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Pilates Perspectives
Pilates Perspectives is your guide to how Pilates fits into real life, no matter your experience level. We unpack the method’s many approaches and history, where it sits in today’s wellness landscape, and simple ways to apply it day to day. Episodes range from building community through movement to using Pilates in physical therapy and rehab. We also explore timely topics, including education standards, diversity expansion across the field, and embracing Pilates as a lifestyle that supports both body and mind.
You’ll hear from seasoned teachers, clinicians, and thought leaders who share firsthand experience and evidence-informed insights; useful for curious beginners and long-time pros alike. Our aim is to offer practical knowledge, foster inclusivity, and widen perspectives so the practice continues to evolve for everyone.
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Pilates Perspectives
Pilates as a Lifestyle [Zoom]
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Pilates is more than a workout; it’s a path to better health, holistic wellness, and a more meaningful life. In this inspiring episode, Dr. Brent Anderson, Founder of Polestar Pilates, joins us to explore the Pilates method as a lifestyle rooted in the integration of mind, body, and spirit. Joy and Brent discuss the movement philosophy behind the original Pilates method, the importance of functional movement so we can fully participate in life, and Joseph Pilates’ powerful belief that a deeper mind-body connection could help “cure the world of its ills.”
Dr. Anderson also shares a refreshing perspective on Pilates exercises as “deconstructed play,” bringing levity, curiosity, and joy back into physical activity. You’ll hear expert insight on why hope is essential for rehabilitation, healing, and better health outcomes, along with thoughtful reflections on the balance of work, play, and rest.
This episode is a must-listen for Pilates instructors, fitness professionals, and anyone interested in holistic health and the deeper purpose of movement. Tune in to discover how mindful movement can support physical wellbeing, emotional resilience, and a stronger connection to self, nature, humanity, and a higher power.
This episode is powered by Balanced Body®.
Hello and welcome to Pilates Perspectives. This is Joy, and today we have Brent Anderson on to discuss Pilates as a lifestyle. But first, let's check in. As children, play is an integral part of our lives. But as we age, we become less and less likely to just take time to simply play. So today, I'd like for you to take a moment and think about the last time you played. Was it recent? What was it like? Is it a challenge to remember? Now, play may or may not be part of your life right now. Think on that for a moment as we take in a few breaths. Just three to five breaths. Slowly inhaling for three to four and exhaling for four, maybe five beats. Now, regardless of your answer, I'd like you to take a moment to think about play as you're breathing and your relationship to it. Is it something you'd like to change? When you think about play, do you think of movement, of fun, of imagination? What is one aspect of your life where you could incorporate play? Also, think about what play means. I think we think we have to be out on a jungle gym somewhere, or we have to be tossing ourselves around in a field. But play is any time where you're just enjoying unabashed joy. So, how can you incorporate play and laughter and fun in your life? Okay, thank you for taking that time. Today we have on Brent Anderson, founder and president of Polestar Pilates, a leading provider of Pilates education, known for a science-forward approach to moving principles. Brent bridges the gap between medical and allied health care. He's a certified Pilates instructor, physical therapist, an orthopedic certified specialist. And we have him on today to talk about how Pilates and play and the integration of the two can enrich our lives. You can find Brent on dr Brentanderson.com or at PolstarPilates.com or on his weekly Thursday webinar, the Pilates Hour. So let's get started. All right. So we're talking today with Brent Anderson. Uh, and he is coming to us from his retreat center in uh North Carolina. And uh I get the added benefit of that looking at him, and behind him is the beautiful scenery of the forest he just described behind him. Brent, welcome to Pilates Perspectives. It's so nice to have you.
SPEAKER_00Thank you, Joy. It's good to be with you.
SPEAKER_02Um, Brent, I have been so looking forward to this. And because I'm looking forward to it, and because you are who you are, I find myself thinking of like, where do I want to begin? So I'm actually happy to have had you begin sort of describing your current surroundings. Uh, because I feel like your current surroundings uh are the metaphor for your your growth, your change over these number of years in the Pilates industry. Uh, and you've you've ended up in a beautiful, serene place that of uh, you know, that really just brings out the best in you.
SPEAKER_00You know, when it was 2018, um it was interesting that just where we were in the industry and things were booming, it was all pre-COVID. Uh we were, you know, still growing, but it was like a nice growing time in 2018. But I had come up to work on my book that now has since been published. And uh Lizette, my son, Gabriel, who helps out a lot with anything uh digital, technical, musical, or strategy with Polestar, uh lives up here in the Carborough Chapel Hill area. And so I'd come up here and took a couple weeks off to write the book. And in my my own attention deficit at times, I was walking around the community and I found a real estate uh agency in called Weaver Street Realty. And uh they said they had a massage therapy school in the country for a sale. And I'm like, oh, that sounds like something I have to do right now instead of writing my book.
SPEAKER_02Right. You found you found a thousand other things to keep you occupied, right? I understand.
SPEAKER_00I drove a half-hour drive. Uh-huh. I saw the property and they were ringing the bell, and people were coming in from the woods and the pond and the gazebos and coming back into their massage therapy class, and I just thought, this is, you know, too beautiful to be real. And I sort of snuck around and I looked at things and um fell in love with the property. And I went back to the real estate agent and I said, Hey, what's the deal on this property? Like Lizette and I had no intentions of moving from Miami. Like, we feel very blessed.
SPEAKER_02I never thought you would have left Miami.
SPEAKER_00Teaching at the universities and the center and our flagship studio. I mean, it just didn't make any sense. But I had gone there and the real estate agent said, You know, don't waste your time, Brent. I've I've brought five people with cash in hand and they've said no to all of them. So now it's like, so you're challenging me, are you? So, you know, it's like so I call Lizzette, my wife, and Lisette flies up and we walk around and um become very emotionally attached to the property. And what was interesting is the couple that owned the property were very somatic uh in everything they do somatic movement, massage therapy, body work. They even had like a geofeng shui of the full 150 acres.
SPEAKER_02What is that geofeng shui?
SPEAKER_00It's like uh we we have a drawing of this person that had come in and drawn the property. And you know how you would look like an elevation map?
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Hiking in the mountains, right? And you would see where the high and the low and where the waterways are. It's very much like that, but it is based on the energy that this person felt, and that there was this vortex on the property that is this 200-plus-year-old oak tree that still stands and is just gorgeous. And we found ourselves stuck there for a while. Like we didn't even know an hour had gone by, and we'd been sitting by this tree looking at the pond, and I say pond, it's a very, very big pond, um, and looking just sort of around. And then we met with the owners, and uh, when we met with the owners, there were no real estate agents with us. So we met with them in their house and we had some tea with them. And it was crazy that like two weeks later, we're just thinking, like, there's no way. I mean, we're not gonna move from Miami. Lisette was finishing up her master's degree in architecture at uh Florida uh International University, and we get a call from them. Now, here's the you know, we talk about serendipity and um even even dare to go into the word spirituality of just feeling something so deeply. But Lisette and I had been talking a lot about stewardship. And it's a it's a word that doesn't get used very much, you know. But the the lessons that we were reading and studying was you don't own the house, you don't own the land. The land has been there for millions of years, it's going to be there for millions of years more. You just happen to be the steward of it for a little while. How do you treat the land? How do you treat, you know, the stewardship of being a parent or a child at that time with our parents that were um getting older? And this guy calls up and he says, Brent Lazette, Carrie and I think that you two should be the next stewards of this land.
