The Real Trick Behind Pilates Sequencing

I have been thinking about a lot about my children in relation to Pilates.

My daughter has a favorite book we have been reading since she was only a few months old. It is called My First Day at Kindergarten, and by now I must have read it hundreds of times. She is two and a half now and we read this book every day. My son has a similar relationship with the original Mary Poppins. He first watched it when he was two, and it is still his favorite choice for our Saturday movie night (four years later). He knows all the lines and songs by heart, and still, he does not seem to grow tired of it.

If you have children, I am sure you have your own version of this. The same book, the same movie, the same game, again and again.

I am not a child psychologist, but as a mother I can see how much repetition gives my children. They know what is coming, and that seems to make them feel safe. They begin to remember parts of the story, then retell them in their own words. They notice things they missed before and they are excited when they recognize something familiar. They also know where they need to look for something specific. And after a while, the story starts showing up in everyday life and they make a connection to a book or a movie we have seen a hundred times.

Now, what does this have to do with Pilates?

In classical Pilates, there is an order to the exercises. You learn them in a sequence, and new exercises are added when the body has built the skill for them through what came before. At least in the Mat work, this order is described in Joseph Pilates’ Return to Life. I am not a classically trained Pilates teacher, and I was not originally taught all the exercises in that way. But the longer I practice and teach, the more I appreciate the intelligence of the system.

I don’t often teach the full classical Mat order exactly as it is, because some exercises are very advanced and the person in front of me always matters more than the idea of a perfect sequence. But I do teach the original exercises. The same exercises, every class.

Sometimes I add a prop. Sometimes I focus my cueing on one aspect of the exercise and then another. Sometimes I teach a Reformer exercise on the Mat, or a Mat exercise on the Reformer. But the foundation is always the same.

And the interesting thing is that students often say to me after class, “You always teach something different. It never gets boring.” Which always makes me smile a little, because I am not changing that much. The exercises and the structure are pretty much the same every time. What changes is where I put the focus, or what the student is able to feel that day. Sometimes the body simply understands something it did not understand the week before.

It reminds me of my children with their favorite book or movie. They return to the same thing, but their experience of it keeps changing.

Yet, if Instagram trends are to be believed, clients seem to want something new every single class. Teachers are spending a lot of time on Pilates class sequencing, there are softwares supposed to help you plan your class, and teacher training students worry about programming their classes.

But it is right there. A sequence that was designed for a purpose, and makes sense.

And trust me when I say, I don’t believe in following anything blindly. In fact, I can be quite defiant at times and I am not interested in doing something only because someone says, “This is the way it is.” I learn from my own experiences and understand why by feeling things myself.

Through doing the same exercises again and again I know in my body what something is for and why an exercise works in a certain way. And by teaching the same exercises over time, I have notice patterns in people’s bodies. I can often sense which exercises will be difficult for someone and why. I understand the relationships between movements more clearly. That did not come from constantly changing what I teach. It came from repeating, observing, and refining.

If repetition helps children learn, feel safe, build confidence, and carry understanding into the rest of their lives, I don’t see why adults would be so different. Of course change is necessary sometimes and we need adaptation, and creativity. But in order to change intelligently, and be truly creative we need to understand the foundations. And foundations are built through repetition. Lots and lots of repetition.