Sue Ruffell Pilates

Keen to start Pilates. I have a couple of daytime. sessions for one on ones or duos in my studio in Kelburn. Either as a private or with two people
Maybe you just wake up with a cranky body or your knees or hips arent what they use to be. Perhaps your pelvic floor needs some attention or you just want to be more mobile and flexible.
I have 17 years of teaching experience that I would love to share with you.
Whether you aren’t quite ready for a group class or would like a more personalised approach I can tailor a session to meet your goals.
To find out more or to book a session please call 0277128434 or email [email protected]

#pilatesstudio43 #newpilateslogo #stretchbreathe. #deneffesigns

Pilates Studio 43 closed until
Monday 9 Jan
Thanks for a wonderful year of Pilates
see you all next year!!

Feet in straps.

Can Pilates help your feet?

We use our feet every day to get around. Some of us don’t acknowledge our feet until there is a problem. As we get older our feet tend to lose their mobility and flexibility. We often develop bunions, plantar fasciitis.
Everything starts from your feet. The feet are your foundation for balance and stability. As were lose connection with our feet stiffness and inflexibility often leads to shuffling and sometimes this results in a fall. Our feet contain a lot of nerves that connect through our legs, pelvic floor and back.
There is alot we can do to maintain mobility in our feet. Something as simple and rolling your foot on a ball . Picking up marbles with your feet just to name a few. We need to keeping moving stretching and exercising your feet.

The Pilates reformer and chair is a range of exercises (known as the Footwork series) These exercises help with alignment through the whole body that also work and stimulate all areas of the feet. Toes, heels and arches and calves. Feet curl around the footbar massaging flexing and curling toes stretch shins and calves.
Pilates can help you connect with the 33 joints , 26 ones and 207 ligaments in your feet. That’s just your feet imagine the possibilities for the rest of your body!

Do you want to feel better ?
Have more energy ?
Stop aches and pains?
Let me share my 17 years of Pilates experience with you

The M Word Pilates is a great choice for women approaching or experiencing menopause. Menopause is sometimes a challenging time in a woman's life. It's a time of physical, emotional and spiritual change. As a movement specialist, I can help support these changes and some of the symptoms associated with it For me personally not only has it stopped the mid section gain that started to appear but I feel smarter about my own body and it's needs. When to push and when to let if rest. As the body goes through the changes that we have no control over, Pilates is something we can proactively do that gives us a sense of empowerment. Pilates is for life !!.
Pilates has alot to offer, just to name a few:
• Strength training for bone health
• Cardiovascular workouts for hormone balance and weight management
• Balance exercises
• Stretching, breathing, and relaxation for stress reduction, lymphatic (these can facilitate improved sleep)
The Pilates method has emphasis on improved postural awareness. Pilates is known for strengthening the pelvic floor, which can help prevent bladder leaks. Pilates is a mind-body experience, just like menopause is.
If you would like to work with me to gain balance in your body using Pilates or would like more information please feel free to give me a call. I work from my boutique home studio in Kelburn. I offer one on ones using reformer, chair , mat and small props. Up to three students using mat and small props if you want to share a session with your friends. Contact Sue on 0277128434

This is why I’ve been working on your squats. Just in case you need to pay for the bus. Hehe

In Cluj-Napoca, Romania, you can pay for your bus ticket by doing 20 squats. A device measures the squats and issues a bus ticket valid for a trip in the CTP Cluj Napoca network (urban area). Disabled and elderly people can ride for free.

Even the coat hooks are flexible

Do you wake up with a cranky body? Maybe your knees aren’t what they used to be! Or perhaps you might just want to achieve better flexibility and strength. Does your pelvic floor need some attention? Pilates can help you build pelvic floor awareness , strength and connections in your body. Or maybe you might just want to know how to use that foam roller catching dust in your back room!
I have a couple of time slots available for private and duos are held at my boutique studio which is located in Kelburn . I work with mat, reformer, chair and small props to tailor a class just for you! To find out more or book a session please call me on 0277128434

Breathe In
Breathe Out
If you can breathe you can do Pilates.
Come along to my Boutique Pilates studio in Kelburn
I offer one on ones or duos
I can teach you how to move without pain and restriction
Let me look after you and and your body.

