"Gosh, I can't get away with anything, can I?"
One of my regular 1:1 clients says this to me most weeks, usually with a slightly exasperated laugh. He's on a screen, in his own living room, several hundred miles away from me and he still can't rotate his feet out of parallel, or let his hip rock back in side lying, or drift out of alignment in four point kneeling, without me catching it. He he!
I think a lot of people assume online Pilates is the watered-down version. Fair assumption, obviously I can't put my hands on your hip and gently correct it the way I could in a studio. That bit's true, and I won't pretend otherwise.
What people don't expect is how much you can actually see and correct without touch, if you know exactly what you're looking for and you're precise about how you say it. I got very good at this during Covid, out of necessity. A year of teaching entirely through a screen, with no option to demonstrate hands-on, forced me to get properly articulate about cueing. "Soften your knee" isn't the same instruction as "unlock your knee" or "let your knee release"....they land differently, and over years of teaching online I've learned which words actually get a body to move the way I need it to.
It also means I'm watching more closely than you might expect. No walking round a room half-distracted by six other people. Just you, on my screen, and me clocking every small compensation as it happens.
So if you've assumed online Pilates is a lesser version of the real thing, I understand why you'd think that. I just don't think it's true, at least not the way I teach it.
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