By Kathryn Comperatore

If you dread doing planks and push-ups because of wrist pain, Wrist Assured™ Gloves, or WAGs, offers a wearable solution. WAGs, from licensed occupational therapist Paula Wilbert, are designed to ease pain and improve comfort for practitioners of Pilates and yoga.

WAGs features an ergonomic gel cushion inserted into the base of the glove, which is designed to help support the wrist. In addition to taking pressure off of the wrists, the insert encourages proper weight distribution in the hands. This pad raises the height under the base of the hand relative to the fingers, preventing hyperextension at the wrist. It is slanted to direct weight into the thumb and index finger while preventing overuse of the lateral heel of the hand. The arch-supporting pad has a V-cut out shape that prevents strain of the soft tissues of the hand, including the median nerve. WAGs also features a slip-proof grip on the palm and has sweat-absorbent liners inside.

Wilbert set out to create WAGS after recovering from a wrist injury; she noticed that she still had pain in certain weight-bearing positions in her yoga practice and felt that her wrists needed relief from the stress of those positions.

For beginning students and for those with wrist pain, WAGs are a helpful aid for loading the forearm and upper extremity correctly in weight-bearing exercises.

By Lauren Charlip

Pilates-Pro.com was unable to attend the Pilates Method Alliance’s Teacher Training Summit in Dallas on November 7-8, and we’ve been eager for information about the event. This week the PMA released a report on the meeting that’s now available here. We also spoke to PMA Executive Director Elizabeth Anderson and summit attendees for a closer look at the outcome.

The summit, which drew nearly 80 teacher trainers and program administrators from a range of Pilates backgrounds, was organized to “try to build consensus about how to move forward as an industry in terms of professionalizing,” Anderson said. At issue, according to the PMA, is the use of the word “certification” and the need to differentiate between the completion of a comprehensive teacher-training program and an industry-wide third-party credential. Currently, the word “certification” is used to denote both.

After many hours of group discussion, all but a handful of attendees left the summit agreeing to cease usage of the word “certification” to signify completion of their training programs, and signed a public commitment to change the terminology they’re using by July 1, 2010. Several well-known Pilates brands signed on, including Balanced Body, BASI Pilates, Fletcher Pilates, Polestar Pilates Education, Power Pilates and The Pilates Center of Boulder. Read the full list here, on the PMA report.

In 2005, the PMA launched an industry-wide third-party comprehen­sive Pilates certification exam (which, to date, is the only industry-wide exam). As a third party, the PMA has no commercial rela­tionship to the exam candidate or the training provider. This independence distinguishes a third-party credentialed certification from a “diploma” or a “certificate” earned at the end of a teacher training program, much like passing a state bar exam is different than graduating from a law school. Many people believe that adopting a third-party credentialing process is important for the Pilates industry as it professionalizes, and believe that professionalization is important because of the level of growth Pilates has experienced in recent years.

The PMA suggests in the report that schools replace the word “certification” with either “diploma,” “assessment-based certificate” (ABC) or “graduate.” “We recommend people do it in the name of self-regulation, so that the Pilates industry can get in line with ways that other professions behave and operate that are much more established than us,” Anderson said.

The American College of Sports Medicine released a fitness trends forecast for 2010 last week, and based on its list of projected top 10 trends, the outlook is great for Pilates instructors next year.

Pilates itself was ranked No. 9 as a standalone category, and two more of the ACSM’s top 10 trends have a direct connection to the work of Pilates professionals; core training and functional fitness were ranked No. 5 and No. 9 respectively. The ACSM’s No. 1 trend was ‘Educated and experienced fitness professionals,’ making this the third year in a row that trend tops the list. Other strongly Pilates-related trends on the list were personal training and strength training, though a Pilates connection could easily be drawn to any of the top 10 items.

The top trends were assembled from the results of a worldwide survey with nearly 1,500 respondents. Surveyors gave 37 potential trends as choices and then ranked returns, formulating a report on the top 20 that was initially published in the November/December issue of ACSM’s Health & Fitness Journal^®

The full top 10 list, with descriptions, is available after the jump.

By Alexa Thorson

Curves, Twists and Bends: A Practical Guide to Pilates for Scoliosis is a useful introduction to the topic from Annette Wellings, a Pilates instructor with major scoliosis, and U.K. master Pilates teacher Alan Herdman. The book is a useful tool for addressing scoliosis through exercise, both for those who have the condition and for Pilates instructors with scoliotic clients. Wellings makes it clear in her introduction that the exercises in this book “are not designed to restructure the curve,” but to enable the spine to be “as healthy and supple as possible.”

