“Core and Cardio” Workshop with Gabe

Gabriel, is not only a personal trainer but he is also an actor with an MFA from Columbia University and a founding member of Magis Theatre Company. Gabriel incorporates his physical theatrical training into his fitness training. And that combination makes his approach completely creative and unique. His approach is not a quick fix or a fad but scientifically based for long-term sustainability.

Gabriel believes in an inclusive, unpretentious, straight-forward approach that addresses topics thoroughly in detail yet is easy to understand and employ. 

Fitness & Fun are not mutually exclusive and with discipline, dedication and unrelenting determination your goals are limitless. Feeling Fit and Fabulous go together hence Gabriel's creation - PHOENIX FAB FITNESS - Be re-born and join the Fun so you can be Fab for Life.  To learn more about Gabe visit his Facebook page.

Come Join us on May 2nd at 7.30pm at the Pilates Garage for a 90-minute “Core and Cardio” Workshop with Gabe. 

The cost is $35. You can sign up through your Mindbody account. Hit the Enrollment tab to pay and reserve your spot.

Core and Cardio (C&C) will focus on building a firm foundation of the Lumbo-Pelvic-Hip-Complex (your core) that compliments cardiovascular activity.  C&C utilizes the "Kinetic Chain Check Points" in proper alignment and technique, resulting in optimal functional movement for all fitness levels.  The Kinetic Chain is the integration of the muscular, skeletal and nervous systems for bodily movement. 

C&C will go through a series of exercises from the rudimentary to the complex that will create a strong core for high levels of endurance. C&C will conclude with a "circuit" (a series of exercises in rapid succession) illustrating how to incorporate these exercises into your daily routine.

Be ready to move and have tons of fun as all of Gabriel's workshops conclude with a fitness-cardio dance party!

Fitness and fun are one :-)

Gabriel Portuondo 

National Academy of Sports Medicine (NASM) - Certified Personal Trainer, NASM Certified Weight Loss Specialist , NASM Certified Integrated Flexibility Training, Fitness Instructor CKO Kickboxing

Follow his Facebook page, Phoenix Fab Fitness

How Pilates and Alexander Support Performers

Margi in the “The Millay Sisters”

Six years ago I met an incredible Alexander teacher who asked me what I thought an extremely personal question: "Do you consider yourself a sensual person?" It took a while to unpack that question, to realize that she was getting at "thinking vs sensing" moment to moment both in life and on stage. And that conversation opened up a whole new way of being in my body that changed me as a performer, and as a teacher of Pilates forever.

Some people in the world of acting and voice training have a very negative view of strength training and core training specifically. That is because so often fitness instructors encourage a kind of “brace here, hold here, now move” technique that makes their client very strong but also a little bound down and unable to breathe or speak freely. There is what we call in the Alexander world a lot of “end-gaining” in the name of fitness that lacks an element of awareness and taking care of the whole self. 

The idea that one could be grounded, strong and available without holding tension is one that is not so understood by many people and not so easy to teach either.

After three years of graduate school as an actor and my early experience with teaching Pilates, I began to realize that actors needed a core, but they needed a free one and for that matter so did just about everyone I know. That quest for a mobile core, along with an injury to my ribs in a rehearsal room, led me to the brilliant Chloe Wing where I studied the Alexander technique, and also to the Kane School where I worked with a number of very smart movers and Pilates teachers.

As I write this, I am getting ready for a performance of a two person show that is a cabaret, theatrical event, and play all rolled into one. It's a show I started writing and working on while I was training with Chloe and I feel she is still with me, still guiding me as we remount it years later at the Gowanus Loft: "The Millay Sisters." Chloe passed away two years ago but I know she is still listening. 

In this show, I play the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, an extremely intelligent but also sensual writer, a Pulitzer Prize winner in the 1920’s.  To have a sensual intelligence, to sense what the body is doing and to allow sound and expression to flow out through very precise poetic language and musical numbers is a challenge. It’s not so different though from the challenge of doing a knee fold without clenching the jaw or stiffening in the neck. It is about awareness: awareness of a habit, inhibiting that habit, and then directing into something that frees you. Make a choice to do something different, something that opens and radiates, rather than something that closes and drops away.

