La Pilates

😂😂😂

📣Calling all Pilates-lovers and those who’d love to give it a try!
Have you considered trying our friendly Pilates class with instructor Larissa in Taunton.?

Join us to stretch your muscles and minds at our stunning studio in Taunton Town Centre. We're keeping our classes to a maximum of 12 clients and an hour of pure bliss each week.

We're treating our clients with a free Pilates Class Trial Session. If you love it (and we think you will!), book a block of six sessions at only £72. We highly recommend booking blocks 💜

Don't forget to bring your mats, hand weights, resistance bands or Pilates balls if you want to use them during the sessions, and of course a water bottle 💙

We're delighted to offer a general Mat Pilates Class for All Ages and Abilities every Thursday from 10.30am - 11.30am in our new studio at 2 Bridge Street, Taunton. 📍

So, take a deep breath and let's get started on this Pilates journey together!🧘‍♀️🧘

📢Live Online Pilates Classes - mornings and evenings

🟥A weekly consistent exercise routine with the convenience of not having to dash out of the house, brave the elements or find childcare

🟨keep consistent in your training with multiple classes a week without paying more

🟩Live interaction with your instructor and fellow classmates, but still be in the comfort of your own home

🟧 Join from anywhere in the world

🟥 All ages and abilities welcome

🟦There are many reasons why Online Pilates Classes might suit you......even down to letting your pet join in!

🟩For a free trial, please get in contact with Larissa [email protected]

📢 PILATES CLASSES - in person

🟦 Wednesdays at 10am in the Bishops Hull Hub.
🟧 Thursdays at 10:30am at Footprints, Medineeds on Bridge Street in Taunton

🟨 Pilates can strengthen your core, help with rehabilitation after an injury, teach you good breathing techniques, relaxation methods, balance and good posture, strengthen and condition your muscles to aid with the sports you love....and much more......give it a go, your first class is a free taster.

🟥 Email Larissa for more information on
[email protected] or [email protected]

💚POSTNATAL MUM & BABY PILATES CLASSES

STARTING NEXT WEEK!

❤️Bishops Hull Hub at 11:15am on Wednesdays
💙Trull Community Centre at 11am on Fridays
🧡Babies from 6-8 weeks to toddlers welcome
💚Classes are mum focused to exercise
💛Contact me for a free taster class.

💜I'm a trained Ante and Postnatal Pilates teacher, I was trained by a midwife and I’ve had three babies of my own.
Having a baby is a major life changing experience which I fully understand and I aim to help you safely regain your core strength and general all over body strength and toning, aid in weight loss and teach you to check your diastasis recti.

🧡I provide weekly Pilates classes giving you exercises and cardio training to help you regain fitness levels safely after childbirth

💚A friendly, relaxed atmosphere with all baby amenities and free parking outside both venues

💛For more information please email Larissa on [email protected] or [email protected]

In case you’re missing your Pilates over Easter - practice these!

Wishing all my lovely clients past and present a very Happy and peaceful Easter

Happy Mothers Day!

💚POSTNATAL MUM & BABY PILATES CLASSES

❤️Bishops Hull Hub at 11:15am on Wednesdays
💙Trull Community Centre at 11am on Fridays
🧡Babies from 6-8 weeks to toddlers welcome
💚Classes are mum focused to exercise
💛Contact me for a free taster class.

💜I'm a trained Ante and Postnatal Pilates teacher, I was trained by a midwife and I’ve had three babies of my own.
Having a baby is a major life changing experience which I fully understand and I aim to help you safely regain your core strength and general all over body strength and toning, aid in weight loss and teach you to check your diastasis recti.

🧡I provide weekly Pilates classes giving you exercises and cardio training to help you regain fitness levels safely after childbirth

💚A friendly, relaxed atmosphere with all baby amenities and free parking outside both venues

💛For more information please email Larissa on [email protected] or [email protected]

I’d love to see you!!

💜Looking for a new exercise class?
🩵Want an instructor who can tailor exercises to your needs?
💜How about trying our group pilates classes here at Medineeds, Taunton?