SPEAKER_02No way, that's crazy. So here they had two cash offers in hand, right? And here you show up, you spend a little time under the tree, the vortex of right, and you commune together. And here it is.
SPEAKER_00We were grilled like you fantastic. And we both just had that. Lisette was going to Italy for four months to finish her master's thesis in architecture. I got the house ready, sold the house, we moved up, and you know, this is the very end of 2018, beginning of 2019. So we're still wondering why. Yeah, and what happened in 2020. And we're in heaven.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00You know, we're building a chicken coop and you know, during COVID and not having to worry about all the things that we would have had to worry about being down in Miami. And so many things fell into place. And so we're still in that area where, you know, it takes care of itself. We have so many pole star events, we have, you know, like some yoga retreats and some corporate things that come and we donate the space for some community activities. Um, but we're still feeling out like what is the real purpose of us being here? I we know we're supposed to be here. We just are still trying to figure out exactly why. And now, you know, seven years later, we have two goats. By the way, our house is on the same 150 acres, so it's another 20 plus acres with its own pond on the same that was their house. And we have two goats and two big Pyrenees puppies that are huge, um, and the chickens. And so we have our own eggs and we laugh every day that we go out and see these puppies and these goats.
SPEAKER_02Right.
SPEAKER_00That uh you know, just complete reality check.
SPEAKER_02How different, how different from Miami and how different city slickers.
SPEAKER_00I mean, Lizette's in New Yorker, and I'm from the Bay Area and LA.
SPEAKER_02Uh Sacramento, which is one of the things we'll get into here for sure. Yeah. Um, no, that's that's uh that's actually a fantastic story, sort of how you find yourself there and and finding your purpose there. I think um as I've I've witnessed your your arc um from you know the early 2000s to now, like it it's a it's a perfect setting for you for sure. Um so let's talk about those early days, Brent. Let's go, let's let's talk about Pilates and you know, this is Pilates perspectives, and let's give people some sense of the history that like uh sort of our are it it's it's not the distant history, but it certainly is the history that has given rise and supports where Pilates is today. Um and you were there right from the beginning, uh uh even before the trademark lawsuit, right? And you, Ken, Elizabeth, can you know start talking about the need for education? What made you even go down the road of education?
SPEAKER_00You know, that's such a good place to start. Um, I was in physical therapy school at UC San Francisco. And I was an amateur dancer at best, but I still danced and I was still taking ballet class just to maintain some sanity in San Francisco. And Ms. Granger, the ballet teacher, said, Hey, you know, St. Francis Hospital, so this is 1987, 1988. Uh St. Francis Hospital has a dance medicine program that you might be interested in. I said, Oh, that's very interesting. She goes, Yeah, they they teach something called pilates. And I think you would be really interested in it. So I very quickly um went to St. Francis and I met Patrice Whiteside and Elizabeth Larkam. And uh, and then um Dr. James Garrick and saw this beautiful dance medicine center with all this equipment. And I asked about pilates. And of course, I got corrected very quickly by Elizabeth.
SPEAKER_02I was gonna ask you who's the person who corrected it. Yeah, who corrected the pronunciation?
SPEAKER_00She was very gentle with me until she put me on the reformer. Like one of the first exercises she taught me was doing like a reverse swan with my pubic bone on the box and my feet on the footbar. Uh-huh. Um, that was a very humbling uh first exercise, but I I grinned and beared it and I went through it and earned my my place there to be able to, you know, be considered somebody who was serious about learning Pilates.
SPEAKER_02How long were you there?
SPEAKER_00Uh, you know, I finished all the training that I had done there that we had at St. Francis. Um, so I think it was '89 or '90 that I had finished the certification, whatever that sort of looked like, you know, and I think that was Elizabeth's doing to really try to have something that that was always Elizabeth's drive, was to have something that was more evidence-based. And I do think that was the attraction between the two of us was that I was very interested in evidence-based, and I brought uh a rehabilitative component to it of what I was interested in very early. Uh, and I think that was really the catalyst. Now, Kenny became part of this like immediately. Uh we realized that we needed to be able to provide an education and something that was more evidence-based.
SPEAKER_02So, can I can I just ask you a question there? Uh, because the St. Francis time I find really interesting on the West Coast here, how you know, I I came from the East Coast, right? Um, from the West Coast, how organically it grew out of um St. Francis, really.
SPEAKER_00Um we had people like um, you know, we we we sort of brought everybody in as far as Alan Herdman and Ron Fletcher, and uh we we fell in love with Eve Gentry and spent quite a bit of time with Eve. Uh, we brought uh Romana and Corolla to California. I think that was down with Marido Say Blum, and I'm trying to remember Marijo Say Blum's partner at the time. Um and so we got exposure to a lot of the founding elders and still had a very contemporary sort of West Coast kind of vibe of how we used it with our dancers.
SPEAKER_02So when we thought it was really just for dancers, like so you're kind of like the Pilates hippies.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00I used to have hair.
SPEAKER_02Well, and let me let me think through that a little bit. But really, you were you were you were really experimental in a lot of ways and very eclectic in the information that you were gathering at the time.
SPEAKER_00What we realized right off the bat, Joy, was that each of these elders that we had a chance to meet with or to study with or to take a class with or hear them teach, we were looking for the commonalities.
SPEAKER_02Perfect. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And and I think that was for whatever reason, that was very inspired so early on in the industry. And it's where we derived the principles of movement from very early on. Uh, by 1995, we were teaching principles. And, you know, it wasn't just repertoire.
SPEAKER_02Right.
SPEAKER_00And everybody else, like wherever we would go, I would come back and I would have these sheets filled with stick figures of repertoire.
SPEAKER_02Okay, could you okay, could you just say that for our audience who's now used to manuals? How did you learn?
SPEAKER_01So spoiled.
SPEAKER_02Uh well, because you know, you you you used to walk 10 miles to school and right in the snow.
SPEAKER_00Up fell both ways in the snow with no shoes on. Um, yeah, I mean, you would go and you had an authoritative setting. The authority would be demonstrating the teaching skills, you would watch them, you eventually earned the right to be able to help them, to assist them. Uh, very, you know, and if you think of it, it came from very much in the dance world, the martial arts world, uh also has that kind of um evolution of being somebody that's the authority. And we were looking at it from a different viewpoint, and I think that uh, and I I'll let Elizabeth speak for herself, but I really wanted to have um something that always had the body-mind spirit. Like I fell in love with the philosophy of the method way before I fell in love with the amazing uh repertoire. And, you know, maybe part of that, if you go back far enough in my life, I was uh missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ, Latter-day Saints for two years in Spain. Um, was always interested in the spiritual side of things, but not in the, not necessarily in the religious side. I was more interested in what you feel, how the body, mind, spirit. So when I was reading or listening to or hearing like Eve Gentry's story or hearing Romana's stories, or now we've heard everybody's story, you know, I'm I'm most interested in the philosophy of the contrology continuing on and being maintained. Like I think when we get too focused on the repertoire, we lose sight of a sound body is capable of allowing the mind to be able to reach its potential.
