[00:00:00] Welcome to Pilates Teacher's Manual, your guide to becoming a great Pilates teacher. I'm Olivia, and I'll be your host. Join the conversation on Instagram @pilatesteachersmanual. Today's chapter starts now.
Hello, hello everybody. Welcome back. Lots of fun adventures for us today. This is a special episode because this past weekend was Momentum Fest, which is a super cool, three day Pilates, yoga, meditation, barre adventure and I had the [00:01:00] pleasure of attending this year.
Naturally, this was not an in person adventure, although it was originally the plan for it to be an in person adventure. I was hoping to be in Denver, Colorado this past weekend, but instead I was in my living room and my only regret, the only downside to Momentum Fest was that I could not clone myself so that I could attend more sessions because it was an absolute blast. The presenters were amazing. The energy was great, and that's a lot for a zoom meeting to have great energy, but it was really just such a fun time.
I am going to tell you all about it from the teacher perspective and really what you can expect to get out of Momentum Fest should you choose to head over there. I'm definitely going to be there next year. I chose to defer my ticket, so I was able to attend the virtual experience and then next year, hopefully I will be able to attend the in person experience as well.
Definitely check out my highlights from the weekend. If you go to the Instagram for the podcast @pilatesteachersmanual, I [00:02:00] saved all of the highlights. I took little clips of all of the classes that I took. So that's kind of fun. And you can also check out Momentum Fest, their Instagram @momentumfest. They did lots of highlights and shared lots of people's stories and pictures. And you'll definitely see me on there several times. I was, like as closest you can get to live tweeting it. I don't Twitter, so I live storied at, and it was again, just so much fun. It really did have that community experience. Every teacher that I reached out to, every presenter, I was able to connect with them on Instagram and thank them for their amazing classes. I'm going to tell you a little bit about the classes that I took.
And I just think that it's such a cool thing that all of the presenters were anticipating going to be in Colorado. And they all stayed on to be part of that virtual experience. And they actually, Momentum Fest had additional presenters who weren't even slated to be at Momentum Fest who were able to join because it became virtual.
You can hear even more about momentum Fest with my interview with Jessica [00:03:00] Valant. So season two, episode one is Special Guest Jessica Valant, where she shares a lot about her aspirations for Momentum Fest, why she created Momentum Fest. It really was a fabulous experience. So I hope you check out that episode if you haven't already done so.
So, let me give you the rundown of the classes that I took, kind of the reasoning, why I chose to take the classes that I did, and then some of the teaching takeaways that I got from them.
Something unique that Momentum Fest did this year was they did offer NCPT continuing education credits. So for the nationally certified Pilates teachers, they did offer continuing education credits this time. And again, from that interview with Jessica Valant that they don't usually offer credits because the goal is that you get to move and enjoy movement and not necessarily do it to check off your continuing education requirements. But this year has been a roller coaster. And with the cancellation of the PMA conference in [00:04:00] October, they decided to offer continuing education credits.
So most of the time you would be taking these classes just for fun. And of course you're going to have takeaways, but the goal isn't to get credits. This time around, however, we were able to get some credits, which is really useful if you were someone who needed to renew your certification and suddenly all workshops were canceled, I'm really thankful that they were able to offer that.
I did take part in all three days of Momentum Fest, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, the first class I took was with Carrie Pages. And she is amazing. She is phenomenal. She has great imagery. She teaches such a creative class. I know that she has her own like membership site platform. I've taken her Pilates Anytime classes. She really is phenomenal. Her class was on keeping it curvy and really about working with the natural curve of our spine. Lots of extension, lots of flexion, lots of just spinal mobility work that just felt amazing. It was a great way to start [00:05:00] momentum Fest. For sure. She did this really cool combination of moves, where she took saw into spine stretch forward and then there was like an extension that she threw in. It just was such a feel good class. Absolutely loved it.
