If you desire a more in depth analysis of your postural alignment please don’t hesitate to contact me as I will do my best to accommodate you on my reformer piece of equipment.
One to one classes at mine are at a very reasonable price.
Please contact me on 07769354468 to book your free postural analysis.
Happy new year
Rosemarie Maio
Pilates on the reformer Balanced Body level 2 instructor
PILATES / BTT
Mondays :
Erith leisure centre 9:30 am
Slade centre 11:30 am
Waterfront 7:15 pm
Tuesday :
Coldharbour leisure centre
Btt 10 am
Pilates David Lloyd Kidbrooke 8 pm
Wednesday :
Charlton lido 9:30 am
Nuffield health shell Canary wharf 11:30am
Sidcup leisure 7:15 pm
Thursday :
Nuffield Waterloo shell building 12 pm
Eltham Centre 6:15pm
Charlton lido 8 pm
Friday :
Aerobics Nuffield 1 pm shell Waterloo tbc
So this Sunday clear and wet ‘octobrine’ morning while I was fasting my pace as running slightly late for my balanced body Pilates on the reformer level 2, along the river Thames, I came to a turning past borough market where a stunning tall ship shines in all her glory. I didn’t stop, I couldn’t stop pant pant, running, biting the minutes under my feet when I barely saw and heard a man standing by shouting out loud ‘this Tall ship’s name is ‘The Golden Mile’ !!!
Ha! what a revelation and what a prophet …. I love my Pilates training on the equipment so I ran even faster to get on the reformer just on time and well warmed up! 😉
I am proudly announcing that I am now a Balanced Body Reformer Level 1 instructor 😉 The training at Tranquility has been really empowering and opening up my eyes to new horizons!
My favourite exercise is the mermaid on the reformer. I introduced it today in its full version to my students and we all appreciated the great discovery of one lung breathing while allowing the body to surrender to the figures changing keeping an active core to hold the position in a beautiful upper body extension, lateral flexion and rotation.
It was after a real storm in my life with separation from my ex (thanks goodness!) redundancy from a tedious office job (thanks god!) and being lucky to escape death in a horrible me on the bike- lorry accident, when I miraculously came out with just a ligament of my ankle torn, that I came to ask myself the Question:
‘what did I want to do with my life??’
another crossroad for me to step on a change of direction without looking back! this time I chose to take the direction to love myself and follow my heart, my passion for dance!
Yes! Pilates was the answer and still is, filling my days with great satisfaction!!
Sharing my knowledge of the Pilates method with fully refreshed clients, helping them controlling their bodies with their minds or better, leading them into a healthy lifestyle, with a pain-free back, listening to their own bodies, letting energy flow and recognising ways of communication between the mind and the body just as mother Nature meant our human marvel to function!
Be an Animal with a powerful beautiful mind ❤
Joe Pilates
Learning to be an Animal
There is a happy band of people, of which I am an aspirant member, who are distinguishable anywhere by their springy step and “saved” look from the mass of their contemporaries who shuffle and shamble in untidy corpulence around us. We know that we are saved because we faithfully attend exhausting but exhilarating sessions at the Joseph H. Pilates Universal Gymnasium on Eighth Avenue in midtown Manhattan.
For it is here that Joe Pilates, a white-thatched red-cheeked octogenarian, his wife Clara and Hannah (who came in for a lesson 25 years ago and stayed on) bark their stern commands as we twist and stretch and complain through the exercises forming the core of what Joe, with his Germanic taste for scientific nomenclature, calls Contrology.
Don’t ask me what Contrology is. Don’t ask Joe either, for orderly exposition is not one of his talents. It has something to do with rational tension and relaxation of the muscles, and it comes from a profound knowledge of bodily kinetics begun three quarters of a century ago when Joe as a child in Germany began observing his fellow children at play and animals bounding through the forest. Later, when he was making a living as a boxer and a circus tumbler he began developing a series of exercises to relax him after an exhausting day.
The full principles of Contrology were revealed to him during World War I. His circus was caught traveling in England when the war broke out in 1914, and Joe and all the others were interned in an abandoned hospital on the Isle of Man. Here, as weeks lengthened into months and years, he watched his fellow-prisoners sink into apathy and despair, with nothing to do but stare at the bare crumbling walls of their prison, nothing to break the daily monotony but the inadequate meals (for the German submarine blockade was slowly starving England) and an occasional walk around the bare courtyard with nothing to look at but an occasional starveling cat streaking after a mouse or a bird.
It was the cats which did it. For though they were nothing but skin and bones – even the most animal-loving prisoners could hardly spare them anything from their own pitiful rations when their own children were begging to be fed – they were lithe and springy and terribly efficient as they aimed for their prey. Why were the cats in such good shape, so bright-eyed, while the humans were growing every day paler, weaker, apathetic creatures ready to give up if they caught a cold or fell down and sprained an ankle? The answer came to Joe when he began carefully observing the cats and analyzing their motions for hours at a time. He saw them, when they had nothing else to do, stretching their legs out, stretching, stretching, keeping their muscles limber, alive. He began working out an orderly series of exercises to stretch the human muscles, all the human muscles. He began demonstrating these exercises to the dejected figures around him, and since they had nothing else to do, they began to do the exercises too. Awkwardly and timorously at first, but under his firm supervision they became more and more confident, more and more bouncy, like cats. They ended the war in better shape than when it started, and when the great influenza epidemic came sweeping over all the countries that had fought in the war, not one of them came down with it.
Once free, he came to America because that is the place to be when you have a new idea. He designed and built machines for carefully graduated stretching exercises, he rented a loft, he opened his Universal Gymnasium, up the street from Stillman’s Gym, an institution built to other specifications. Little by little the word got around, people began coming in, people from professions which demand complete and precise control of the whole body, ballet dancers, opera singers, Laurence Olivier, Yehudi Menuhin.
