X
Suzanne is a Pilates Practitioner (91490NSW) and co-Director of Pilates Fitness Institute (PFI) in Perth. She has over 10 years of combined industry and education experience and works hard to elevate the standard of education and grow a positive culture around lifelong learning in the Pilates industry. Suzanne is particularly excited by holistic biomechanical movement and has been strongly influenced by Karen Clippinger. She is also mentored by Sally Anderson, has presented at the PAA Conference, and delivers Continuing Education around Australia. She has served on the board of the industry’s peak body, Pilates Alliance Australasia (PAA).
Enjoy a deep dive into the Method as Suzanne brings her extensive knowledge directly to you in this dynamic Reformer Masterclass! Suzanne will take you through an hour-long Reformer Pilates workout that intelligently layers the mechanical function of the hip, balancing strength and stabilisation with range of motion and freedom. You’ll gain a deeper understanding of why these principles should be prioritised to optimise whole-body health, and feel fantastic in your own body!
Please note:
Please note that some events will be repeated, to allow for flexibility for you to join us live, online at a time that suits you!
From Boulder, Colorado, Amy Taylor Alpers is a hugely influential Pilates Practitioner who studied under Pilates Elder Romana Kryzanowska.
Amy fell in love with Pilates because of the way it felt in her body. After having studied ballet at the Julliard School for Dance and dancing professionally, she found that Pilates was able to correct a number of imbalances she had created in her body.
Amy and her sister Rachel both became Pilates Instructors in 1989 under Romana’s Kryzanowska’s watchful eye at Pilates Studio in New York City. Romana Kryzanowska had taken over Joseph Pilates’ Studio after his death, with the goal of maintaining the integrity of his teaching.
Amy primarily works as a teacher trainer and Educator, having founded The Pilates Center (TPC) in 1990, and their Teacher Training Program in 1991 which is known all over the world. She is passionate about teaching people to reorganise the body through the Pilates Method to promote efficiency and power in movement
Spend a full day learning with Amy Taylor Alpers. Your Day 1 all-access pass gives you access to both sessions on this day including:
Join global Pilates superstar Amy Taylor Alpers for a one-hour Reformer Masterclass!
This Masterclass is suitable for anyone with a minimum of two years of Pilates experience – long-time Pilates lovers, Students and experienced Instructors alike!
In this workshop you will explore the differences between the current versions of the original Pilates Reformer repertoire and the versions as shown in archival film footage and photography of Joseph Pilates teaching in the early 1940s. The subtle alterations and variations in form and choreography provide valuable “new” insights into the purpose and goals of the exercises.
From Footwork to Russian Squats, slight tweaks to the designs of many of the extant exercises powerfully reveal and clarify his intention, and thereby, help the practitioner better focus on the intended objective. Rhythm and dynamic emphasis are accentuated, and consequently, muscle power is heightened.
In addition to the variations on exercises with which we are already familiar, several entirely “new” archival exercises – ones many have never seen or tried before – will be learned.
Spend a full day learning with Amy Taylor Alpers. Your Day 2 all-access pass gives you access to all sessions on this day including:
Extending the Spine Through Breathing and Discovering the True Natural Path
Pilates students and teachers often ask me how I came to seem so fearless in enabling clients to find the right path to spinal extension when they are so nervous to go there. Join me for this fun and enlightening 3 hour workshop in which we will calm the nerves, and explore the process of helping you and your clients release any tension and fear that may reside in the spine, thus enabling it to extend – “blossom” – into its fullest expression of pure freedom and joy.
Breathing plays a huge role in freeing extension, as there are over 80 joints in the rib cage alone, most of them in the thoracic spine. Any tension, fear, pain, or confusion stuck in this area will absolutely block the spine’s ability to extend. In addition, each spine has its own unique path it must take, following the innate design of its amazing engineering. We will look at a number of different spines to bring awareness and understanding to those many unique ways it is possible to discover and experience each spine’s true natural path.
Join global Pilates superstar Amy Taylor Alpers for a one-hour Matwork Masterclass!
This Masterclass is suitable for anyone with a minimum of two years of Pilates experience – long-time Pilates lovers, Students and experienced Instructors alike!
As Pilates teachers our main task is to utilise the profoundly valuable exercises Joseph Pilates designed to help people achieve optimal over-all health.
In actuality, however, we are often confronted with clients who require additional help with specific issues that can be a little outside our comfort zone and even our scope of practice. Some of the most common ones we often face include: neck tension and pain; spinal pathologies such as scoliosis, kyphosis, bulging/herniated discs, sciatica; joint concerns including gritty/clicking/popping sounds and arthritis; tendonitis, hernia, migraines, digestion and sleep problems, post-surgical issues including joint replacements, mastectomy; and more.
