Practice What You Teach: Is Perfection required?

It was a busy week.  After having the first month of summer off, my husband was back teaching this summer which simply means for us there is a little more juggling schedules when it comes to kids activities and kid care throughout the week.  This is really no big deal, but the first week of adjusting schedules is always a little more hectic and crazy.  This just happened to start on the first of the month (which is always a busy time from a business standpoint as we are doing our monthly newsletter, payroll, and lots of other first of the month tasks) and to add to the fun we had a pretty big event planned at the studio on Friday night.  So..by the time Saturday morning arrived, I barely had time to think about my movement practice this week, let alone write a blog about it!

Luckily I had an hour break after my morning clients and my 9 am Return to Life Mat class and I decided just to work out and see if anything came to me! First of all, let me tell you I really kind of wanted to do a Reformer workout (no particular reason…it was just what I was feeling like.)  But… I was also feeling a little tired and uninspired to teach my morning mat class so I decided the best thing I could do is to do my mat work.  As a teacher I find that doing the Pilates work in my own body before I teach is often enough to help “inspire my teaching” and simply helps remind me of the work and the feel of the work that my students will be doing.

Before I started, I decided I would just flow through the work letting my body do what it knows how to do. In my mind I was telling myself…Just move and don’t worry about what it looks like or doing things perfectly! So that’s what I did.  I put on my favorite Pandora station, and ran through the entire mat sequence from Footwork to Pushups with Big Twist thrown in at the end!   The whole workout took me about 25 minutes and I had two takeaways definitely worth talking about.

imperfect1. Moving is more important than perfection!  As a Pilates teacher I spend so much time teaching people to move better, that I think I forget sometimes that it’s the movement itself that is so effective as a health tool not the perfection of the movement.  As long as you are being safe in your body and not injuring yourself the best thing you can do is just show up and move!

2. Flowing movement and breath without breaks means you are getting your heart rate up and sweating (at least for me).  I felt “worked” when I got done but honestly more than that I felt kind of refreshed and definitely more energized for the rest of my day.  As a teacher this reminded me of the importance of working toward more flowing workouts with clients where ever they are in their body.  The concept of flowing movements in the Pilates method definitely ties together all of the concepts you learn in your Pilates practice and is a great way to keep challenging your body in a safe way.

Hope you had a great week and had some time to sneak in some mindful movement time into your life whatever you had going on!    As always I would love to hear from you and what you’ve been doing in your personal practice!  What did your movement time look like this week?  What did you take away from from your movement practice?

 

 

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