For movement professionals looking to brush up on their anatomy background or for newbies looking to learn why Pilates is so successful at decreasing pain, increasing range of motion and strength, Dennis Martin is teaching an Anatomy Workshop at Functional Strength on January 15th and 16th.

In this 12-hour workshop, Dennis will be conducting a general anatomy and physiology overview, focusing on the musculoskeletal and the nervous systems. Participants will study healthy movement patterns and the specific anatomy associated with these patterns. Additionally, Dennis will look at common compensatory patterns established either through a traumatic or a chronic injury and learn how to unravel those compensatory patterns through muscular reeducation. Special focus will be paid to the spine, the pelvis and the shoulder girdle.

Schedule at www.functionalstrengthpilates.com

or call 303.589.8710.

Functional Strength offers a 12 week Weight Loss Program that incorporates nutritional counseling and Personal Training sessions. Instead of making a drastic change in how you live and eat, this Program will teach you how to make small changes to your eating habits and why these small changes will, over time, lead to a healthier, leaner you.

This 12 week weight loss program is designed to help you lose body fat, tone your muscles, and develop lifelong weight management habits. Because you will be incorporating small changes, it will be easier for people to stick to this Program after you’ve lost the weight so that you should have less fear of returning to old habits and gaining back all the weight.

There are 3 programs that you can choose from, pick whichever fits your needs. All include weekly individualized nutritional counseling, body fat and fitness assessment at the beginning and the end of the 12 week program, and private personal training sessions.

More importantly, every participant will have access to a computer program that they can use at home to count calories and make sure that they are following the program established by the nutritional counselor.

Most individuals who actively follow both the at-home and in-studio portions of this program will lose an average of 1-2 pounds a week.

Pilates Exercise Training works for Everyone!

Injury Rehabilitation:

Widely recommended by doctors and physical therapists, Pilates can help you to counteract the physical maladies associated with injury. By strengthening underdeveloped muscles and learning to relax overused muscles, Pilates can help create decompression at the joint, allowing for more healthy movement, increased range of motion and improved strength and flexibility.

Pain Alleviation:

Often prescribed by doctors as a form of physical therapy, Pilates can help you to manage pain. Pilates works well with general pain alleviation related to arthritis, scoliosis, sciatica, low back pain, and other physical maladies.

Pregnancy and Post Partum Fitness:

Pilates will lead to an easier pregnancy, delivery and will get you back to your pre-pregnancy shape. Pilates is generally safe during pregnancy.

General Fitness:

Pilates will increase movement efficiency leading to longer golf drives, smoother ski runs, more comfortable century rides and overall better fitness.

Injury Rehabilitation

Widely recommended by doctors and physical therapists, Pilates can help you to counteract the physical maladies associated with injury. By strengthening underdeveloped muscles and learning to relax overused muscles, Pilates can help create decompression at the joint, allowing for more healthy movement, increased range of motion and improved strength and flexibility.

Pain Alleviation

Often prescribed by doctors as a form of physical therapy, Pilates can help you to manage pain. Pilates works well with general pain alleviation related to arthritis, scoliosis, sciatica, low back pain, and other physical maladies.

Pregnancy and Post Partum Fitness

Pilates will lead to an easier pregnancy, delivery and will get you back to your pre-pregnancy shape. Pilates is generally safe during pregnancy.

General Fitness

Pilates will increase movement efficiency leading to longer golf drives, smoother ski runs, more comfortable century rides and overall better fitness.

Want to learn to teach Pilates? Functional Strength now offers Teacher Training! Check out the Education page at www.functionalstrengthpilates.com for a comprehensive break-down of the year-long Program and its requirements.

This is your opportunity to:

Be your own boss, Set your own work hours, Work in a casual, non-office enviornment, Help people achieve their physical fitness and rehabillitation goals. And, best of all, you are paid well to do it!

Live an active, healthy lifestyle while working in a growing field where your training can easily move with you.

Check out the website and call 303.589.8710 today for information.

Looking for a good Pilates instructor is like finding a craftsman in any other profession: You have to do your homework to find someone qualified and experienced. Unfortunately, these days you can hang out your shingle–Pilates Studio–without any teaching experience or education whatsoever. This is why it is good to ask a few questions of your local studio before you jump into privates or classes.

What is your background? This is a good first question. If you are talking to someone with experience, they may first tell you how they found Pilates; what it is about Pilates that attracted them to become an instructor; and (here’s the most important part) where they did their training.

What is the name of the Teacher Training program you did and how extensive was your study? There are a handful of quality Teacher Training programs out there. Some require a touch of anatomy, while some require passing anatomy tests and lectures with anatomy experts. Some programs encompass 250 hours of study, while some require a much greater commitment of 1000 hours of study. All of these thing make a difference. Ask about each of them.

Do you have training to work with special populations? This question is asking whether or not your prospective instructor has the background to work with people who are taking Pilates for more than general fitness purposes. Even if you are uninjured, it is nice to work with someone who is accustomed to rehabilitation work because they understand the body on a different level than someone who is just teaching the choreography of an exercise. And everyone has something going on in their body. Everyone.