Group Class - £12 per class
Block of 6 Classes - £72

All classes run for 1 hour, we will begin with a postural set up, then a warm up to mobilise your joints, some balance work, standing cardio workout with weights, mat exercises aimed to strengthen your core, muscles, legs, upper body and glutes for a total body conditioning workout. The class will end with a cool down, deep breathing and stretching.

Classes are kept to a maximum of 12 clients to ensure that you can benefit from help and correction if needed. 🩵

Classes are held in our Praana Wellness Studio at No.2 Bridge Street.

Please bring a mat, a set of small hand-held weights and a resistance band if you have these items.

We practice Pilates in socks or barefoot and wear loose, comfortable exercise clothing. Please bring a water bottle to keep hydrated. 💧

📲For more information on our sessions, please visit our website.
📞To book a class or 1-to-1, please call 01823 277755
or email [email protected]

😉😉😉thanks goes to one of my lovely clients for this! 😂

Barre class cancelled this evening - so sorry!

Contact me directly or straight to Medineeds for these classes

📣Calling all Pilates-lovers and those who’d love to give it a try!
Last week Medineeds launched a brand new Pilates class in Taunton. We'll be waiting for you to stretch your muscles and minds at our stunning studio, located at No. 2 Bridge Street, Taunton. We're keeping our classes to a maximum of 12 clients and an hour of pure bliss each week.

To start, we're treating our clients with a free Pilates Class Trial Session. If you love it (and we think you will!), book a block of six sessions at only £72. We highly recommend booking blocks as we've noticed a boost in attendance rates.💜

Don't forget to bring your mats, hand weights, resistance bands or Pilates balls if you want to use them during the sessions, and of course a water bottle. Our first class is Thursday November 16th at 2 pm, so mark your calendars! 💙

We're delighted to offer a general Mat Pilates Class for All Ages and Abilities every Thursday at 2pm. With our growing client base, we plan to host more specific classes such as Postnatal, Antenatal, Over 60’s, Men’s and Barre.

As with any good thing, we need to lay down some ground rules. Clients must sign our Pilates Class Cancellation Policy during their first session, but no worries, we don't charge for cancellations. However, if a client misses a group class or cancels without notice, we won't be able to provide a refund or transfer the session to another date.

Lastly, we will need you to complete standard Pilates Consent and GDPR forms, as well as a health questionnaire during your first session. 📝

So, take a deep breath and let's get started on this Pilates journey together!

Happy New Year to all my clients past and present, may 2024 be a healthy and wonderful year for you all! 😘

👍🏻👍🏻

Wishing you all a very Happy Christmas 😘😘

Saturday, December 9th commemorates the 140th birthday of Joseph Pilates, the founder of the Pilates Method. Get to know the visionary that created the method that bears his name. https://bit.ly/3Te3zVv

To Keep in Shape : Act Like an Animal

So says Joe Pilates, a unique man with an unusual system of exercise called contrology by ROBERT WERNICK (Sports Illustrated, February 12, 1962)

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.

1

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.

2

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.

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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, andJoe 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.

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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.

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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.

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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."

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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.

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"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 ci**rs.

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"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.

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"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!"

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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.

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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.

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"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."

4

"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!"

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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"

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Sports Illustrated, February 12, 1962 by Robert Wernick To Keep in Shape: Act Like an Animal

https://vault.si.com/vault/1962/02/12/42197 #&gid=ci0258bf461016278a&pid=42197---071---image

February 12, 1962

Pilates classes starting again this week, choose from online or in person classes. Get in touch with me for more info!

Looking for some quality time with your baby? Then come and join me for the next baby massage course. Over 5 weeks of one hour sessions you'll learn some different techniques to bond with and massage your baby. As well as meeting other new mums in the area.

I'm moving these courses now to my new treatment room in the courtyard at Rumwell Hall.

Course starts Tuesday 31st October at 10am. Get in touch for more information and to book.

Pilates is a mind to muscle exercise programme - it’s not only good for your muscle strength, but also your brain strength!

I have a few spaces left for Mum & Baby Pilates classes on a Friday in Trull. Babies can be any age from 6 weeks. Your first class is free to try. Email Larissa on [email protected] for details and to book in