MEET OUR INSTRUCTORS: Kerstin

 

Breathe Pilates is kicking off 2016 with a series of candid interviews with our instructors as we get to know them better! Starting off this series, we have Kerstin whose Reformer and Tower I class was recently awarded ‘BEST BEGINNER FRIENDLY REFORMER CLASS” by Shape Sports Award 2016.

Hi Kerstin! Tell us more about your background. What inspired to become a Pilates Instructor? 

I’m originally from a small place in Germany called Gladbeck. My professional background is in nursing and I have practiced as a specialized nurse for intensive care and anesthesia for quite a long time. What got me started in Pilates was due to my involvement in sports such as volleyball, skiing, running etc. About 10 years ago my husband and I had the opportunity to live and work in India for a few years. It was there that I fell in love with pilates and quickly became a regular with a 2-3 per week routine.

My love of pilates was noticed by the owner of the studio who suggested that I became an instructor. I jumped at the opportunity immediately and in early 2009, did my trainer certification before heading back to Germany.

Tell us more about your career as a Pilates Instructor and how did you get to where you are now? 

While back in Germany, I was teaching Pilates while working as a nurse at a hospital. But I decided to take the plunge to become a full-time Pilates teacher when I relocated to Singapore 4 years ago. I found an interest in learning more about Pilates, specifically with regards to post rehab, manual therapy and the requirements for injuries and special populations. That’s probably the reason why a large percentage of my current clients come after rehab or with pre-existing issues.

Being able to make even a slight difference in their health and recovery greatly satisfies me. As for new clients, I am excited when I am able to introduce them to Pilates and show them how to control certain muscles that they hardly utilize. Simply put, I hope to make a difference to an individual’s health and recovery.

What would your advice be to new clients just starting out on their Pilates Journey?

Firstly, I believe that it is important for new clients to get a good foundation in terms of core strength, coordination and body awareness. My advise to new clients is to try and stick to one trainer in the beginning as consistent education in terms of teaching style and understanding each other. Having a consistent education more often than not will get people to a good level of Pilates faster.

Once the client have a good basic foundation, they can definitely branch out and perhaps try other types of Pilates to complement their existing classes or interests.

Secondly, having a realistic and clear expectation often helps. Pilates is not a typical gym strength training regime. It is about body awareness, posture, core strength and not purely about muscle growth. That doesn’t mean that it cannot be very challenging as many other can attest to.

Lastly, be patient with yourself. It is a journey and not a race. If the exercise is consistent and focused, the results will come.

Describe your perfect weekend in Singapore! 

That’s actually quite easy. A bit of relaxing by the pool together with some sports with my husband and good food. My husband runs ultra-marathons and I love to accompany him on his training runs with a mountain bike or inline skates. Food here is really delicious and there a weekend can’t be considered good without eating well!

You are in great shape! What is your personal exercise regime like? 

It is actually slightly unstructured but I like to throw in quick Pilates session for myself in between classes. I also get a bit of a workout during my own classes because I actually do something like a “dry training” with the clients; for example, when I tell them to squeeze their glutes for a specific exercise, I will squeeze mine as well. You can burn quite a bit of energy participating in a class like that. This can burn quite a fair bit of energy participating in classes like that. End of last year, I also started yoga and try to get some cardio workouts at the gym when time permits.

What are your favourite restaurants and bars in Singapore? 

My husband and I love exploring local hawker centers, with probably the one at Old Airport Road being the favorite so far. On the other hand we also love trying new restaurants. What I like most are places with a cozy atmosphere, good service, and hearty food that’s not entirely over the top. A restaurant that I like going back to is Senso, a lovely Italian restaurant close to Chinatown. But I’m as happy with a bit of Mexican grub and a frozen Margarita at Cha Cha Cha in Holland Village. Both my husband and I love al fresco dining so all my favorite hangouts need to at least have the mentioned!

What are your hopes and dreams for the future – Where do you see yourself in five years? 

I very much enjoy what I’m doing right now, and I love living in Singapore. So, there is actually not that much that I’d like to change in the near future. What I’d like to do instead is to simply try and learn more about Pilates and continuously become better as a teacher. Besides that, I’d only love for us to stay heathy.

 

February 1, 2016February 1, 2016 by breathepilatesstudio Categories: InterviewTags: breathe pilates, breathe team, german pilates instructor, interview, kerstin vieth, pilates, pilates instructor, pilates singapore Leave a comment

Client Conversations: Yi Peng

It’s been awhile since our last client conversation and this month we speak to Yi Peng. Apart from his day job in the finance sector, Yi Peng is also a bike racer and a member of an elite amateur cycling team, the Specialised Mavericks, that competes in races across Southeast Asia! We speak to him about how he discovered Pilates and how it has helped him in his biking.

1. How did you first encounter Pilates

I was introduced to Pilates by my girlfriend, initially to help relieve some chronic neck and shoulder pain due to an separated shoulder sustained when I was a teenager. Apart from helping with the pain relief, I found that Pilates had a positive impact on my performance on a bike as well, and have incorporated as a key element of my training schedule.

2. How did you find Pilates help you with your sport

There are several ways that Pilates helps with bike riding and racing.