I would not be able to do the work in this show or to connect to the wholeness of teaching and training without this connection I found to the body via Alexander, and not only Alexander but the intersection of Alexander with the activity of Pilates. These two methods in some ways seem to be odds, but when given a chance to dialogue can bear fruit.

I spent this weekend teaching and taking sessions at a conference for actors and Alexander teachers from all over the country. The conference called “Freedom to Act” happens annually. I was given the opportunity to teach along with one of my colleagues from Magis Theatre Company, a training and actor-based company in New York City. We taught a class at the conference called “Awakening Your Text.” Its theme was balance: balance in movement, balance in the room, balance and core on a squishy ball, and balancing on your bones.” Oddly enough, finding balance is a very global way of freeing the body, voice and imagination. Here is what one of the young actors had to say at the end of the class: “I did this monologue from Walt Whitman in my Voice and Speech class and even then I got stuck doing the same thing but here it was just like there were words that popped up that I hadn't thought were as important as they were now, and then there were images that popped up in places and it freed me up in a completely different way than I had when I was at school. Even the squishy ball. I just loved the squishy ball! We talk a lot about freeing the body and opening ourselves up...and just rolling the pelvis around on the ball and doing the clock...that alone just freed me up. I have a lot of tension in my chest and even that is open and available."

I think that sums it up.

We all want to feel free, open and strong both as performers and people. Getting there is a creative process and different for all. For me, this combination of Alexander, Pilates and performance has helped me get a closer connection to the golden thread of radiant energy.

An Interview with Jonathan Janis, dancer and somatic coach, and Margi Douglas

MARGI: What have been your strongest influences as a mover and a teacher and what excites you about them?

JONATHAN: 

1. partner dance with a teacher who opened the doors to the psychosomatic connection
2. ideokinesis/ biomechanics - the ability to change the body with imagery
3. qi gong - I’ll tell a brief story of my qi gong teacher.  He has combined Jungian archetypal imagery with traditional qi gong movements, in order to form new movements that were expressions of his inner psyche.  In this way, I saw the possibility of everything my earlier study had pointed towards -- the ability to work in the inner worlds using movement, and the ability to allow movement to be infused with the processes of the inner self (which I consider to be the fount of all true art).

These things still excite and drive me today, because they represent the utter dissolution of the mind/ body distinction.  They point to the fact that movement is emotional/ psychological, and psychology is physical/ developmental, and spirituality -- who knows?.  It leaves us with immense freedom to create ourselves in areas that previous generations have considered entirely static.  It points towards the existence of a self that could become anything we dream of.  It is radical in the most fundamental conceptions of ourselves and communities, and I find it to be in alignment with teachings of spirituality and the dissolution of Newtonian physics in the past century.  To possess our physical bodies in this way seems to represent the next great leap forward in human thinking.

MARGI: So combining all three it is really an inside to outside approach, would you agree? What do you find helps your students most to open up to movement on this level?

JONATHAN: No I wouldn’t agree... although I sometimes use that paradigm to explain.  To call something inner and outer is to remain in a body/mind paradigm, and is to say that I start with the mind, whereas others start with the body.  Everyone is always working with all the levels -- that is precisely what Pilates and Alexander technique do as well.  I am just calling more attention to the theory behind it all.  

It so happens that the class I’ve prepared for Pilates Garage is for Pilates-based movements, so I will be offering outer movements, and inner imagery.  However, I also have a private practice called Embody the Question, as well as a corporate consulting business helping management communicate more effectively.  I can assure you that not all my clients want to start on a mat!  With some people, you might say that I have an outside --> in approach, with others all outside, with others all inside.  Once again, it ultimately doesn’t matter what we do.  It’s about about how you engender change in a vastly mysterious human system.  What I strive to be is a “people whisperer,” always asking the questions that are relevant to elicit deeper experience.