SPEAKER_02So I'd love to touch on two things that you were talking about. One, um, let's your principles of movement and and the looking for the commonality. Uh, and two, is the philosophy. Uh, let's start with the philosophy. What if if you could say what the philosophy is or distill it down, how would you categorize the philosophy that is Pilates?
SPEAKER_00You know, Joseph thought that he had the solution to the ills of the world. You know, when you read his book, Return to Life, if you read the Contrology Method, it was that people that had uh the a body that could participate fully in life would be more likely to have a sound mind. Now he continued on talking about not just movement, but he talked about nutrition, sleep hygiene, nature, being out in the sunshine, being out uh, you know, where you get fresh air. And then he talked about a balancing of stressors of work, play, and rest. And I think looking at those nine variables that were so fundamental to Joe and whether he practiced them or not, you know, there's people that saying, oh, I don't know that he did those things, but I mean he wrote about them and he talked about them. And he did go, you know, out of the city to be able to get fresh air as often as he could. He did, you know, exercise himself and he kept himself fit. I don't know about his nutrition or sleeping habits because I wasn't around. But I think that now when you look at modern day medicine and particularly wellness and health promotion, these are not only important, these are the key elements of dealing with things like autoimmune diseases, dealing with cardiovascular and metabolic disorders and obesity, dealing with mental health of depression and anxiety. It was interesting, this particular psychologist from NYU made the point that the best cure is deconstructed play. Like take the digital devices away and go out and play outside. Like the risk of being kidnapped is so much less than the risk of the phone.
SPEAKER_02I'm not really laughing for those of you out there.
SPEAKER_00You know, so uh this is where you talk about the philosophy. To me, like Joe really had something. And the idea was that the having a healthy body was fundamental to be able to have a healthy mind and a healthy spirit. Yes. And to me, when I define spirit from the Pilates perspective, to me, it's connectivity. It's connection, it's connection to humanity, it's connection to nature, it's connection to source. For me, that's God. For you, it could be something else, but it's connectivity, right?
SPEAKER_02Connection to self too, right?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, absolutely. And you know, mental is being able to be present. And I remember Ron Fletcher saying something, he goes, you know, when you're doing short spine, you shouldn't be thinking about anything else but short spine. You know, it's like, um and and that also resonated with me. It's like meditation is having singleness of thought. In a good Pilates class, that somebody is really experiencing internal feedback mechanisms in their movement experience are very present.
SPEAKER_02Yes, very strong meditation. Uh, you know, uh Pilates is a you know, let's let's just put an exclamation point here. I know I was uh not chuckling uh earlier in a in sort of a negative way. I was chuckling. Because this idea of being present is so necessary today, because it's very easy to think that, well, this is a this has an element of fitness to it. This you could, you know, Pilates classes are now being done to music. They're they're being done in large groups, but you can still keep that sense of presence regardless of your environment. Right. And the sense of play. I I you know, when you watch, have you ever have you had young kids come into your studio?
SPEAKER_00Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_02Right. And the minute they hop on the equipment, do you have to even tell them what to do?
SPEAKER_00I mean, we joke about it, but in our house, our kids were conceived, born, and raised on the Pilates Trapeze table. You know, it's like it's been such a part of every family, every kid, any cousins coming to the house, it's just a piece of furniture that they're going to play with. Right. It's like they do. They know how to swing. It's like an adult on it. They know how to swing on the straps. You hope they don't let go of the tower bar with somebody standing over it with their teeth. Um, but you know, they they get it.
SPEAKER_02Right. They get it.
SPEAKER_00And sit on the bar. I mean, you know, you take most adults and you put it, the only thing they see is supine leg press.
SPEAKER_01That's right.
SPEAKER_00You put a kid in front of it and they see all of the orientations. That's right.
SPEAKER_02I I think that Joseph Pilates created the the most beautiful adult playground with the apparatus.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely.
SPEAKER_02Um, but going back to what you were saying, this idea of deconstructing play and being present, um uh that is very deep in the philosophy of contrology.
SPEAKER_00I I believe it is. I think it's the essence of it. And the other thing that I would say, Joy, you know how we at the PMA, we sort of come up with three guiding principles of Joseph Pilates. One was whole body health, and that was his definition of it. The other was whole body commitment. And when you break that one down, again, you look at a mental health component of where is your locus of control? Right. So if you have an external locus of control, you're going to be blaming a lot of people and situations and governments and religious leaders and parents for all the woes of your life, professors, et cetera. And an internal locus of control is that mindset of self-discipline, right? That Joe talked about in that second principle. To have a work ethic, Joe talked about in that second principle, and being able to take responsibility for your own health in that second principle. The third one was breath. But I think that when you when you really break that down from a healthcare perspective, from a doctor of physical therapy perspective, my goal is not to keep people dependent on me. Right.
unknownRight.
SPEAKER_00Right. It's a really important statement here because, you know, from a business standpoint, retention is a very important word for a successful business. In the rehabilitation world, we want to graduate people into autonomy. We want our patients to be autonomous. And they're autonomous through education and self-awareness and to trust that what they feel is important to me as a doctor to be able to help find a solution to your ability to participate in all of your activities. And that's what Joe said too, right? He said, you know, to have a healthy, strong body so that you could participate in your many very daily activities with spontaneous vigor and zest.
SPEAKER_02Uh for those of you out there who don't know this, uh, Brent Anderson is a doctor of physical therapy. He is a professor. Um, how long have how long have you been practicing and teaching, Brent?
SPEAKER_00Uh well, I mean, physical therapy, graduated in 89, 2005, got my PhD. I've been teaching university since 97. So I have a couple faculty appointments and I still get my hands dirty with patients.
SPEAKER_02Uh, and just a little something about the word steward. Um, when I was thinking about the introduction, and if I had taken a more traditional introductory path, I was going to introduce you as the co-founder and longtime steward of Polestar Pilates. So I think stewardship has been on both our minds. But, you know, you talk about this idea of autonomy. Um, and in physical therapy, uh, you know, how important autonomy is. But the other thing that came to me as you were speaking is empowerment, right? You want to empower your clients to believe that what they've done with you in your sessions has value and hopefully they take that ethos home and continue to move.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_00And that was part of Joseph's teaching with Contrology, right? Right. Read the Crology. It's like you this was a funny um poll that I did asking people if you had to be with a certified Pilates teacher to practice contrology. It was I it was totally set up, right? I I know I set the question up. And of course, what people were thinking of is is it more important for me to work with somebody certified or somebody that's not certified? That was not my question. My my question really was can people practice contrology independently? Right? Because that's what Joe was teaching. He said, if people practice contrology four to five times a week, they'll the world will have no need for hospitals, insane asylums, or prisons. Now that's an incredibly bold statement, right? What Joe's saying is that when we are in tune with our bodies, we don't feel the urge to hurt somebody else.
