Do you want to take your Pilates teaching to the next level while providing an exceptional experience for your students? Creating lesson plans can be precisely what you are looking for to keep classes fresh and engaging and help your students feel successful in their practice.
A few weeks ago I received a question from one of the PilatesBridge readers asking for help with lesson plan templates. When I posted this question in the PilatesBridge newsletter, Mara Sievers, the creator of Pilates Encyclopedia, responded with a link to her absolutely free Pilates lesson template. As a way to provide an even more in-depth answer to the question about lesson planning, I asked Mara to record an interview for PilatesBridge.
Here are the questions that we discussed during the interview:
- The benefits of creating lesson plans.
- How lesson plans can help your students remember the exercises and become more autonomous in the studio and at home.
- How lesson plans help build longer commitment in students
- The perfect “balance” between repetition and variety
- How often you should switch out lesson plans (spoiler alert, the answer is every 4-8 weeks.)
- The importance of knowing WHY you are teaching an exercise.
- How to bring excitement into student sessions by changing the FOCUS of the exercise.
- How to bring Flow into Pilates sessions (and should you?)
- Teaching easier exercises with depth requires more skill in making people feel it.
- Pilates exercises are too easy only if the student is not doing them right.
- The SIX blocks of the effective Pilates lesson (download the template here.)
- How to never run out of creative ideas that help your clients progress and feel successful.
Resources:
Meet Your Speaker:
Mara Sievers, NCPT, is the creator of Pilates Encyclopedia, a digital resource center helping Pilates instructors teach effective and enjoyable classes that their students will love. After owning a boutique studio in New Hampshire for eight years, she is now focused on gathering and sharing in-depth Pilates knowledge and organizing it to make researching Pilates exercises faster and easier from anywhere in the world. Her goal is to help Pilates teachers gain confidence for working with clients with various pathologies and goals. The Pilates method has been defining Mara’s movement experience since 1998 and has been a lifesaver more than once for her personally. Her body of work is her dedication to this awesome and powerful practice. Reach her directly at hello@pilatesencyclopedia.com