Since you are so involved in the teacher training process, do you think it's important to have a national certification exam?
Absolutely. Years ago when Kevin Bowen was the head of the PMA, he told us certification is legally something different than what one studio does with their trainees to get them graduated out of their program. That's not certification. You can give them a certificate but that's not certifying. One of the main reasons it was so vital to get a PMA certification happening is because of insurance. If somebody sued you they could say, "Your not [legally] certified, how did you get insurance?"
We took the word [certification] out of all our material. Even though many of the teacher training programs still say that, and prospective trainees still come to us wanting to certify. But you cannot be certified in the United States unless you pass the PMA exam. That is true certification. It has to be a third party exam by an independent, objective organization (more than your own studio, maybe even more than your own state).
Amy and I have been involved with the PMA from the beginning. We've been involved in writing the exam. The exam is still a work in progress and will only get better; nevertheless it our industry’s certifying exam and should be taken by every Pilates teacher.
When our trainees graduate - and it's very rigorous to go through our program with many hours of examination spread through the program - they get a diploma. We are registered with the State. It was a big process that took a lot of time, and continues to be so. But it was the legal thing to do. So when our trainees graduate from us, they graduate from a recognized government agency. All of them have passed the PMA exam, to my knowledge, the first time.
Do you have any concerns about the Pilates industry today?
We felt from the beginning that to be a Pilates teacher, you need to know all the work and you need to know all the equipment - at least 99%. Even if you don't have a studio with all the equipment in it, knowing about all the exercises on the various equipment will inform your teaching phenomenally.
We don't teach a mat diploma. We don't pick out pieces. You learn everything at approximately the level that it might be given to the client. We have a wide platform to address the client's needs and get the product out of them that Joe wanted. We do not believe in mat by itself or reformer by itself. We think it's a disservice to Pilates, and to the clients, when teachers only know one aspect or a couple aspects of the whole thing and start teaching.
The Everything Pilates Book is such a great reference. Are you ready for another book?
We finally wrote a book for our teacher training program. That was blood and sweat. Not quite as difficult as The Everything Pilates Book,, but really hard.
Is the book for the teacher training program available to the public?
It is available. It's a weekend by weekend, exercise by exercise workbook. It has details that we consider vital, that could be lost. It has support for the full-out exercise as well as how to modify. You cannot learn how to teach Pilates from it. But it's a workbook that has a lot of great information if you know the work already. If it's been a while since you've had a lesson or a workshop, and you wonder if you remember that exercise correctly, then it can be good for that. We are going to do a workbook for every weekend.
The book we did [The Everything Pilates Book] was a fight to get anywhere close to what we wanted. We were probably the wrong people to do it because the Everything series is quite cute and trendy, and our book is not that at all. They gave us a copywriter, but we ended up rewriting entire chapters. We wanted there to be such richness to it so it could be as close as possible to a textbook for teachers.
We've had teachers come to us who have said: The Everything Pilates Book has been so useful because I was taught so simply and broadly, and it opened my eyes to what's available and how things connect.
At the time [the book was released], nobody was talking about Joseph Pilates. They were talking about Pilates. We included a whole section about the elders. I like to think our book was part of honoring them all. Honoring who they were, what they studied with Joe, what they took with them, and what they moved into. Some went quite far-a-field, like Ron [Fletcher] and Eve Gentry. But nevertheless they stayed in their deep learning from Joe and Clara. So that was in the book, which wasn't anywhere else.
Return to Life wasn't even in print when we wrote our book so nobody read it. It wasn't until the PMA reprinted it that it was easy to get. We were so lucky that we got that book early on. How can you teach Pilates and not know that book? It's Joe's work.
That was beautiful. Really amazing. Thank you so much.
Learn more in my interview with Amy Alpers and Rachel Segel: Reflections on a Pilates Instructor Training Program
Page 1: learning from Romana, classical Pilates, modifications and the importance of advanced work
Page 2: instructor training, teaching, the best cues, and running a successful studio