SPEAKER_02Right. Again, that internal, internal locus of control.
SPEAKER_00We don't feel the urge to be dishonest. We don't feel the urge to steal from somebody. We don't feel the urge to cheat in school. And this is what I try to bring out is like if you really are practicing contrology, the control of your body is super important, but it's not the control of the body that he's talking about. It's the control of your mind and being able to be present and that present people don't do bad things to the environment or to other people or to humanity. Right. We become a positive force in the world. And so if we're practicing contrology every day, and this is really sort of the, you know, it's one of the tangents that I'm on right now, is doing some research of really looking at does that really happen when you get a large number of people that are practicing contrology exercises at home four or five times a week? What happens to their psychosocial outcome measures? And is this something that we should be longing for as Pilates teachers? It's because 70% of the people that come to us have some form of pathology or impairment in today's world of adults. Do we use the equipment to prepare them to do the controllogy work at home? Come in maybe once a week or once a month to sharpen their saw, make sure they're doing it right, make sure that they're aligning their internal feedback with your external feedback as the teacher, but understanding the behavior is a lifestyle.
SPEAKER_02Right.
SPEAKER_00Right. My I realized the other day I was over at Gabriel's house and his partner uh Marty uh trained in Pilates and myofascial release, and I realized that Marty does the contrology exercises every day.
SPEAKER_02The mat exercises?
SPEAKER_00The mat exercises, yeah. Yeah, in a sequence.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And had adopted that as a personal behavior to be able to have a healthier lifestyle. And I see Marty healthier today.
SPEAKER_02But so this is really important because I I think uh as an industry, we're all sort of coming to this place of uh not just Pilates industry, I think fitness, wellness, health in general, that moving, moving often, moving joyfully is really the secret sauce.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_00Movement's medicine, movement, health, you know.
SPEAKER_02Right. To to longevity and and um and sort of and the counter for a sedentary lifestyle. Joe predicted this sedentary lifestyle. Absolutely.
SPEAKER_00He was appalled, he was appalled by it in the 40s and the 50s.
SPEAKER_02In the 40s and 50s. Think about that, right? That's way before a computer, a cell phone, right?
SPEAKER_00Any kind of as he is today, right?
SPEAKER_02Um even right, even before faxes. Do you remember there at least used to be lag time between a sending a fax and receiving a instant? Now everything is instantaneous. Um, but that's really uh led to this sedentary lifestyle. Um, just just I mean, hours and hours go by before you can move in a chair. You've actually spearheaded some of the conversation around sitting and sedentary lifestyle uh recently in our, you know, in the Pilates conversation.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, definitely like POT. I think I've done a couple um courses on sitting is the new smoking. Yeah, and um also the idea of deconstructive play. I mean, I think that uh making movement playful and exploring things and making sure that our movement incorporates vertical play as well, and you know, ground play, that we're on the ground and that we're feeling the effect of the ground. And the research is just, you know, it doesn't stop coming in right now of looking at this idea of play. And, you know, there's other pioneers out there like Ito Portal or Roy Gold or Parkour, um a lot of the martial arts. So it we have this incredible desire um to move in a way that is like an animal. And Joe talked about that a lot too, is like, do we have the elasticity to be able to land like a cat, to be able to jump like a kangaroo, to be able to, you know, have hang time like a bird. And what I find incredibly interesting, and and Joy, you know a little bit of my medical history, but I had, uh, and I don't mind being transparent, I am on my podcast as well, but I had a major back surgery in June. So I'd been dealing with this severe stenosis, especially my left side, that I mean, it was horrible for two years. Um, I had fallen multiple times, broken a kneecap from a fall. I mean, it was it was rough. And now I'm very much in the rehab zone. So I have a wonderful physical therapist, Brian Beatty. And Brian is a Tai Chi master and also a Feldenkrais master.
SPEAKER_01Oh, great.
SPEAKER_00And so right now, uh matter of fact, even this week, my lesson was elasticity. And it was trying to find, he was forcing me to jump up onto a platform. I thought I was gonna die. Um, but I knew that Brian saw that I could do it. I just I had had so many falls, and I don't feel that elasticity in my body the way I did for decades as a pole vaulter and a dancer.
SPEAKER_02I I was gonna I was gonna bring up your pole vaulting.
SPEAKER_00Well, you know, and and we could talk about that a little bit later, but I was what I what I'm saying is is that feeling the ability for me only to jump up on a 18-inch platform changed my mood drastically because my goal is in January, I'm gonna go visit the kids in Utah and we're gonna go skiing. I'm gonna go skiing. So I've got to be ready to go skiing. And so we are working hard on restoring that elasticity. And every time that I was jumping on there, I was thinking, like, I could almost hear Joseph Pilates, you know, you know, jump up. You could do it, you know, jump down and you gotta land. That's what we do as human beings. You be like a cat, be like a dog. And what I remember is is um Kathy. Kathy uh always taught Pilates as in uh with animal, animalistic properties, a lot of cat cueing, uh, but being elastic. And I'm so excited to think that at 62 I'm discovering some elasticity again, that it doesn't matter our age, right? And it it matters like where our attention is to be able to feel a little bit of elasticity. My fear was if I had to run across the street or climb a fence, that was a challenging thought for me over the last two years.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, you've so this uh sort of this bout or this stint in terms of your health, um it it's been it's been since we came out of COVID or has it been longer than that?
SPEAKER_00Well, I had the first hip replacement in 2019, right before COVID, and the second side in 2020. And yeah, so it's been, I mean, you know, I I'm the kind of guy that gets up in the morning, I'm gonna go do things. Um I'm gonna build something, I'm going to lift a 50-pound bag of dog food, I'm going to, you know, dig up the garden and get things ready. I'm going to travel around the world and make those things happen. I'm going to teach for a balanced body. I'm going to teach for Pulse Star. I'm going to have, you know, make those trips happen. Uh, so I don't want to lose the ability, uh, but I'm excited now to think that I finally found what was sort of plaguing um my my confidence in movement for the past four or five years. But the last two years have been I would I remember I had a bad fall at POT in Arizona.
SPEAKER_02I remember. Yes, I remember. That was what I'm actually and you credited that for fixing your knee, I think.
SPEAKER_00I got motion back in my knee. Yeah, but it was it it still was the ridiculous symptoms from the back that finally figured out it was up so high in the back that we didn't really think about it being up in L2, L3, and L3, L4.
SPEAKER_02This episode is powered by Balanced Body. If you own a studio, you know your equipment is the heart of your business. Balanced Body partners with business owners around the world to outfit new studios, refresh well-loved reformers, and support growing class schedules with durable, thoughtfully designed apparatus, from reformers and towers to Pilates chairs, barrels, and small props. We help you create the Pilates space of your dreams. Start exploring options today at Pilates.com. The idea of play and deconstructing play, um, how has that changed your practice and your daily practice?
