Bridging Across Classical Pilates : Finding My Pilates Teacher Training Home with The Pilates Center

Way back in 2003, I attended my first Pilates Method Alliance (PMA) conference. I was two years into my journey as a Pilates teacher, and the PMA was an incredible opportunity to learn from a huge cross section of early leaders in the industry.

One of my first teachers, Kerry Devivo, had completed her initial certification with The Pilates Center (TPC), so I was familiar TPC and its founders, Amy Alpers and Rachel Segel, by reputation. I sought them out at the conference. Their workshops gave me so much to think about in my teaching and my personal practice, leaving me eager to learn more.  I still use imagery from that weekend in my teaching, 21 years later!

Fast forward a few years, I opened my first studio, and my partner and I quickly realized we needed a teacher training program. We reached out to TPC, but bridging into their program at that time required a 6 month move to Boulder, which didn’t seem feasible. I ended up bridging with Power Pilates, where I had the incredible opportunity to learn from and be certified by the late Bob Liekens.

We became a Participating Training Center for Power Pilates and began to host cohorts of trainees. While I appreciated the organization and training at Power Pilates, I continued to take workshops with TPC whenever I could at PMA conferences and in Boulder. Every time, I left feeling inspired by their humanistic approach to teaching classical Pilates in a way that supports whole body health.

Their work felt very grounded in and connected to classical Pilates as I learned it, but they also had a level of curiosity, flexibility and openness to new information and individual voices that I had not found elsewhere in the classical Pilates world. They also encouraged every teacher to develop their own voice – honoring the value of the perspective of the individual teacher.

In 2011-2012, Power Pilates was acquired by a venture capital firm, and the early interactions I had with that organization felt cold and impersonal. Thus, when TPC announced that they would be taking their teacher training on the road, I jumped at the chance to enroll in their bridge program, traveling to Boston, Portland, Maine and Boulder to take the live lectures and to complete lessons and observation hours. 

As I completed my bridge program, CORE started to host TPC’s Licensed Teacher Trainers (LTTSs) who traveled to Atlanta to teach their lecture series. Bringing some of the most seasoned teachers in the Pilates industry to teach trainees from around the southeast was an honor.

By 2014, my trainees were among the first to experience TPC’s online teacher training program…they sent videos of the formal lecture series back and forth and supplemented the online work with TPC’s teachers coming to visit CORE’s studios. At the end of their programs, my trainees made visits to the “mothership” studio in Boulder to get their certification.

Over the years, TPC moved from DVDs to iTPC, their university-grade online learning system. The transition of the lecture series to an on-demand learning format allowed Amy and Rachel to document and preserve their work, and created a consistent experience that allows many types of trainees to engage with their teacher training program. It also made TPC well positioned to pivot smoothly when COVID hit. 

After nearly 10 years of serving as a Host Advisor to trainees, I became a Licensed Teacher Trainer (LTT) in 2023. As an LTT, I can both guide trainees through the program and complete their testing requirements to complete the program in Atlanta instead of sending my trainees to Boulder for testing.

Even aside from the advantage of having iTPC during COVID, I love TPC’s hybrid online/in person mentorship format. The benefits for trainees are extensive:

• you can complete their lecture hours at your own pace, working around other employment or family commitments
• you the same information from the same source as every other TPC trainee around the world, instead of each lecture having slightly different information depending on who is teaching it
• The on-demand platform and archive makes it easy for you to go back and clarify questions when you are applying what you’ve learned during their practice teaching and as you are refining your personal practice.
• The optional trainee immersion events hosted by TPC allow trainees to meet others in the TPC community, making connections for support, learning and even future employment.
• Even though your “classroom” learning is online, your HA or LTT works closely with you to help develop your movement and teaching skills so you can apply the online learning to your in person hours practice teaching, taking lessons, observing sessions and engaging in your personal practice.

In addition to benefiting trainees, TPC’s approach allows me to be part of an international community of teachers. We are all committed to teaching classical Pilates as Romana Kryzanowska handed it down to Amy and Rachel in the 1980s. We share a common commitment to evolving as effective, impactful teachers of the original Pilates method and to use our teaching as a means to help heal the world. I love that I get to continue to learn and refine my skills as a teacher and as a teacher trainer as part of the TPC community.