Firstly, my position on a road bike is pretty hunched over. Spending hours in this position puts significant strain on my neck, shoulders and back, and regular Pilates sessions have been very helpful in releasing tight muscles and relieving these effects.

Flexibility and strength are other areas where Pilates has had an effect; by improving the flexibility of my hamstrings and hip flexors, I am now able to get into a more aerodynamic yet comfortable position on my bike, which has had a tremendous impact on my performance.

As for strength, like most sports, a cyclist’s power starts with his/her core, and regular Pilates sessions have helped me learn to engage my core more effectively and recruit other large muscle groups such as the glutes to generate more power on the bike.

Finally, sometimes on really tough training weeks, my muscles are shot from the riding, and instead of working on strength, I spend the session working on myofascial release. This is a fantastic tool for recovery which allows me to train harder than I have in the past.

3. What is your training schedule like

Well, unfortunately (or fortunately), I’m not a professional cyclist, so I spend a significant amount of time at work, sitting at a desk or on a plane. I do most of my training before dawn on the weekdays, with a couple sessions of core work on weeknights including Pilates once a week. Weekends are when I do long rides with my team, or if there’s a race we’ll travel to the races as a team. Mondays are almost always a rest or recovery ride day.

August 8, 2015August 8, 2015 by breathepilatesstudio Categories: About Pilates, Exercise, Health, InterviewTags: benefit of pilates, cycle, cyclist, endurance, men's pilates, pilates, sports, triatheletes Leave a comment

Flexibility vs Hypermobility

After each yoga class, I inevitably get a few comments from either instructors or my classmates going “Wow, you’re so flexible”.

(this was what we use to do before ballet)

While flexibility and hypermobility may be everyone’s goal – and I do get a lot of questions about how I am so flexible, I’m here to tell you the the story from the other side.

I’ve always been hypermobile my whole life, and I did choose the word hypermobile instead of flexible. I can bend my fingers backwards till they are parallel to my wrist. I’ve always been able to bring my legs over my head since I was young, do over splits, back bends and what not. On the Beighton score of hyperlaxity I score a perfect 9. While it was fun at first, what it has resulted in are a lot of injuries and pains.

What then is the difference between hypermobility and flexibility? Flexbility refers to muscles and fascia while hypermobility refers to ligaments. A muscle is a contractile tissue which cross over one or more joints in your body. When a muscle contracts, it exerts a pulling force on the bones to which it attaches. Ligaments, on the other hand, are short bands of fibrous connective tissue which connect bone-to-bone and act as “seat belts” to hold our joints together. Unlike muscles, ligaments don’t contract, generate force or create movement in the body. They stabilize our joints if our body moves in a way that could otherwise take a joint beyond it’s normal range of motion.

When we stretch, our intention should be to elongate our muscles and not our ligaments. When muscles stretch, they return to their original length after the stretch is released – a tissue property called elasticity. But when ligaments stretch, they behave elastically during just the first tiny bit of the stretch, and if they’re stretched beyond that point, they will permanently stay at that new length and are referred to as lax. Lax ligaments can no longer stabilize our joints for us and are a source of chronic pain and injury for many people.

The worse part for someone with hypermobility is that our bodies often like to take the path of least resistance. So if someone with lax ligaments attempt to stretch their actual muscles, their body will sneakily rearrange itself into familiar hypermobility, passing the intended muscle stretch and loading the ligaments instead.  Breaking this cycle requires body awareness and willingness to take a step back. In reality someone who is hypermobile can actually have very tight muscles as they have always been achieving range with ligament laxity instead of actual muscle length.

(An example of a dyanmic stretch done on the reformer)

Pilates has been great in helping me deal with hyperlaxity with it’s focus on dynamic/loaded stretches instead of passive/static ones. With dynamic stretches, there is resistance against the stretch, forcing me to activate my muscles instead of just letting it all hang out in my joints.

Taking this concept of flexibility and hypermobility this to my yoga practice and ballet classes was definitely a lot more challenging. It required tons of body awareness as well as the willingness to leave my ego at the door. Also try explaining to your ballet teacher why your extensions fell a good 50%  in height or explaining to your yoga teacher that you just didn’t want to do backbends because of the lumbar instability you were having.

(she may be smiling but my teacher and I most definitely weren’t when my extension derriere was at this height)

It was occasionally frustrating to say the least because it was so much easier to just DO THE POSES AND MOVES while reverting to my bad habits. It took discipline, control, patience and humility to work on true flexibility instead of relying solely on my hypermobility.

November 7, 2014 by breathepilatesstudio Categories: About Pilates, Exercise, Health, InterviewTags: ballet, barre, flexibility, hypermobility, orthopedics, physiotherapy, pilates, stretches, yoga 1 Comment

My experience with Pilates

I was first introduced to Pilates about 8 years ago by my ballet teacher. When I meet other Pilates aficionados I am always curious as to what made them first start and why they continued.

For me it was a niggling back pain that first started in my teenage years and the desire to improve my ballet. Pilates is fairly popular throughout the dance world and though I did not realize it, I had been exposed to Pilates exercises since I was a little girl during ballet class.