This Workshop will cover issues from the above list as requested by those personally attending. Bring your questions, confusions, and concerns – maybe even bring a suffering client if possible – so we can address as many as time permits.
Consider revealing your own struggles with any of these problems too, so we can all benefit from actual ‘live’ examples to help us learn and grow as teachers.
Spend a full day learning with Amy Taylor Alpers. Your Day 3 all-access pass gives you access to all sessions on this day including:
Practical Anatomy for Pilates Teachers – Seeing the Body Better
Finding Your Centre through your Feet and Hands – The Pilates Fortune Teller
Does anatomy make you nervous? Have you ever felt you’ll never understand it? Never know enough? That it’s just too big a subject? Never fear – this workshop is for you.
Explore human musculo-skeletal anatomy in a totally practical, user-friendly, movement based, easy to understand way that will benefit every Pilates teacher who’s ever wished they
knew more. And all for the ultimate purpose of being able to help your client towards uniform development, one of the key Pilates principles.
Joseph Pilates was clear that Uniform Development was the goal of his work. Imbalanced, overdeveloped or under-developed muscles hinder the body’s ability to work well, leading to pain, dysfunction, reduced movement options, and ultimately injury. And certainly post injury or surgery, there can be quite dysfunctional muscle patterns that we teachers need to be able to help our clients with.
In this workshop, we’ll look at images, palpate muscles and bones, explore textural qualities of muscle tissue, and feel and watch it all move live, in real time, right in front of our eyes. You will walk away with confidence and tons of newfound knowledge that is easily applicable and valuable in your everyday teaching.
Join global Pilates superstar Amy Taylor Alpers for a one-hour Chair Masterclass!
This Masterclass is suitable for anyone with a minimum of two years of Pilates experience – long-time Pilates lovers, Students and experienced Instructors alike!
In Pilates we often focus a lot on the abdominals and the “centre”, but Mr. Pilates’ writings make it very clear that his work is about normal, natural, whole body movement – that we should move like the animal we are. In other words, our abdominals should not need to be arbitrarily and mechanically contracted and held, but rather be automatically activated through normal, natural, full body movement. Given our innate design as an originally four-footed animal, this automatic access should naturally occur through the connection of our hands and feet.
Our feet and hands constitute half of all our bones. Given that, the number of joints in each is also considerable – several dozen at least – and therefore the number of muscles and nerves proportionally greater as well. This is a simple way to recognise the value and potential available in fully utilising them. In other words, the strong connection from brain to hands and feet, and back again, is undeniably essential to our survival and to our health.
In this Workshop you will get to explore the Pilates exercises through the perspective of hands and feet better connecting to our brain and centre, to learn how to achieve the fullest potential of the movements to create whole body health.
Watching film of a cheetah running, we will discover how the feet/hands trigger the appropriate action of all other muscles to enable the most efficient, effective movement possible. In this way, breathing is enhanced and unimpeded, and movement more powerfully cleanses and re-oxygenates the body.
Spend a full day learning with Amy Taylor Alpers. Your Day 4 all-access pass gives you access to all sessions on this day including:
In this workshop you will explore the differences between the current versions of the original Pilates Reformer repertoire and the versions as shown in archival film footage and photography of Joseph Pilates teaching in the early 1940s. The subtle alterations and variations in form and choreography provide valuable “new” insights into the purpose and goals of the exercises.
From Footwork to Russian Squats, slight tweaks to the designs of many of the extant exercises powerfully reveal and clarify his intention, and thereby, help the practitioner better focus on the intended objective. Rhythm and dynamic emphasis are accentuated, and consequently, muscle power is heightened.
In addition to the variations on exercises with which we are already familiar, several entirely “new” archival exercises – ones many have never seen or tried before – will be learned.
Join global Pilates superstar Amy Taylor Alpers for a one-hour Matwork Masterclass!
This Masterclass is suitable for anyone with a minimum of two years of Pilates experience – long-time Pilates lovers, Students and experienced Instructors alike!
As Pilates teachers our main task is to utilise the profoundly valuable exercises Joseph Pilates designed to help people achieve optimal over-all health.
In actuality, however, we are often confronted with clients who require additional help with specific issues that can be a little outside our comfort zone and even our scope of practice. Some of the most common ones we often face include: neck tension and pain; spinal pathologies such as scoliosis, kyphosis, bulging/herniated discs, sciatica; joint concerns including gritty/clicking/popping sounds and arthritis; tendonitis, hernia, migraines, digestion and sleep problems, post-surgical issues including joint replacements, mastectomy; and more.