SPEAKER_00Uh I mean, I think any time that you can bring an element of play or fun into what you're doing, um, you know, what one of the things we did for a couple summers is we had here at the farm, we had the movement farm, which was a summer camp for kids. And particularly kids uh that were um challenged with access. Right. And so they would come to the farm, to the schoolhouse, and you know, their mothers would come and drop them off and would have their tablets and their phones. And I'm like, yeah, we're not gonna need those. And the kids themselves were a little scared at first. But by the end of the week, you know, they had done running around the lake, they had done Pilates and yoga and frisbee and juggling and slacklining and climbing trees. Um, but every day we had time for them just like a recess to play, right? Just deconstructed play. We told the counselors, do not meddle. Don't mess with them. Stay far enough back that they're not worried about you meddling with them, but you're close enough that you can see if there's ever an emergency or something that needs to happen. And by the end of the week, we would ask the kids, what was your favorite part of the summer camp? And they're like, Oh, we love doing these things and that thing. But our favorite part was the mud kitchen, which was part of their deconstructed plate. They would go over behind this building that I'm in now, and there was a sink and a kitchen, and they would have a full restaurant, and some one of them would be the sous-chef, and one of them would be the the waiter and the maitre D. And um what I'm why I bring that up is because they they had huge outcome changes. Because you know, I would I was doing pre and post measures with the kids, but looking at their satisfaction, looking at their endurance, looking at their coordination, looking at their balance, looking at their core strength. We took measurements on everything pre and post, and all of them got better. Every week they got better. But the most important one was the confidence of the kids and their ability to find joy outdoors and particularly up in a tree.
SPEAKER_02Fantastic.
SPEAKER_00I'm you know, I'm a huge advocate of that. And I and I think now we just had um you do are you familiar with Petite Pilates uh from France?
SPEAKER_02No, no.
SPEAKER_00Um, Petite Pilates, uh Florence and Miriam are two Pilates teachers in France, and they have built a beautiful, beautiful uh education system for working with children of all ages, all the way up into adolescence, of doing things at home, in schools, in clinics, and studios, uh, with pediatric physical therapists, the whole kit and cabo. Very, very good. And we brought them into uh Miami just recently to do their first course in the United States. And it was so beautiful with the and it was like one of the complaints that came back was it wasn't structured enough. And I I laughed, I said, no, no, it was designed to be deconstructed, play for you as an adult, understand how to talk and how to work with children. That the exercises were grouped into different animals that had different properties of movement, and they would play games with these cards to design the class, and then they would have to do the exercise, and they would have to mimic those different things in the animals. And so children love it. And we now, Leslie, who works here at the uh retreat center with us, has nine kids, three of which are very young, but she teaches for us, and she set up a full kind of she went down for the training uh to Miami and she set up a full sort of optical play course that was all built around Pilates.
SPEAKER_01Oh, fantastic.
SPEAKER_00Uh, for these young kids, four, five, eight years old, that were able to do all of these things that you would look at them and you'd go, like, that's crazy that they're able to do that in today's world. And I think that that's just where we're gonna go more and more with being able to make sure that if we're teaching a Pilates class to the mothers or fathers, that the kids can be next door having and working on obstacle courses and um doing things that are part of deconstructed play, and they can create their own classes by doing color coordination and playing, you know, old made with the cards, and they can come up with their own classes and then they can do the classes themselves and to build that deconstructive play. The other thing I was gonna say with that is Juan Nieto from Spain and Blas Chamaro, uh, both uh pulsar licensees for Spain and longtime uh educators, physios, but they put together a conference that was off the charts all about play. And they brought in Kim Jibelisco and they brought in a number of other people, and and it was just three days of play. And the outcome of that was so glorious, like everybody was happy.
SPEAKER_02Happy, yes, happy, yes, right?
SPEAKER_00And that's what Joe said the first requisite of happiness is a body that can participate in your many very daily tasks and activities.
SPEAKER_02Um you know, Brent, you're you're credited uh um as really uh a bridge from Pilates to rehab and also from rehab into Pilates. Uh play, you know, um how do you how do you uh I'm trying to think of how I want to say this, but over the years, how have you evolved in in terms of your teaching to orient um someone who is either going through rehab or who is a rehab practitioner physiotherapist? Therapist, physical therapist, um, and even sort of very um structured Pilates instructors. How do you orient them toward taking the client from reliance to independence and autonomy to being more autonomous with and having a sense of playfulness?
SPEAKER_00Um one of the things out of um my dissertation was focused on this topic exactly, Joy. It was looking at people with mechanical low back pain that were chronic or that were recurring back pain, meaning they had had multiple episodes of severe back pain. And they had to have had it for at least six months to be included into the study. And we compared it to a passive intervention of manual therapy, and then we had the Pilates classes, reformer classes, and we would have classes with six um subjects at a time, and we did the treatments, the same thing, two treatments a week. You went for 12 weeks of intervention. We had pre and post measures that we looked at the physical limitations, so things like their range of motion, their strength, their power, their balance, their coordination. We had their psychosocial measures, so their perceived sort of behavioral measures, so self-efficacy, fear avoidance, fear of pain, SF 36, quality of life measures, all of these that were perception of the client, right? Because they're filling them in themselves. They're not meeting with a psychologist. They're you you fill out the 10 questions for self-efficacy. And then we had these two specific functional outcome tests for low back pain. They're called the Oswestri and the Roland Morris test. And those were really looking at are you able to return to your activities? So it fit very perfectly into what Joe talked about of being able to participate in your many very daily activities. The other thing that was happening at the same time by the World Health Organization was they were designing the ICF model, the International Classification of Function model. And the World Health Organization model, the original one, the WHO model, was a disability model. It was identifying the severity of your disability or your handicap, were the words that were used back in the 80s and 90s. And this model had evolved into something that really looked at participation. It looked at what activities you believed you should be doing. It looked at the influence of disease, the influence of limitations. But most importantly, it looked at the constructs of the individual. So the personal and environmental constructs. So powerful, right? And so in this study, there were many things that came out that sort of changed, they certainly changed the way Polestar looked at things. They also changed the way that I taught in the university. They have changed a lot of physical therapy practice with additional studies that have come out and reinforced the same thing. But what we discovered is that in the Pilates group, we knew they would have a better outcome than the passive intervention. And that's why I'll come back to that in a little bit of like how I used to practice and how I practice now. But we we sort of knew that they were gonna have a better outcome with chronic pain because we had seen it clinically with the Pilates already for about 10 years. We had seen people with low back pain that didn't get better with any manual therapy or passive interventions get better with Pilates. And that was what we were hypothesizing. And what we noticed was that the psychosocial measures had a high 70, low 80% predictability of functional outcomes. So if you believed you were gonna get better, you got better.
SPEAKER_02If you believed you were gonna get better, you got better.
SPEAKER_00That's yep. Most of these people came to us with a very low score, chronic pain, believing that everything failed. Right? The physical limitation measures that physical therapists hung their hat on for decades did not predict outcome. It was like 45 to 50 percent predictive, statistically. Really important to understand that. That was a mind blower for us because here we were in physical therapy, banging our head against and teaching all the students that they had to have these physical limitation measures to justify what we're doing. But with low back pain, insurance companies don't want to pay physical therapists for low back because the statistics kept showing that we don't predict outcome.