I find the key to helping people open up lies in cultivating curiosity, ease, and always referring to actual experience.  If experience isn’t improving, I’m not satisfied.  I refer to children and their pre-socialized learning process all the time. Children are the most open, moldable, and curious people on the planet.  They are also largely the most rational: everything they do is based on what works, without theoretical or social pre-conception.  Until just recently, neurology claimed this was because the brain was somehow more plastic at that age, however the past decade of research has shown that we retain the ability to change at all times.  I don’t think the neurological studies have gone far enough yet, because I see that children have plastic minds, precisely BECAUSE they do things easily, effortlessly, and with joy and exploration.  This is why I’m currently collaborating on an embodiment workshop for children AND their parents in a Montessori school.  We will offer the children tools they can use to grow, but we will learn from the children HOW to best apply those tools.  A child isn’t scared to try something different, but they also won’t go along with something that doesn’t work.  That’s what I encourage in my clients - to take responsibility for their own experience!

I always start with what a client wants to change.  For some it is lack of harmony in a marriage, for others low back pain, and for others higher levels of embodiment in pelvic function.  Whatever the case, by de-emphasizing the “problem,” as a stuck entity and regaining curiosity, we can transform the “problem” into a guide, pointing us to a better future experience. 

An Interview with Caroline Feig and Margi Douglas on Feldenkrais

MARGI: What do you love about teaching and/or practicing Feldenkrais?

CAROLINE: I don't think anything has had as profound of an influence on my work (or self-development) as the Feldenkrais Method.  When you practice the Feldenkrais method, you learn to be able to feel so many things that most of us want to feel. In Moshe's words, "it makes the impossible possible, the possible easy and the easy elegant.”  

M: Ok I'm in! Sounds delicious. How do you usually begin with someone who has never done it? Is there a movement experience or a principle that feels like a starting place?

C: Typically, we start at 1A... The very beginning.   In Feldenkrais, there is a concept of meeting a person where they are, wherever that may be...  It can be so comforting when someone just lets you be you. I can still remember the very first time someone did that for me.  It was very powerful.  It made me feel safe and ready to learn. Then, from there on out, the work becomes more of a dialogue then an instruction.  And actually, "work" is a terrible word for it.  It's more like "play."

M: Ha! Ok so it is play. Do you find that people want to turn it into something else like "strength training" or "yoga" or even "pilates"? It seems very strange, to many people, I think to move in a playful way.  We all are so focused on wanting to do something well or to feel the "right" thing.

C: I couldn't agree more.  Often these ideas of "right" or "ideal," serve little more than a moment in time- like a pose in Yoga or posture with weight lifting. Then when it's time to transition, roll, lunge, swing a racket etc., our ideas of  "right" can actually inhibit our ability to move freely.  Feldenkrais thought that instead of "posture," which comes from the root "to post," the word should be "acture," from the root "to act" to reflect how we hold and use ourselves in three dimensional space.

I believe that there usually is, in fact, a right and wrong for most of us.  But often we forget that the "right" has to do with comfort, ease, fun, joy... a feeling of safety and security... something that just feels right.   Sometimes we don't even know what "feels right."  That's ok!  Feldenkrais is an amazing tool for that.

M: It sounds so freeing. So if I walked into a group lesson half way through what would I most likely see? Are people moving in unison or following specific choreography? What kinds of movement would I see?

C: Well, that is a sight to see!  You would most likely see a group of people hearing the same instruction, but doing what appears to be completely different movements!   And that is part of the method- each is aloud to have his own learning process... move in his own way.  A teacher rarely corrects a student’s movement.  More likely, a teacher will help a student to see what he or she is doing.  And then often, through the process of awareness, something really special happens by the end.  The group does tend to move in unison.  Almost in the way the “om” of the group can resonate more at the end of a Yoga class, the movement in the class starts to resonate too. If you’ve never rolled around in unison with a group of 50 people, I highly recommend!  

M: Thank you Caroline. I take your recommendation. And I am definitely looking forward to your workshop at the Pilates Garage! Come one and come all and get ready to resonate together!

---

Tuesday October 27th 7:30-9:30pm

Meet with the talented Caroline Feig, physical therapist and Feldenkrais practitioner, for this month's workshop entitled:

Unlocking the Jaw with the Feldenkrais Method

This workshop will focus on relaxing and and improving the movements of the face, neck, tongue and jaw.
 