When I came to join this band, he greeted me as he did everybody else. He lay down on his eighty-ear-old back and commanded, “Step on me.” I hesitated. “Don’t be afraid,” he said. “STEP!” Gingerly I put one foot on his belly, one on his chest. “You see,” he said. “It’s easy.”
Later I stood before him in the mandatory black trunks and he poked a scornful finger into my poor bare flesh.
“Typical,” he said in ringing Teutonic tones. “Just like all of them! Americans! They want to go 600 miles an hour, and they don’t know how to walk! Look at them in the street. Bent over!. Coughing! Young men with gray faces! Why can’t they look at the animals? Look at a cat. Look at any animal. The only animal that doesn’t hold its stomach in is the pig. Look at them all out on the sidewalk now, like pigs.
“By exercising your stomach muscles you wring out the body, you don’t catch colds, you don’t get cancer, you don’t get hernias. Do animals get hernias? Do animals go on diets? Eat what you want, drink what you want. I drink a quart of liquor a day, plus some beers, and smoke maybe fifteen cigars.
“And what do Americans do? They play golf, they play baseball, they use half of their muscles, a quarter of their muscles. They get fat, they go jogging, they go on crazy diets, they jump up and down in crazy exercises, they have bad backs, they have beer bellies, they slouch, they complain, they have hernias.
“So, you want to learn how to do better. It’s all up here, in the head. Lie down on the mat. Don’t flop down, go down smoothly, like this, cross the arms, cross the legs. Now, legs in the air! Grab your ankles! Of course you can’t reach them, no American can. All right, grab your calves. Make it your knees. Straight the knees! Bend forward! Now reach! No, you have to think first! Think! Up!”
It may take months to learn exactly which straining set of muscles and tendons is the object of that Up!
In the meanwhile, the neophyte is ever under someone’s scornful eyes or encouraging grunts, learning the Pilates ropes – the varieties of pulls, twists, bends, crouches which he says use 25 percent more muscles than circus acrobatics and fifty or seventyfive percent more than baseball (pfui!) or golf (double-pfui!), No jumping or running, which put unnecessary strain on the heart; in fact, almost everything is done flat on your back or your stomach. No weights (“Do animals lift weights?”) No bulging biceps.- Joe is more interested in muscles that will hold you up up than those that will let you knock another fellow down.
The exercises are graduated and have whimsical names: the Teaser, the Forward Rocking, the Saw, the Hanging.
Looking down from the walls of the gym are paintings, photographs sculptures of Joe, naked or loinclothed: spearfishing at 56, representing the Spirit of Air on the floor of the Nebraska state capitol at 60, skiing at 78. There are also photographs with admiring testimonials (“To the greatest,””to the one and immortal Joe”from distinguished alumni, and photostats of articles from American newspapers documenting the horrors of American posture. Through sweat-filled eyes, as you are upside down on one machine, you might see a famous publisher or producer or anchorperson bent double on another. They are all receiving the full lash of Pilatean philosophy.
“Its’ the stiffness. You must open up the chest more, two inches more. Up! NO! With this muscle” poking a protuberance about his midriff which will never rise on you or me – “straight the knees! Where are you going – like an elephant?”
“Oh Joe,” wails a famous ballerina. “Now you’re calling me an elephant.”
“I wouldn’t insult the elephant. An elephant could walk into this room, and you wouldn’t hear it. An elephant walks delicately. But you – clump, clump, CLUMP! Americans! Baseball players! Joggers! Weight-lifters! No wonder they come to me with arthritis! Ulcers! Animals don’t have ulcers! Animals don’t go on diets! Straight the knees! Out the air!”
So the minutes pass — flipping and wriggling through the Corkscrew, the Jackknife, the Seal. It’s not cheap ($5 a session, which lasts about 45 minutes) but as you go your two or three times a week, the weeks become months, and the abuse becomes scattered with a few congratulatory murmurs. Kindly Clara will admire you new sleekness, gruff Hannah will say, “Well, about time.” Perhaps your head is a little higher in the street, above all the young gray faces. Aches and twinges disappear. A day comes when you are able to swing your ankles neatly into two loops hanging down from a bar way up there, stretch your body, get a firm grip on two upright poles – and climb up. You reach the top with grunts of pleasure and suddenly whoop in terror, “How do I get down?” “The same way you got up.” Down you come, hand under hand, with gasps and moans and a final yell of triumph. In the hush that follows, Joe bellows out his final accolade:
“Now you are an animal”
©1962 Robert Wernick
Sports Illustrated, February 12, 1962
Joe Pilates would have been in his 120’s today (June 22, 2003) if he had not died of smoke inhalation when his house caught on fire, and nothing in the intervening years would have caused him to change his philosophy.
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Nothing is more rewarding than having a group of participants coming to me at the end if the class with idling happy faces, recognising the benefit if the class straightaway. Today at the Eltham centre the comments were : “when are you teaching next !? It’s the first time I manage to keep my balance on one leg thanks to your input on finding a point in front of me…. ” or this class is very good different from the usual boring Pilates classes, you always vary the routine!! And it’s so good to redline that my message goes across in the participants bodies and minds 😉
Joe Pilates looking good at 82, genius, inventor of the Contrology method, stronghold for many coming out of injuries, trying to re strengthen the body by releasing the fear of the pain sending oxygen where it hurts and stretching exercises used as a body mind meditation type to warm muscles and ligaments up, letting the oxygenated blood flow where it most hurts !!! It WORKS
Mobility PILATES 