SPEAKER_02Right. But yet the biopsychosocial says if I believe I'm going to get better.
SPEAKER_00Now here's I participate.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, go ahead.
SPEAKER_00Well, in the behavioral psychology world, uh, this was a Dr. Hoskins, I believe, up in uh Buffalo, um, had neurosurgeon and had a team, but what they showed, and this was also Pandora's work, was that it was an incredible predictor, but they couldn't influence it with psychosocial interventions. So, meaning diagnose adios. If you get a low score on the self-efficacy, you're probably not going to get better, was their conclusion. And if you got a high score, you're going to get better. 80% chance of getting better. But they didn't believe that their interventions could influence that. And what we found was having these, and this is my phrase that I've used, heard me use it for years, Joy, but having these successful movement experiences without pain or that exceed their expectation are the psychosocial shifters. So in the psychology, we're not going to shift it. We're just going to diagnose you and say, sorry, you're not going to get better. You don't believe you're going to get better. You've had too many failures. Passive intervention didn't impact that at all. Even though they would feel better for a couple hours or a day or something with a manipulation or manual therapy. It was the stickiness of having a successful movement experience that kept them coming to the class. We had no attrition. And because of that, they got stronger, more flexible, better balance. So they had proof in the pudding that what they were feeling and what they were believing was actually manifesting in a way that they believed they could return to their daily activities. And this is why, in so powerful, our language, yeah, we eliminated words like core control and core strength and strong glutes, and we got rid of all of the muscular components of it for a very important reason. We know they're going to get stronger. But if your emphasis is on the individual having a successful movement experience, your outcome is going to be significantly better. So people that know how to communicate and create hope and are not catastrophizers in the Pilates world and in the PT world are always going to have better outcomes because their people are having successful movement experiences.
SPEAKER_02But Brent, wouldn't you say that's an evolution? Because I do think I really do see uh a large consensus on this and moving in this direction across the board, um, maybe at different levels for sure, but or at different speeds.
SPEAKER_00Well, hopefully we've made enough impact in the last 25 years.
SPEAKER_02But the yeah, but but it's it's it's a significant difference from practice of 25 years ago, which which really was uh very much my business grew if people were dependent on me. Um, you know, we the the idea of teaching a client to be autonomous in the early days was was was an odd.
SPEAKER_00I remember I remember having a patient say, Brent, I planned my vacations around your vacations.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, no, that's not the way that should be.
SPEAKER_00That felt good at first. And then I thought, that's sick. That's there's a problem with that. That's not normal, healthy behavior, right? And you're exactly right, Joy. I mean, I think that we're realizing, and here's the thing, too, is if you're afraid of losing your clients because you don't create dependency, that is a false belief. That is a myth, right? People that feel better because of your intervention and because of your ability to push them towards more independence and autonomy means that they stay with you for life as their resource for this kind of knowledge.
SPEAKER_02They don't just hear be the resource, be the resource, not the fixer, right? Yeah, yeah. Um uh it it's it's an interesting concept because actually the idea of fixing is is um is also something that's shifting and changing in our world.
SPEAKER_00I'm not the healer. You heal yourself from within, and I'm a facilitator, I'm uh a coach, I'm a guide, and to help you find that inner strength and that you know confidence. And that was another word Joe used all the time too, right?
SPEAKER_02You talked about self-confidence, self-confidence, physical confidence, personal self-esteem. You know, uh Brent, I want to cycle back to um working with all the elders and looking for the commonalities, because I I actually think a lot of what where where we're coming today, where we're you know, this evolution, um many of them, maybe without the words, were teaching back then. Um, in particular, Eve Gentry. And I understand Eve's uh particular favorite of yours. Why is that?
SPEAKER_00You know, Eve went through a very hard time. You know, she had breast cancer, she had a radical mastectomy back in the 50s. Um she her work was an evolution as well. Like if you looked at all of them, Corolla's work and Romana, they all had an evolution and a twist based on their experience with Joe and the time and and the season that they were. And that would be true with any of us, too, right? Like if you thought of somebody that worked with you in New York versus somebody that works with you now two decades later, is Joy different? Brent's certainly different.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00I certainly talked differently. So I think that if you were thinking that Joe was the guru from the time that Corolla was working and then went out on her own to Romana, there was a lot of change in there. And working with Eve, I spent, I think we were almost like two weeks there. And, you know, it was just beautiful watching her sensitivity to the pre-Pilates work that she called it. And it was so empowering to me of thinking of working with patients that have ALS, working with a patient that just got done with, you know, major surgery and cancer, but just wanted to be present in their Pilates studio. Um, it it empowered me to realize that it what it didn't have to be the rollover and jackknife and boomerang for somebody coming out of rehab that we could still use the principles of Pilates and of what Eve taught. And that was empowering to us. This was back in you know, 92, 93, 94, that we had our you know, time with with Eve before she passed away. And, you know, people that trained with her. Shelly Larson. I mean, you think of, you know, what a fantastic teacher, what a great influencer of of the work, and people that studied underneath Michelle, you know, and and you know, there's all these bodies of work. And I think that we get caught up sometime with misnomers of you know, something being, you know, authentic or classical. And and there's nothing wrong with that work. That work is beautiful. It's just understanding historically, oh, this came from this lineage, this came from that lineage. Um, what I liked about Eve Gentry was that she was more on the rehabilitative side. She was looking at that post-rehab transition into contrology.
SPEAKER_02And that's well, she herself experienced it. I mean, when you say a radical mastectomy in the 50s, that's that's took everything off the ribs.
SPEAKER_00They scraped it.
SPEAKER_02They cut out the muscle.
SPEAKER_00So she had to take her top off for the doctors at NYU to believe she had had a radical mastectomy.
SPEAKER_02Brent, as as we start to sort of wind down, um, we talked about the philosophy of Pilates. So then there's a lifestyle that's Pilates. You mentioned Marty doing the the the original 34 exercises, I'm assuming the original 34 exercises, but a Met-based practice every day. Um uh and you're working on some, you're looking into literature or are you working on research to to I'm just writing an IRB right now for it.
SPEAKER_00So I'm submitting the IRB at uh University of St. Augustine. And I'm, you know, anybody that's sort of interested in this, my goal is to make it so that it is a uh virtual stimulation of progression from um three, four-week intervals of doing the exercises and the logbooks that go with it, looking again at the psychosocial and being able to submit videos of actually doing the work. So we can do our own qualitative analysis of how they improve in their movement, but also making the correlation of how they perceive the quality of their life, their happiness, their stress levels by doing that. And part of this is because most of the research that's out there in Pilates, we actually have no idea what they did that they call Pilates.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Well, that's we don't have any idea.