I started doing studio Pilates about 8 years ago. Since then, I have had a whole host of physical benefits, such as the disappearance of my back pain, increased core strength, shoulder girdle organization and pelvic and leg alignment. But the favorite thing for me was the lack of pressure and the lack of perfection. In ballet it was all about perfection, and the constant pressure and stress to attain it at all cost. To come to Pilates and to learn about my body type, its limitations, and to be accepted and even celebrated for our differences was delightful. And strangely enough, doing Pilates helped me to enjoy dance a lot more and achieve much more than before I did Pilates.

You’ll probably be surprised but biomechanics and the moving anatomy was not a huge part of medical school. Pilates really helped me put it altogether and definitely helped with medical school. It offered me a clearer insight into the body and a greater appreciation for it. It also lit the interest in sports medicine for me.

Having done it for a good 5 years, I was not satisfied with merely knowing the repertoire, I wanted to know more, to understand more and so I decided to pursue Pilates Instructor Training. I was offered the opportunity to teach after I finish my training and started to discover that I really love working with individuals to help them achieve their goals and to learn, understand and appreciate their body. When my students are able to translate what they learn into real life and achieve efficiency in their movements, it really shows me just how wonderful Pilates is.

The human body is a marvelous thing and Pilates has taught me how to respect it. So what is the story between you and Pilates?

May 19, 2014May 19, 2014 by breathepilatesstudio Categories: About Pilates, Exercise, InterviewTags: dance, exercise, experience, interview, pilates 3 Comments

Client Conversations: Germaine

This month we speak to Germaine! She first joined Breathe as a preggie belly and has since delivered a lovely baby girl. She’s now back in the Mums & Bubs class. We speak to her about how Pilates has helped her pregnancy and delivery and why she came back after!

 

1) How did you first encounter Pilates
Breathe Pilates was my first experience with the reformer. I tried a couple of matwork group classes in previous years – once during my uni days, and once a couple of years ago when my colleagues engaged a trainer for lunchtime group exercise sessions – but didn’t particularly enjoy them.

2) How did Pilates help during your pregnancy and delivery
I have a wonky back due to mild scoliosis, diagnosed when I was a child but deemed too mild to require treatment. I was also that kid who consistently failed the sit-and-reach component of the annual fitness test.

When I was pregnant my ob-gyn advised me to tone down my regular gym routine, and almost immediately I started developing aches and pains in my lower back. Prenatal Pilates kept my backaches manageable, and also helped me build strength and improve my flexibility – which was great for carrying the extra weight and dealing with my ever-shifting centre of gravity. Being in a class full of fellow preggos was also great for morale. At my gym I was the elephant in the room, but at Breathe’s Preggi Bellies class, everyone’s lumbering about in the same boat!

I had an epidural-assisted delivery because I’m quite pathetic when it comes to pain. And when you’re numb from the waist down, it definitely helps to have strong core muscles that remember how to engage even when you can’t quite feel them.

3) What made you decide to come back for post natal and how has it benefited you?

My daughter is now just over three months old; it’s a really cute age, but she’s getting hefty and constantly demanding to be carried. Every day I bend down and pick her up dozens of times, and that gets pretty hard on my (still-wonky) back.

Right now, Pilates isn’t my only regular exercise since I’m able to go back to the gym. But unlike strength training and cardio, which mostly leave me feeling exhausted, after each postnatal Pilates session I feel both looser and stronger, and more energised on the whole. It’s a constant amazement to me that such small and controlled motions can have such a huge effect on my physical well-being.

 

May 9, 2014 by breathepilatesstudio Categories: About Pilates, Interview, Prenatal PilatesTags: babies, mums, pilates, postnatal, pregnancy, prenatal Leave a comment

Client Conversations : Kirsten

Kirsten is one of our most regular clients and comes for classes 3 times a week rain or shine! Mother to four sons, three of whom are triplets, and founding partner of creative agency, The Local, we speak to this superwoman about her experience with Pilates.

How long have you been doing Pilates and what led you to it?

After a career hunched over a computer and a triplet pregnancy, my back and core were not in a good way. I was searching for a miracle and Pilates happened to be just that! But it wasn’t my first port of call; I had spent time trying other exercise fads which, while great for fitness and tone, unfortunately exacerbated my misalignments. I spoke to a physiotherapist a year ago, who asked me if I’d tried working out on a Pilates reformer. I contacted Breathe Pilates, where I booked my first lesson, and I haven’t looked back since.

How has Pilates benefited you?

My posture is greatly improved, I have much less neck, back and head aches and with tailored exercises, I’m toning muscles I never knew I had! Every session is unique, which eliminates the chance of boredom but also enhances total body awareness, helping me avoid slipping back into old habits in daily life. After a Breathe Pilates class I literally feel an inch taller – and I’m regaining the sort of strength and flexibility that makes me feel a decade younger.

What do you love best about Breathe Pilates?

I feel fantastic after every lesson, both physically and mentally which is testament to great teachers and a conducive environment

February 26, 2014February 26, 2014 by breathepilatesstudio Categories: About Pilates, InterviewTags: clients, interview, pilates Leave a comment