This Workshop will cover issues from the above list as requested by those personally attending. Bring your questions, confusions, and concerns – maybe even bring a suffering client if possible – so we can address as many as time permits.
Consider revealing your own struggles with any of these problems too, so we can all benefit from actual ‘live’ examples to help us learn and grow as teachers.
Spend a full day learning with Amy Taylor Alpers. Your Day 5 all-access pass gives you access to all sessions on this day including:
Creating True Integrated Whole-Body Movement – Pelvic Floor, Psoas and Breathing
Matwork Masterclass
Defy Gravity – The IntenSion of Suspension
Joseph Pilates designed every movement in his system to involve the ‘whole body,’ and to connect it in its entirety to and from its core/centre/powerhouse.
Do you move from your centre in a truly organic, whole body, integrated way? Are you able to assess whether your clients can – and if not, why not?
In this workshop you will utilise Pilates exercises to develop your visual assessment skills to determine whether movement is actually coming from ‘the centre’ correctly and efficiently, and if not, how to correct it. The ultimate power and health potential that can be achieved through Pilates is only possible when this integrated connection is accessed as its inherent human design dictates.
This Workshop will begin with an anatomy discussion of what constitutes our centre/core/powerhouse to better help us understand what we truly mean by these terms. This will include the abdominals, psoas, pelvic floor and diaphragm. Then we will explore how all these muscles work together in natural harmony through breathing correctly. This is how to create truly integrated whole-body movement.
Then you will look at Pilates exercises to discover the deep power of their design to organise and unite the body into a single moving animal through breathing and moving from the centre.
Come prepared to move, explore, discover, awaken and heal your deep core to create whole body integration.
Join global Pilates superstar Amy Taylor Alpers for a one-hour Matwork Masterclass!
This Masterclass is suitable for anyone with a minimum of two years of Pilates experience – long-time Pilates lovers, Students and experienced Instructors alike!
Haven’t you ever dreamed of flying – of floating in air with that weightless feeling of freedom and release from gravity?
Pilates can make that feeling possible. It is the anti-gravity system, designed very intentionally to organise your body so wisely and naturally that you literally feel lighter and truly do defy gravity longer. However, it’s often taught from a more careful, slightly fear-based approach of stabilising or holding parts of the body to prevent movement, especiallyin the case of injury.
Instead, we can learn to teach from the natural truth that enabling and supporting movement through the amazing suspension system we all have in our own bodies is actually what heals.
Utilising the profound natural laws of movement, you can learn to teach a client how to move – not stabilise – in a suspension field of amazing bones, cables and fluids todevelop the strongest, lightest, most powerful body possible.
The geometry of energy. In this Workshop you will discover how to teach the idea of suspension versus stabilisation.
Utilising Pilates Mat and Reformer exercises you will explore ways of reconnecting to the innate ‘tensegrity’ in our bodies. Tensegrity, the term coined by Buckminster Fuller, means ‘tensional integrity,’ or “the use of internal forces to overcome external forces, as in a self-supporting sculpture,” which defines this universal truth – a way of following nature’s design to achieve more results with less effort.
Just watch Baryshnikov leap impossibly high above the dance stage and seemingly float there for a moment – or Michael “Air” Jordan jump into the air and actually appear to fly across the basketball court to make a dunk – and you know it’s humanly possible.
And we all can do it in our way – we just have to reconnect with our own unique personal suspension system.
Spend a full day learning with Amy Taylor Alpers. Your Day 6 all-access pass gives you access to all sessions on this day including:
Join global Pilates superstar Amy Taylor Alpers for a one-hour Reformer Masterclass!
This Masterclass is suitable for anyone with a minimum of two years of Pilates experience – long-time Pilates lovers, Students and experienced Instructors alike!
Join global Pilates superstar Amy Taylor Alpers for a one-hour Matwork Masterclass!
This Masterclass is suitable for anyone with a minimum of two years of Pilates experience – long-time Pilates lovers, Students and experienced Instructors alike!
Joseph Pilates designed every movement in his system to involve the ‘whole body,’ and to connect it in its entirety to and from its core/centre/powerhouse. Do you move from your centre in a truly organic, whole body, integrated way? Are you able to assess whether your clients can – and if not, why not? In this workshop we will utilise Pilates exercises to develop our visual assessment skills to determine whether movement is actually coming from ‘the centre’ correctly and efficiently, and if not, how to correct it. The ultimate power and health potential that can be achieved through Pilates is only possible when this integrated connection is accessed as its inherent human design dictates.