SPEAKER_00So I thought I would start and come back. Maybe the the last big push I do in Pilates is a sort of a grid or a nomenclature, which I'll need help from others, uh, but looking at being able to say, like, can we have a classification of what a 12-week, which is what most research is, a 12-week or a even a six-month, depending on lifestyle, what that looks like and how that impacts. Now, I happen to believe, right, this is a Brentism, but I happen to believe that successful movement leads to successful outcome. And we see that even things we've seen with people who have had horrible technique or form are having these positive outcomes. And if you look at the research that's out there, the systematic reviews over and over again, the one that just came out a couple of years ago from the British Journal of Sports Medicine, it was a systematic review of like a thousand articles looking at mechanical low back pain interventions. So it's looking at manual therapy, it was looking at traction, it was looking at exercise. Pilates came up in the top three again. And the editor was challenged about the quality of the research. And the editor said, if the quality gets better, it'll become number one. You know, so it's not an excuse not to improve the quality of the research that we're doing. That's what I hope to do is like we can have better nomenclature, better categorization of where that intervention is taking place. So if it's a very like I know some people are probably just doing footwork and feet in straps as their and bridging as their Pilates intervention that is part of the study, because I've read the study and they wrote what they did as a method. Um, others were a group MAC class for women with cancer or high school girls with obesity. You know, there the number of studies out there is is crazy. Like I go run a new search, and you know, within six months, there's 135 new studies that have been published.
SPEAKER_02Well, and that proliferation is pretty recent, right? Last seven, ten years.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, last 15 years.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And all over the world. So I mean, China's producing a lot, Brazil produces a lot, uh Australia. Australia, we're seeing it in um Russia and also in Turkey. There's some research coming out. Probably the least amount of research is coming out of the US, which I find very funny.
SPEAKER_02But yeah, right here.
SPEAKER_00Um yeah, right here in Saut City. Anyway.
SPEAKER_02Um, so along those lines, uh, you know, first of all, let me just say that uh that's one of our big hopes for 26 and 27 is actually getting people back into practice and and using sort of you know, the original 34 and to just say, just let's let's get into a daily practice and let's see how you feel. Uh it it it's an initiative we're we feel strongly taking on. So maybe that's something we should talk about on the on the back.
SPEAKER_00Certainly, certainly. It's something I uh it's not something that I would put into a poll star classification. I think this is in general looking at Pilates and being able to talk more intelligently about it, which has always been my goal. And that's where the principles of movement came from being able to have the scientific foundation to talk to physicians and surgeons and hospitals. And um, that was a big part of the, you know, the tours that Ken, Elizabeth, and I did for those 10 years was we met with an unlimited number of hospitals and doctors and medical conferences and physical therapy conferences and fitness conferences. We presented research, we did research. Um, you know, that was a big part was us to be able to say there is an evidence base to this. And part of that came from um some of my mentors that talked about how when we think of research or practice, we said everything starts as witchcraft, then it becomes clinical practice, and then with enough evidence, it becomes evidence-based or research-based. And I always encourage people like, don't be afraid of the witchcraft component of intervention. That's where everything started. Manual therapy started as witchcraft, uh, needling started as witchcraft, you know, and now there's a great research that shows predictive value of when these things work really well and when they don't. And Pilates certainly is an incredible modality that allows us to have in very early intervention and progress them to a very high level of performance. It's not the end all. I mean, I think sometimes people get stuck in that too. But if I ask you, what do you believe you should participate in and you want to climb Mount Kilimanjaro, then I got to make sure that the Pilates prepares you to go to the next level of training to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. Right. Pilates itself is not going to give you the endurance and the O2 sat that you're going to need to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. No, but it can help certainly provide it to have the endurance in the training methodology to be able to do that or to run a marathon or those kind of things.
SPEAKER_02All right. Before I close up here, I think I would be remiss if we didn't talk about your principles of movement book. Um, what I'm sort of interested in there is is going back to um Eve Gentry and others, uh, how would you say they influenced you as you were you were writing the book and organizing the book?
SPEAKER_00Again, in the beginning, we were looking at the commonalities, right? So we were looking at things that kept coming up as far as um words like control, uh, words like movement and mobility. Breath, of course, was always part of every conversation with every elder. So breath was still is our number one uh principle. Uh we looked at things like alignment. And what we discovered was when you get fixated on static alignment, you're probably looking at the wrong things. You know, that's it has nothing to do with function, it's not a predictive value to say that somebody has a, you know, valgus knees that they're going to end up with this disease. There's no predictive value in that. Um, what it was really looking at is the efficiency of movement when you have arthrokinematic alignment. And that's dynamic, that's happening while we're moving. And so a lot of times our sedentaryism, our behaviors, our habits, our injuries predispose us to have less efficient movement. And when you can see the arthrokinematics in your client while they're working on the equipment or moving or demonstrating, uh, it's incredibly empowering to be able to make just the tiniest movements and then follow up with an internal an internal feedback clue of like, what are you feeling here? Right. Um, we're going to be wrong most of the The time, but the patient or the client will be right most of the time when they're feeling, you know, and moving towards that direction. When you force somebody to be in an alignment on the reformer, you're probably taking that person, if they're decantitioned, to an end of range, right? So if they're used to being tucked or they're used to being hyperextend in their low back, and you try to put them in a neutral position, believe it or not, they're probably going to be close to an end of range. Where does all injury happen? End of range. And so when we ask them what they feel here, we want to find them feeling that neutral zone of movement and then pushing towards the end of ranges as we continue to build their distribution of movement. Listening to Ron Fletcher talk about his experiences and talking again, Lolita coming in a little bit later and having her experiences of things that they remember Joe saying or Claire saying. I think that those are the things that influenced us the most of saying, how does the science of anatomy, physiology, biomechanics, um, you know, biotegrity now, looking at um neuromuscular, neurolearning, motor learning, the psychology and behavior aspects of this. And when you become more proficient in these sciences, what the principles of movement was was a qualitative look at those sciences being applied in real time. So if I can look if if I had like a scale of zero to ten and I said, Joy, do you see breath facilitating that movement or obstructing that movement on a scale of zero to ten, five being really no impact either way, how would you rate breath as a factor in that movement? If I said, Joy, if you looked at distribution of movement in this golf swing, and you know that that golf swing requires, you know, forefoot mobility, midfoot mobility, ankle mobility, knee mobility, hip mobility, pelvic and spine mobility, shoulder mobility, all the way up. How would you rate that zero to 10 of that distribution of movement contributes to the quality of that movement or not? So now I can go back and say, you know, we're gonna work a little bit on your foot and ankle mechanics and a little bit on your thoracic mechanics, for two areas that we saw a little restricted in your distribution of movement on our Pilates exercises and home exercises. And what I can guarantee you is that I'm gonna add 20 yards to your drive. I can't guarantee where it's gonna go, but I know that biomechanically, if I can add 15 more degrees of rotation in your swing, the ball's gonna go further. And that's the way that the principles get applied. They get applied, and when we teach an Impulse Star, the principles in the beginning are experiential. Can you feel this in your body? Then we use the principles to adapt learning. Can you learn from this? Then can you teach from these principles? Then can you assess from these principles? Can you then design? So this is sort of like uh Bloom's taxonomy of gradually progressing the application of these principles into the qualification of being a movement teacher. And it applies to any movement, doesn't have to be Pilates.