Cost: $50
Reservation required
Please call 718-768-123
E-mail: pilates.garage@gmail.com
Location: 441 3rd Ave @8th Street

PC360 Margi Video

Clients at the Pilates Garage are experiencing a new wave of fitness and therapeutic training using the PC360 eccentric band system in combination with the Cadillac table. Caroline Feig, a physical therapist in residence at the studio, has developed a unique series of exercises that address common hip and knee injuries. She has shared her work with studio teachers and now some of those exercises can be integrated into your Pilates fitness session. Says studio owner Margi Douglas: “It is particularly useful when a client is bridging the gap between therapeutic work and fitness to use the PC360 straps prior to going into the Pilates springs or to help an advanced client gain a new awareness of an old Pilates exercise with a slightly different feeling of resistance, or turning something upside down. The results have been phenomenal, and students have reported feeling a dramatic change in support for a troubled knee or hip by the session’s end."

Spring into exercise safely and with ease after a long winter: Learn the Alexander Technique

TRADITIONAL ALEXANDER CONCEPTS IN A NEW LIGHT
One-time opportunity to work with Master Teacher Bill Conable for teachers and students of AT.

SATURDAY APRIL 25 & SUNDAY APRIL 26 - 1.30 TO 6.30PM

The birds are chirping, the trees are in bloom, and suddenly you have the urge to hop on your bike or jog around the park. You dust off your sneakers and off you go. Then… ouch!

While nature can bounce back after months of dormancy, people who are out of shape often cannot. If you have been inactive for a sustained period of time, then sudden or aggressive exercise can prove dangerous since weaker muscles and bones are prone to sprains, tears, and breaks.

According to the University of Maryland’s Baltimore Washington Medical Center, “Emergency rooms and sports medicine clinics see a fairly dramatic rise in sports-related injuries during the spring and summer months.”

Perhaps this year, you could give yourself the opportunity to notice “how” you are doing your exercise of choice, rather than just pushing through it.  The “how” of it is often so much more important than the quantity or mileage though it is hard for us to believe that.

What gets most of us into trouble is a habit the Alexander Technique world calls “end-gaining.” We see where we want to go and we rush to get there without taking the time to really go through the process. Maybe we’ve achieved the goal before so we don’t understand why we can’t just go out and do it again. 

At the Pilates Garage, I have started using the The AlexanderTechnique as a jumping off point for my clients in their pilates work but it applies to all activities. AT is a method that rebalances your mind and body, increases your awareness of good “use,” and promotes efficient movement, thereby decreasing your chance for injury. 

Recently, I came across some advice to runners from an Alexander teacher/running coach named Malcolm Balk. He gives workshops to runners using the technique. Here is his advice for runners. Read it carefully. Even if you aren’t a runner you will notice the language is very different than what our usual “end-gaining” idea of running would be:

• Lie down for a few minutes before you run to prepare mentally and to allow the spine to decompress. Keep your knees bent and put a few books under your head.

• Think “up” before you move forward. Most of us have a tendency to shorten and contract before we move - think about lengthening and expanding instead.

• Release your knees and ankles before you move. This may feel counterintuitive because we tend to clench them before action.

• Allow your knees - not your feet - to lead your stride. Trying to increase your stride length by extending the foot out further results in a braking action, while the body has to catch up with the legs.

• Don’t try to “fix” your posture by sucking in the stomach, pulling the shoulders down, tilting the pelvis or pushing the chest forward and up. This creates unnecessary tension.

• Run with your whole body, not just your legs.

• Don’t bend at the waist, but to take your weight slightly forward, to let gravity tilt you from the ground up.

• Look ahead, not down, and keep your eyes “soft”.

• Don’t expect to get it right all the time. “Even Roger Federer loses sometimes,” says Balk.

• Practice running very slowly. You’ll notice more about your style. Do you have a light or heavy footfall? Is there any unnecessary tension? How fast do your feet lift off the ground?

• Set goals. Having a realistic target or goal helps maintain motivation long after the initial thrill of becoming a runner is gone.

Enjoy the beautiful weather and remember to take your time as you launch yourself back into that next run around Prospect Park.