The next class I took was with Jessica Valant on the power of YouTube. And that's definitely something that is on my list of things to do. Just like the power of YouTube as a search engine, that it's the second largest search engine on the internet, that your videos, unlike in social media, where your posts can get buried and it's very difficult to find them again, unless you're on your page. That a video that you posted three years ago is still as searchable and easy to find as if you posted it yesterday. She gave a really great tutorial on how to use videos, what, what set up you're going to need for those videos, what content, kind of key words.
And it's just another way to show your brand. And if you're a teacher, whether you are [00:06:00] actively creating your brand or curating your brand, like you still have a brand, regardless of your social media presence. And YouTube is a great way to kind of round out that. It gives people a little sample of your teaching before they either subscribe to your membership site, which Jessica Valant also has, or take your classes or sign up for privates. They kind of know what they're getting. So instead of doing a tutorial or a free trial, or even a consultation, you can just direct them to your YouTube site. There really are a ton of benefits for it. And Jessica Valant is just so cool. You definitely know that from her interview, from the fact that she put Momentum Fest together with her husband, like she is a really cool cat and it was great to do a workshop with her.
I took another movement class with Nikki Naab-Levy. And she is hilarious. I don't know if you've seen her on Instagram or her YouTube videos, but she is so funny. Her class was called posterior chain power. And she had this setup with resistance bands where you loop the ends of [00:07:00] both of your resistance bands. And then you have one on your arch and then one on your hand. So you've got this entire like band set up. That class was such a burn because just imagine doing a mat class with resistance every time you move. It was incredible and sweaty and a mess. And the whole time I'm sweating, I'm also laughing because she is so funny.
If you haven't taken class with her, whether on Pilates Anytime or her YouTube channel, I just recommend. I love teachers that are funny because humor really resonates with me. I had never done the looped bands before. It's super cool. I definitely do not have long enough bands. I made it work, but there was probably a little but more resistance on my movements than needed to be there, but it was so fun.
I attended the round table for change, which was a great panel with some incredible Pilates teachers of color. Maria Earle was on there. I don't have everyone's last name, but her handle is Pilates804. Her name's Danica, @get2werk is Mychelle. I'll link to all of their Instagrams [00:08:00] as well. @vonne_Pilates_ around_town was there, Roxy Menzies was on it, as was Jason Williams.
It was just really powerful to hear these incredible professionals just share their experience in the Pilates industry and just like in the world. I think that as a nation we're waking up. I mean, for people of color, this has been an obvious reality, but as a white person, you could no longer ignore what's going on just in the advent of social media with video. We've seen in the George Floyd protests that this is something that people are committed to making a change.
So it was really intense, amazing, important to listen to the stories, listen to the pain that these individuals were expressing and the unfairness and the prejudice, not just in the nation, but also in the Pilates industry. That the model for wellness is still [00:09:00] thin and white, and that's not everyone's experience.
There's a long way to go, but I could tell both from these panelists and the people who were attending that there is a commitment to change that there is an antiracist push as there definitely should be. And that there are things that you can do going forward just in your studio, just in your teaching, whether it's the language you use, the assumptions that you make, that just as an individual, there's a lot that you can do to make your studio a more welcoming and inclusive place. That was a really powerful session.
Next I took Anula Maiberg's keep it weird workshop, which I love Anula's teaching. I think that she's really cool and creative. She definitely had some Feldenkrais inspired movement. She did work in this workshop with a, like a yoga block, where you have a yoga block on the palm of your hand and doing things. Like if you're lying on your [00:10:00] back and you've got your palm of your hand to your ceiling, how do you roll onto your side while keeping the block on your hand? How do you move up to seated? How do you get to standing?
Right. And just really interesting ways of getting you to be in your body, that if you're doing the classical choreography of Pilates, it can become muscle memory. You know the exercises in the order that they come in. For me, I can tune out to some point because you know, what's coming next. Just by using this yoga block or changing the way that you move, changing your focus, it really forced your brain to make new connections and different connections. And it was a really cool experience.
There's like too many ideas. I'm just saying like, it's cool. It was great. But there are like so many things that I'm still processing myself. It was just this past weekend and just so many ideas to broaden what it means to move.