This Workshop will begin with an anatomy discussion of what constitutes our centre/core/powerhouse to better help you understand what we truly mean by these terms. This will include the abdominals, psoas, pelvic floor and diaphragm.
Then we will explore how all these muscles work together in natural harmony through breathing correctly. This is how to create truly integrated whole-body movement. Then we will look at Pilates exercises to discover the deep power of their design to organise and unite the body into a single moving animal through breathing and moving from our centre.
Come prepared to move, explore, discover, awaken and heal your deep core to create whole body integration.
Spend a full day learning with Amy Taylor Alpers. Your Day 7 all-access pass gives you access to all sessions on this day including:
The Universal Reformer Then and Now – The Archival Reformer
Matwork Masterclass
This Workshop explores the differences between the current versions of the original Pilates Reformer Repertoire and the versions as shown in archival film footage and photography of Joseph Pilates teaching in the early 1940s. The subtle alterations and variations in form and choreography provide valuable “new” insights into the purpose and goals of the exercises.
From Footwork to Russian Squats, slight tweaks to the designs of many of the extant exercises powerfully reveal and clarify his intention, and thereby, help the practitioner better focus on the intended objective. Rhythm and dynamic emphasis are accentuated, and consequently, muscle power is heightened. In addition to the variations on exercises with which we are already familiar, several entirely “new” archival exercises – ones many have never seen or tried before – will be learned.
Don’t miss this great opportunity to expand your knowledge and understand your history.
Join global Pilates superstar Amy Taylor Alpers for a one-hour Matwork Masterclass!
This Masterclass is suitable for anyone with a minimum of two years of Pilates experience – long-time Pilates lovers, Students and experienced Instructors alike!
Uniform development inherently arises from the ideal, innately “true” timing of muscles firing to create healthy movement. In this workshop we will utilise the Pilates exercises and equipment to strengthen our depth of understanding of the precise timing required and to develop our visual assessment skills of these patterns and progressions. Mastery of these will help us determine how to accurately support our clients to achieve their most powerfully healthy movement choice.
Spend a full day learning with Amy Taylor Alpers. Your Day 8 all-access pass gives you access to all sessions on this day including:
One Size Doesn’t Fit All
Chair Masterclass
Bend, Don’t Stretch – It’s a Muscle Thing!
Body types are often referred to in fruit metaphors – apple, banana, or pear shaped. Or geometric forms such as rectangles, triangles, and circles. Or odd scientific terms such as mesomorph, ectomorph, and endomorph. However, the variations in the human body’s design are much more diverse and complicated than that.
In Pilates our mission is to help ‘uniformly develop’ the body – to bring it into ideal balance and alignment so it can move with ultimate efficiency and effectiveness, enabling detoxification and reoxygenation through unhindered circulation.
Regardless of both genetic programming and lifestyle issues, it is possible to enable any body to be more uniformly developed through Pilates. However, this doesn’t happen automatically simply by teaching them to do the exercises. It requires that the teacher truly acknowledge all the essential facts about the body in front of her/him, and realise that the Pilates exercises will need to be adapted in such a way that they will very purposefully accomodate all physical inconsistencies.
Proportions of weight, height and length, as well as relative tightness and flexibility, as well as male/female differences in distribution of mass will all need to be taken into consideration. It’s basically a physics problem. How do we make the Pilates exercises fit each person’s unique design to help achieve our ultimate goal – uniform development?
Join global Pilates superstar Amy Taylor Alpers for a one-hour Chair Masterclass!
This Masterclass is suitable for anyone with a minimum of two years of Pilates experience – long-time Pilates lovers, Students and experienced Instructors alike!
Joseph Pilates was a short, stocky, strong muscled man. He felt it was important to keep his strong muscles flexible. Consequently, in teaching Pilates we’ve been encouraged to use words like lift, reach, lengthen, decompress, and stretch.
However, often as Pilates teachers, we actually see people who are the opposite of this – they don’t need to stretch at all, but rather to make their flexible muscles strong. Constantly lengthening and reaching only pulls many people apart and puts tension and unnecessary stress into their muscles. These clients actually often need to contract or shorten their muscles, instead of lengthening them. That’s how they would truly build integrated strength.
Human movement is created by muscle contraction, so the mental concept of thinking “lengthen”, “reach”, “stretch” while you move is somewhat of a misconception. Muscles literally can’t do any of these things; they can only contract, hold a contraction, or release the contraction relative to another muscle contracting or a force such as gravity. In other words, they can contract in three ways – they can contract and shorten in length (concentric), contract while maintaining their length (isometric), and finally, release from a contraction (eccentric). So all movements, including all Pilates exercises, are actually an amazing, complicated combination of these types of contractions.