SPEAKER_02Uh I love where you put the assess part. Uh, you know, I think uh new instructors want to jump right into assessing movement without ever really feeling and experiencing and embodying um and then teaching, right? Um so I I think that's that's fantastic.
SPEAKER_00Uh and the I was just gonna say one more thing. In the end, long after they graduate, um, we have a product coming out that is the path of kinesiology course that's open to everybody, but it is specifically designed now to say, okay, you learn how to listen to your clients. You have this incredible toolbox of this repertoire. Now let's learn how movement impacts pathology for the better. Let's understand your indications of how you're gonna design the program. Not like, well, this exercise is one of my favorite exercises. You're gonna love it. Well, you're a ballet dancer that's 25 years old, and your patient is an obese man that's been deconditioned for 25 years, laying on the reformer. He's not gonna like short spine. Not like you do.
SPEAKER_02Not like you do. That's yeah.
SPEAKER_00He might eventually, I hope he does, but not not today.
SPEAKER_02Not today. Oh, that's that's great. And and Brent, your book is available to everyone, am I correct?
SPEAKER_00To everyone. Yeah, you can go to Amazon, Polestar Pilates, uh, or sorry, it's uh Principles of Movement. It now is in Chinese, uh, Korean, Spanish, just got released, Russian, obviously English, and we're working on French, Portuguese, and German right now. So the translation is in the process.
SPEAKER_02Great, great. Um, okay, so let's do rapid fire questions. Brent Anderson, what is your favorite Pilates exercise?
SPEAKER_00My favorite Pilates exercise control balance.
SPEAKER_02Oh, I would not have guessed that. Fantastic. Okay, your least favorite.
SPEAKER_00What's the one where you're standing on your head on the reformer? That's uh the crab is a crab nose.
SPEAKER_02Well, crab is in the is a mat. Um it's headstand, isn't it?
SPEAKER_00It could be headstand, but since I broke my neck, the thought of doing that is just sort of repulsive.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, no.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, no.
SPEAKER_02We'll put we'll put that in the no category. Okay, what is uh we talked about this. If you could define Pilates, what would it be?
SPEAKER_00Whole body, whole mind ability to regain your internal locus of control and be happy through movement.
SPEAKER_02Nice. Uh where do you see Pilates going in the future? From today, right? We would never have seen this as our future, but from today, where do you see it going?
SPEAKER_00Well, I mean, all of the statistics everywhere in business show that the Pilates reformer is still exploding. And just a bit of trivia, it was Ken with Bounced Body and Elizabeth and myself that introduced the idea of the Allegro at an idea conference in Las Vegas, and everybody sort of sh themselves thinking that how could you possibly teach a group class on a reformer?
SPEAKER_02I yep.
SPEAKER_00And that was that was a a big statement. I think that was like in '97 or something like that. But it was um what what a great, great evolution. And I think of now, just you know, the more people that can be exposed to it, the better, you know, we don't ever want to lose the seriousness of the or the wholeness of Pilates work on all of the apparatus, the mat work, the philosophy. Uh my my goal is that if you're going to embark in just a reformer or a mat training, is that you at least take the time to dive deep into the philosophy and that you realize that the philosophy is what makes the big difference. And if you understand that philosophy, you can have wonderful experiences teaching group reformer and group mat and make it a little exciting and make it a little more challenging. I don't think Joe had a problem with that, adding weights to it if you want. I'm okay. But I I do see, you know, the more people that get exposed, remember she sold the videos, passed away from ALS.
SPEAKER_02Oh, Mari Windsor.
SPEAKER_00Mari Windsor, yeah. So I remember when people felt like Mari Windsor was, you know, shortchanging on the fridge. And it's just the opposite, you know, Mari Windsor brought Pilates to millions of people.
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_00So the more people that get exposed to Pilates, I believe they will find those of us that are really true practitioners of Joseph Pilates and Clara Pilates, and that we'll continue to see it growing in the rehabilitation, the wellness, the fitness, and the conditioning markets. It's not going anywhere.
SPEAKER_02So you just need to uh look at those early days with you, Elizabeth and Ken, as you started the trend. And you know, as with all trends, right? You hang around long enough, it comes back around.
SPEAKER_00It comes back. And I was at the Beyond Active conference in um November, and everything, all anybody could talk about was Pilates reformer classes.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I know.
SPEAKER_00And you know, everywhere. And I just I mean, they had no idea who I was. I mean, zero idea who I was. They had all these different machines that were made from who I I never I didn't know who they were um either. But it was like the fact that I was just sort of sitting in the background smiling, thinking, like, oh my gosh, we never would have thought that there would be 20 different manufacturers of the Pilates reformer from all around the world, but there's more than that. But that's it was at the conference.
SPEAKER_02And and here we are, and here we are.
SPEAKER_00The future is now all star what?
SPEAKER_02Right, what? And you pioneered it. It's really, it's great. Um, all right, Brent, before we conclude today, where can our listeners find you?
SPEAKER_00Um, we have a number of you can always go to drbrentanderson.com. So Dr. Brent is uh it's a new podcast that we're releasing in January. That one is particularly looking at pathologies, meeting with doctors, and looking at education to our consumers, to our family, to our communities about removing fear from diagnoses and things that they receive in the medical community, and then looking at how movement becomes the medicine for those. So that's something new that's coming up. PolstarPilates.com is always there. We're in over 80 countries with full education. Um, that's a pretty easy one to find. And then lastly, I have a webinar that since COVID, I've done a webinar every Thursday, um, almost every Thursday at 3 p.m. Eastern time, and it's recorded. And if you sign up, we're always talking about Pilates and movement and special populations. And I bring in a lot of guests, um, just like you and I talking here, Joy. We'll switch it around and bring you on to the Pilates hour. And you know, it's live, so it's a little different where you can't edit or take out words that I accidentally say or those kinds of things.
SPEAKER_02A little more vulnerable. It's live.
SPEAKER_00Vulnerable, which I love. I love it. And that is every Thursday at three o'clock. So if you want to do that, you can just go to PolestarPlias.com. And one of the first things it'll ask you there is do you want to join the webinar? And it's free, it's always free, and it's always recorded. So if you're in a different time zone or you're working, you can listen to it another time.
SPEAKER_02Fantastic. Um, Brent, I just really want to thank you for this conversation and for your openness and uh willingness to explore. Thank you so much.
SPEAKER_00Well, thank you, Joy. You know, you and I have uh continued to build a wonderful, beautiful relationship and sort of leading education and two companies arm in arm. And I love being at conferences with you and um, you know, especially our time afterwards when we sit down and talk about our families and things that are actually the most important.
SPEAKER_02Right. That's the best part for sure.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so I I love you. I appreciate all you're doing and you know your your hard work.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, thank you so much. And the same to you. All the best, lots of love. And um, someday I'm gonna be sitting right there with you looking out that window.
SPEAKER_00You bet. I'm ready to reserve the time anytime you want to do a little retreat.
SPEAKER_02All right, all the best to you. Lots of love.
SPEAKER_00Take care.