I took two more workshops on the [00:11:00] first day, one with Lorna Bennett called meditation for everyday life. And that was such a great reset. I have, I've taken three moving classes at this point and my body was beginning to feel a little bit tired. So this is a great reset. Some of the things that Lorna has said that really stuck with me. Thinking about your thoughts like weather, so you don't get attached to your thoughts as they're happening, knowing that anything you observed you are not. So if you can observe it, that's not who you are. That's just something that you have.
An image that stuck with me as being the surfer and not the wave that you can have emotions. You can have feelings, you can have experience answers, but you don't need to, to be attached to them. And just the idea that you can experience it without getting bogged down or stuck. She also defined meditation as doing nothing, but being with everything, which I think is a really beautiful way to think about meditation and I don't know. That just stuck with me.
The last class I took on the [00:12:00] first day was with Brooke Tyler on self becoming. She is a really neat teacher who has merged Pilates with Eastern philosophy and she did some really cool work, imagining your arms as your magic circle and really using your arms when you're doing things like the ab series or even things like roll ups, roll downs. That if you're using your arms as kind of an oppositional force, I thought that that was a really neat way to tune into your abdominals a little bit deeper because you have something that's resisting you.
And definitely that it's something that you can do in your mat classes, because it's not equipment specific. You don't even need to have a magic circle. You just definitely have arms. And then we can use them in a new way.
Coming up after the break, I'm going to be talking about the second and third day of momentum Fest and my overall impressions from the adventure.
[00:13:00] Hi there. I hope you're enjoying today's chapter so far. There's lots of awesome stuff coming up after the break as well. Please share this episode with your friends and followers and share the Pilates love. Now back to the show.
Day two started with the greatest workshop to start a day ever. And probably how I would like to start every workshop ever in the future. It was with Marimba Gold-Watts and it was called sole mates. And it was all about the power of your feet. And we started giving ourselves a [00:14:00] foot massage, getting some space between our toes and the space between our metatarsals. It was fabulous.
And just how awake my feet felt after that workshop, it changed the entire day. And I know that we start every performer class with footwork. So you are supposed to be waking your feet up, but this was like a whole new to level of awareness in the feet. We need to do more foot Pilates, for sure. It was great.
I took a class with Maria Earle, who is a second generation Pilates teacher. So she learned from Kathy Grant who learned from Joseph Pilates. So if you're interested in lineages, she is pretty tuned in. She shared great stuff, not just as a class, but also the way that Kathy Grant talked about breath.
The workshop itself was about breath, and that Kathy Grant used a lot of sound to really tune into the breath and get you to think about the exercises differently. So we did this thing called hissing cat. That was like a three part [00:15:00] exhale to sit from quadraped position to your heels. And you do like three short hisses and then a long exhale into child's pose. And it just felt amazing. Anytime you can take something and connect to it in a different way, in this case, using sound to feel your breath differently, it was just phenomenal. And that's another one that like, okay, now I've been thinking about my feet. I'm thinking about my breathing and you can really feel the difference in later workshops because you have this new awareness.
Jason Williams taught a barre class that was meditation and barre and Pilates and yoga. It was such an amazing combination of concepts. At first, I was like, I don't know if those things go together, but it really was delightful and incredible. One teaching thing that was amazing is he was able to snap the count to the hundreds and I can't snap that loud. So like I was doing the hundreds and then also very impressed because the [00:16:00] snapping was fantastic.
And the whole class was just using a chair as a prop for some of the barre exercises. But we did stuff on the mat. We did stuff with the chair slash barre adventure. It just made sense as you were doing it. I was like, this is fantastic. The whole time I was sweating and smiling, then also a mess and it was so fun.
I also took an amazing Afro funk dance class with Roxy Menzies. And that was the most fun I've had looking ridiculous because I aspire to be a dancer. I wish that I could see choreography and then just like do it in my body, but it doesn't always work out that way. But it was so fun and I can imagine that in person, it would be even more fun to have all of these people just moving and grooving together. It was a fun song.