Do you wake up with a cranky body? Maybe your knees arent what they used to be! Or perhaps you might just want to achieve better flexibility and strength. Does your pelvic floor needs some attention? Pilates can help you build pelvic floor awareness , strength and connections in your body. You might just want to know how to use that foam roller catching dust in your back room! Find out what Pilates can do for you! New Term starts Monday 2 May. I have a few spaces in my regular timetable.
New Adult Group Pilates Beginners or for those of you who have had a break and want to get back on the mat . Tuesdays 930 am starting Tuesday 31 May for 6 weeks.
Group mat classes using small props are held at St Annes in Northland. Enroment essential
Private and duos are held at my boutique studio is located in Kelburn . I work with mat, reformer, chair and small props to tailor a class just for you! To find out more or book a session please call me on 0277128434
Enroment essential

Breathe In

Breathe Out

If you can breathe you can do Pilates.

Come along to my studio offering one on ones and and groups of two I can teach you how to move better everyday.
Let me look after you and and your body.

I have five spaces available from now until Christmas will one of them be yours? Call me on 0277128434 to book your movement bliss

All Group classes start next week and will run through the school holidays.

No walk-ins during level 2 . Please book your class.

Term 4 starts 18 October to 16 December.

COVID 19 LOCKDOWN
From 11.59pm Tuesday 17/8 until Friday 11.59pm.
The studio will be closed until next week.
Be safe and well

. Reformer has found its perfect spot . Students are loving the new space

Do you wake up with a cranky body? Maybe your knees arent what they used to be! Or perhaps you might just want to achieve better flexibility and strength. Does your pelvic floor needs some attention? Pilates can help you build pelvic floor awareness , strength and connections in your body. You might just want to know how to use that foam roller catching dust in your back room! Find out what Pilates can do for you! New Term starts Monday 26 July. I have a few spaces in my regular timetable.
New Adults Pilates Introductory/Beginners class is on Mondays 10.30 am starting Monday 9 August for 8 weeks
Group mat classes using small props are held at St Annes in Northland.
Private and duos are held at my boutique studio is located in Kelburn . I work with mat, reformer, chair and small props to tailor a class just for you! To find out more or book a session please call me on 0277128434
Enroment essential

Enjoy your holiday break looking forward to seeing you all on the mat Term two which starts Monday 3 May for 10 weeks

Looking forward to posting pics of my new boutique teaching space. All group classes will remain at St Annes in Northland

Heres a pic of some of your fav props just incase you miss them!

Hiya Pilates peeps we are all on our mats at level 2 following the same protocols as we did last time. Bring your own mats if you have one.

Adult Pilates classes.
Term 4 class starts Monday 12 October till 17th December.
I have 14 years teaching experience and would love to teach and share with you all I have learnt. If you are keen to find out what I can offer you please give me a call 0277128434 or email [email protected] leaving your phone number. I teach group classes from St Annes Church Hall in Northland and private one on ones and duos from my home in Karori.

No classes on Monday Labour Day Holiday . Relax and enjoy the break or do your own practice!

words for life

The Friday 30th August Pilates class 9.30am class is cancelled

Animal Rights Awareness Week! ;)

Sports Illustrated, February 12, 1962
©1962 Robert Wernick
Pictures by IC Rapoport

To Keep in Shape: Act Like an Animal

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

"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.

"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.

"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!"

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.

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.

"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."

"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!"

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"

Original magazine article here: bit.ly/Act_like_an_animal

Longer Exhalations Are an Easy Way to Hack Your Vagus Nerve

psychologytoday.com Respiratory vagus nerve stimulation (rVNS) counteracts fight-or-flight stress.

Term 1 Starts today. The mats are ready and waiting. Looking forward to seeing you all soon!

Yup thats why we do Pilates and ofcourse because its fun!

Do you ever pause to think about the chain reaction that occurs from poor posture? One small change each day to improve your posture can help, even if it just a minute of awareness or an hour in Pilates class!

No classes tommorrow! Time to relax and enjoy a day off or perhaps do your own practice

ATELIER PILATES

PILATES HISTORY

Yesterday I found the article published by the New York Times announcing the death of Joseph Pilates. I did copy the article exactly as I found it in order to be much easier to be read.

Ieri ho trovato l'articolo pubblicato dal New York Times che annuncia la morte di Joseph Pilates. L'ho copiato esattamente come era al fine di renderlo più facilmente leggibile.

No 7.30pm class tonight. 6.30pm intermediate on as usual

Well what an interesting class last night with the lightening; thunder and rain. What amazing students coming out in that challenging weather Feeling joyful to be able to teach you all