She told me I needed to get myself to a Pilates class ASAP.

I went to my first every Pilates class the following week, and to cut a long story short, since then I’ve never stopped practicing Pilates regularly.

My posture, coordination, balance and strength came on in leaps and bounds, and today you might never guess how clumsy I once seemed (though you can still bamboozle me easily by telling me to do something completely unfamiliar with my arms and legs, as I am reminded of every time I try a new dance style).

The more different Pilates classes and teachers I’ve experienced over the last decade, and the more I’ve learned about the movements and the logic behind them, the more I have come to enjoy and appreciate this system of exercise, and how powerful it is.

So, what made Pilates so different an experience from the school sports and PE that had left me feeling hopeless?

  • As with dancing, the teachers were kind and encouraging, and wanted everyone to benefit from the class & have a good experience
  • It was all about using movement to care for your body and feel better in yourself, instead of competing with others, comparing yourself, or trying to reach some set goal
  • The learning curve was gentle and accessible – Pilates exercises can be modified to create just the right level of challenge for each unique body, and at a beginner level they can be very simple yet still powerful
  • I was generally able to keep up with the classes (and more importantly, never felt that I was being shamed or criticised when I couldn’t)
  • I came away from each class feeling better – energised rather than tired out, and relaxed rather than frustrated

For me, dance was the gateway to enjoying movement again, and it gave me the motivation to even consider exercise as an option! Then it was Pilates which really empowered me to use physical exercise as a way to look after myself.

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.

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 😊

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.