Roxy is so fantastic. You just have a good time. I mean, I just love dance and it feels good to do things that you aren't necessarily great at and just do them because they feel good because it feels fun to [00:17:00] move in a new way.
So that was all that I did on day two, because I also had to teach a few classes of my own, but going into day three, I took a Pilates sculpt class with Delia Buckmaster and that was a fantastic cardio style Pilates class. And I gotta tell you, I'm not a huge cardio person. Pilates is my cardio, like running on the reformer is my cardio, but it was so cool.
So many different ways to use hand weights. I do incorporate it into my classes on occasion, and that was such a fun adventure. I took a barre class with Tracey Mallett and she is a trooper. Talk about like your teaching worst nightmare, she had a power outage in the middle of teaching and her like router died and she had like, restart it and like get the power to come back on ,and like in the middle of her class.
And she came back on without missing a beat, we kept going and a true professional. She did amazing. And she is also just like a fun, incredible teacher. All [00:18:00] of these teachers. There's a theme. These are amazing teachers.
I also got to take a class with Becky Phares on the power of imagery and she busted out every image imaginable. She had a rolling pin. She had a huge like ship wheel. She had a fan and tap shoes and just really giving you as a teacher, but also as a student, lots of ways to visualize the way the pelvis can move. Lots of ways to visualize the way the spine moves.
We did this cool plank thing where she was talking about pyramids. And what is your base of support? If you lift one leg, if you lift a leg in an arm by minimizing that base of your pyramid, you're adding this instability, you're adding this challenge. So cool. Definitely things that you want to sprinkle into your class when you're teaching, because not every visualization lands for every student, so you want to have options. You want to have lots of ways to talk about the spine so that it can connect with everyone in your class.
[00:19:00] The last adventure that I took was with Jessica Valant, where she wrapped up all of the classes. My favorite part was she just allowed some space for free movement to just move the way your body wants to move. And then she led a class last that had little snippets from all of the presentations. It was just a fabulous way to wrap up. We did have a dance party song, which is fantastic. I had my partner, we came in danced. We saw lots of both presenters and students who had their kids with them or their families with them. And it was just such a happy time. And I can only imagine how much more wonderful that's going to be in person next year.
Overall, Momentum Fest was fantastic. I was a little bit hesitant because. I knew that I was going to do it anyway, but you know, I've done a lot of zoom meetings. I've done a lot of zoom classes. I was, you know, a little concerned, like, what am I going to get out of this? And the answer is literally everything. You can get so much out of it, it being able to take [00:20:00] classes from these incredible presenters who you might not see because they're in New York and they're in England and they're in, like Maria Earle's in Barcelona. Like you may not be able to see them, but at a conference like this, you really can meet some of the top teachers and take classes and learn from some of the top teachers.
I did take some notes, but really not that many notes, which I think is kind of the point, the point is to just move and be in your body. And maybe I'll get more articulate about all of the incredible things that I was able to do in the classes. But even if I'm not able to take the exact choreography that I did in the classes and then share it with my students, Olivia as a person feels so much more joyful and so much more excited about movement because I was able to do this almost retreat-like experience and just be in my body and do great things.
I can't recommend Momentum fast enough as a [00:21:00] Pilates party, pretty much, for an entire weekend. I really hope to see you in 2021, I will be there, pandemic permitting. Yeah. Did you go to Momentum Fest? Were you there, hanging out? What did you think? Did you love it?
So I think that's enough gushing for one episode, but I really did have a great time do check out my highlights on Instagram.
I'll also be sharing more adventures from momentum Fest on Pilates Students' Manual this week. So you can check that out @pilatesstudentsmanual on Instagram and everywhere that podcasts live as well.
Thank you so much for joining me for today's chapter of Pilates Teachers' Manual, your guide to becoming a great Pilates teacher. If you lovde today's episode, subscribe and leave a review. You can reach out to me on Instagram @pilatesteachersmanual. Or send me an [00:22:00] email to pilatesteachersmanual@oliviabioni.com.
The adventure continues. Until next time.