Pregnancy and Pilates

You and I have had several conversations about doing something around women's health across the lifespan.

So I know that this pregnancy is not your only passion, but that you're very interested in women's health.

And as you said, in 2004, when you were pregnant, you used your own self as... as the experimentation for the platform that is Pregnancy and Pilates.

But that's actually an interesting concept in Pilates to date because we're such a young, relatively young industry that there was nothing Pregnancy and Pilates and then we all got pregnant.

And then there was nothing about menopause, but guess what? We all had hot flashes, right? Yes.

So we're all sort of writing the story in many ways as we're going through our own experiences.

Across your personal trajectory, how have you seen the conversation on women's health and Pilates change over the years?

I would say it's definitely much more out there now, both in a good and a bad way.

Like I feel like there's a real sort of pre- social media and post-social media era around what the conversation is, it's definitely much more out there.

There's a lot more people who are doing the work, I would say, both good and bad.

I think my biggest issue around women's health in general is the crazy stats, and you and I have talked about this, that it wasn't until 1994 that that the NIH actually put guidelines around including women in women's health trials of any kind.

And we were just treated as small men.

And I think that a lot of that has also been true in exercise science.

And so now what you're getting, I feel, is you're getting a generation of there's women physical therapists and trainers and biomechanic and scientists who are actually starting to do work around women's bodies and working out.

Which I think is, that's sort of where I, what I'm super passionate about is I'm myself not a huge... data nerd, but what I love is listening to people who go in and they're like, here, we looked at all these like PubMed studies and we did all these things and this is what we're finding out.

And I think the really tricky thing around this world, and this is true particularly in the world of exercise and what's confusing for trainers, it's confusing for clients, is that for everything that you read, there's something else that says, no, that's actually not correct.

So how do you navigate all of that information?

You know, it's really something that has been on my mind, I'm going to say, from COVID on.

We, you know, again, being a relatively young industry, we all took anecdotal evidence from our clients.

And we made applications and generalizations.

But now science actually is meeting us and that science is shifting and changing.

So how do we stay? How do we navigate that?

Well, I think one thing that we can do is I think there are a couple of people.

I've done a lot of my sort of continuing education in the world of sort of pelvic health physiotherapists.

And there are a couple of people out there whose work I really respect who are total data nerds and who are actually starting to do longitudinal studies and sort of seeing like what I don't know if works is the right thing, but really looking at the data of like if we're doing exercises.