If you don’t check up on what kind of experience your local Pilates studio has, don’t be surprised when you don’t get the results that you are looking for. You wouldn’t pay someone with no training to fix your car, right? Why would you trust your health to someone with a weekend “certification?”

Functional Strength is offering a client workshop series designed to take your pilates to the next level. Learn why its so important to be well-versed in the fundamentals and learn how perfecting those movements can catapult you to the next level of pilates training. Discover the building blocks of the work, figure out how to conquer your own body’s perceived limitations, and have a great time doing it.

Check out our schedule on the website. And even if you can’t make it to one of our workshops, talk to your pilates instructor and find out why working on the fundamentals can take you from an intermediate to an advanced level in your practice!

I always get asked by people, “If I start doing Pilates, how often should I come in to the studio?”

 Well, it’s like training for a 10K or a bike race. You need to start building strength and stamina and only after you’ve done that can you back off and just maintain the new-found Pilates muscles that you’ve trained. So, I usually tell people to come at least twice-a-week, if you want to see results, and three-times-a-week if you can. Then, after a few months, you can back off a bit, and come just once or twice a week. If you don’t take the time at the beginning to learn how to do it correctly for your body, with an instructor who knows more than just the choreography of the work, then you really won’t get to the point where you feel the difference that Pilates can make.

Also, remember that Pilates gains, in terms of understanding and strength, can be plotted on a graph as a staircase and not a flat incline. This means that you will have some periods of time where you are really questioning if you understand the work at all. You aren’t sure what you are doing wrong and you aren’t sure how to make it right. And then, after a bit of a struggle, you will make a breakthrough and your Pilates practice will transform. And so will your body.

Keeping up with your training and dropping in for private lessons to focus on your individual issues will help minimize your vertical climb on the graph. But keep in mind that you aren’t alone. Everyone’s been there.

In our new, larger Lone Tree Colorado space we are now offering Spin-lates, which is 1/2 hour of spin class and 1/2 hour of Pilates. I took Melanie’s Friday morning class last week and thought that I would get a good cardio workout and then just a touch of core strengthening. I was SOOO wrong!

The cardio is interval training. Making your heart rate go up, then down, then up again. This really got my lungs working, much harder than a nice steady jog, and it got my muscles pumping too. That was the part that I didn’t really anticipate.

By the time the Spin portion of class was over, my main muscle groups were so taxed that I didn’t really have any option but to engage my stabilizers and deep core muscles. I was so surprised that just 1/2 hour of Pilates worked my muscles much differently (for me it was a deeper engagement) than a regular hour long class.

Spin-lates is also fantastic for keeping your body guessing. Without constantly changing up your workouts, your body begins to guess what’s coming. Its harder to re-educate muscles without continually adding to and changing up a workout. So Spin-lates is a nice shock to the system.

Try it, and see for yourself!

I am often asked what is the difference between Pilates and Yoga. And I tell them that the greatest difference is how they are taught. Both Yoga and Pilates create length and strength in muscles. Although Yoga focuses on a deeper stretch than Pilates at the beginner levels, they both provide similar benefits when taught and done correctly.

And that is the key, when taught and done correctly. At Functional Strength in Lone Tree Colorado, our classes are small and we require some private instruction for new clients. This ensures that when a client is doing the work, he or she is doing it correctly for what they have going on in their body. Because almost all Yoga is done in large classes, a client may not have any previous interaction with an instructor and the class may be so large that the client can get no personal attention. This means that a client may or may not be doing the exercise correctly. Moreover, the exercise may be contra-indicated for something that they have going on in their body. Meaning that the exercise may actually be hurting them. Bad Yoga and bad Pilates can injure you.

Another problem with some local Colorado Yoga studios is the level of training of their instructors. Just as with Pilates instructors, it is important to make sure that the people you are studying with know what they are doing and have more than a weekend course under their belt.

Don’t get me wrong. I love Yoga. I practice Yoga. But I take the principles that I have learned in Pilates into my Yoga practice and that is why I can do Yoga without injuring myself. Otherwise, I would be just like many other people in the class, going for the deepest stretch without engaging my core or stabilizing muscles to hold me in an extreme position.

In this circumstance, just as with other activities, Pilates can make you better understand what Yoga is really about and it can help you to excel at it. More to the point, studying Pilates and taking that knowledge with you into your Yoga study can help you NOT to get injured in a Yoga class with 30 other people in it.

Most individuals have a total hip replacement due to pain associated with arthritis in the hip joint. Once the hip is replaced, it is imperative to strengthen the small, supporting muscles in the joint so that the hip joint has the strength to move safely in all ranges of motion. Because these muscles are most likely not strong, thus leading to the condition where arthritis was originally created in the joint, a hip replacement patient must not simply work on the large muscle groups.

Pilates focuses on the engagement and strengthening of these small supporting muscles by doing exercises such as leg circles. In this exercise, the practitioner holds the pelvis completely stable while moving the head of the femur in the cup of the hip. It sounds simple, but because most of us recruit our larger muscles for movement, keeping the pelvis stable will force the practitioner to allow those overused muscles to release. This takes some time to master but is very important in the creation of a stable, supported joint.

This principal applies to other joint operation patients, as well. Pilates is an excellent form of rehabilitation and on-going exercise.  Visit our new studio in Lone Tree, Colorado.