Saturday, 10/5 from 9am - 4:30pm (1.5 hour lunch break from 12 - 1:30pm)
Workshop Descriptions
Before the 1oos (3 hours, 9am - 12pm) :
Blossom assisted Kathy Grant's matwork class at NYU for 10 years. In that class, Kathy developed a vocabulary of warm-up exercises that came before starting the traditional Pilates matwork. Before the Hundreds are the building blocks to doing the traditional Pilates vocabulary. This is the heart of Kathy's work.
The exercises have a huge stylistic range, but can be easily assimilated into your teaching. Before the Hundreds includes warm up movements that will mobilize, deeply strengthen your abdominals and enhance your body awareness. After this workshop, you will have a new tool kit to get in tune with your body.
From the Feet (3 hours, 1:30 - 4:30pm):
The health of our feet is critically important, yet rarely discussed. Blossom will share the techniques she has curated over the years to strengthen, realign and stretch the feet. The movements come from her own teaching experience, Kathy Grant and other Pilates teachers.
In this workshop, you will see how the feet are the structural foundation for our knees and hips. We will use our eyes, hands, balls, towels and pads to connect to the feet while investigating their role in balance and strength.
We will also examine how the feet play a role in traditional Pilates exercises on equipment like the Reformer, Wunda Chair, Cadillac and Barrels in addition to learning strategies for how to better incorporate the feet into your everyday Pilates teaching.
Sunday, 10/6 from 9am - 4:30pm (1.5 hr lunch break from 12 - 1:30pm)
Workshop Descriptions
Kathy Grant Cats (3 hrs, 9am - 12pm)
Kathy loved cats and loved the way they moved. They inspired her to make up many different exercises based on their movements. You'll learn all of Kathy's “cats” and how Kathy used them to enhance the connection to traditional Pilates.
You'll discover that the principles, imagery and skills of the cats can transfer to other Pilates exercises both on and off the equipment. Kathy Grant’s cats are a wonderful way to warm up a group of students, assess a new client's spinal movement patterns and stretch without tension.
In addition, Blossom will share Kathy’s signature Matwork inserts such as her Laterals and Weather Vane that can be translated to many apparatuses. These exercises are favorite places to add a twist in order to challenge the body in a different way than the traditional Mat and demonstrate Kathy’s continued genius at work. Deceptively challenging these exercises can make a huge difference in your teaching and your client’s workout -- stimulating the brain and the body. This won’t be a whole new set of movements, but rather ways to mix up the “routine” of it all.
Connected Arms, Strong Torso (3 hrs, 1:30 - 4:30pm)
Finding the mental and physical connection to the extremities is important. As a Pilates teacher, it delights Blossom to hear someone talk about their torso when they are doing an “arm exercise”. The mind-body connection is a mirror for the arm torso relationship.
In this workshop, we will explore a collection of exercises from Kathy Grant combined with traditional Pilates that focus on how the arms attach to the body. We'll play with ideas on how to use the upper extremities to strengthen the symmetrical or asymmetrical torso and learn how to effectively implement these tools when teaching.