Wellings and Herdman have assembled a set of 34 exercises primarily focused on stretching and lengthening, that are appropriate for people with symptoms ranging from mild to severe scoliosis, and even for the general population. I often incorporate similar exercises in my mat classes to warm people up before harder Pilates choreography. This book does not address Pilates equipment or even the classic Pilates mat choreography.

Curves, Twists and Bends is structured in three parts. The first, called  ‘Understanding and Awareness’ is a straightforward, uncomplicated overview of the condition of scoliosis, and a discussion of curve patterns, with an explanation of how to identify different types of scoliotic curves, complete with drawings. It even includes a section on “the psychology of scoliosis.”

The second, called ‘Exercises for Flexibility and Posture’ establishes a set of exercise principles that Pilates instructors will find familiar, such as pelvic stability, balancing dominant and weak sides of the body, and de-rotation of the pelvis, ribs and spine.

The Pilates Method Alliance announced plans earlier this week to create regional and local chapters, a response to member requests in recent years. A new PMA Chapters Committee has been established, headed up by PMA member and certified teacher Andrea Jeanfreau, who brings 17 years of corporate organizational experience to the initiative.

PMA Executive Director Elizabeth Anderson said that regional chapters will create a better communication vehicle for the PMA and its membership, and an opportunity for board members to visit and have direct contact with the Pilates community. “We want to feel that there’s a lot of back and forth. We’re interested in getting direct and accurate feedback from membership about what they want from the PMA and how they’d like to contribute and what they’d like the organization to do,” she said.

The announcement was made in an e-mail blast that went out on Tuesday (which, in an uncanny coincidence, was released just about the same time we published a story on The Growth of Pilates Collectives). At the moment, Anderson says, they’re still working on structure and documentation for regional use, and putting together the affiliate agreement.

“We’ve had over 100 emails since Tuesday, from all over the country and all over the world,” Anderson told us yesterday. Internationally, Anderson said, the PMA has received inquiries from Italy, the U.K., Germany and Mexico, among other countries.

Jeanfreau, who is based in New Orleans, will be launching the pilot PMA regional chapter. She’s considering forming a Gulf Coast chapter encompassing in Mississippi, Louisiana and Georgia.

This is a big week for the PMA, which is also convening a Teacher Training Summit in Dallas on Nov. 7-8  in lieu of its regular annual conference.

The full text of the announcement, including contact information, is after the jump.

By Nicole Rogers

It’s been a little more than a year since Pilates-Pro.com reported on a Pilates collective forming in the San Francisco Bay Area in August 2008, but in that short span, something seems to have taken hold. Other regional collectives have surfaced across the country, and the Bay Area group—which quickly ballooned to the state level—is now taking its program national. These collectives were inspired by a desire to build Pilates community spirit or a local Pilates network, and some, on a more pragmatic level, organized for a shared business advantage. For all, the rewards of sharing information, comparing notes and pooling resources are only beginning. There is, after all, strength in numbers.

We were able to catch up with a few of these groups to bring you this update on grassroots-style Pilates organizing. Read on to find out what the various Pilates collectives are up to now. 

Support for the Business of Pilates
The Bay Area Pilates Collective, now known as the United Pilates Collective, was one of the first to materialize. It started in 2008 when Tracey Sylvester and Nancy Myers, owners of EHS Pilates in San Francisco, thought to hold a mixer for Pilates studios in the Bay Area. “We invited trainers and studio owners within a 25 mile radius to chat about business, and it was immediately obvious that there was a need in the community for this kind of support network,” Sylvester says. She and Myers, as business owners, saw a need for studio owners and independent contractors to share information, such as where to find a lawyer who understood the Pilates business or where to get good liability insurance.

by Mary Kay Hausladen Foley, PT, GCFP

Foley (r.) with a patientPilates instructors know well that the Reformer is an excellent tool to work on strength, flexibility, motor control and balance. For these reasons, the Reformer is also an extremely useful tool for working with people with multiple sclerosis. I have worked with a wide variety of MS patients over the last 23 years, as a physical therapist and as a Pilates Reformer instructor, in association with The Heuga Center for Multiple Sclerosis (the mission of which is to empower MS patients; its motto is “Can Do”). Some patients have such mild symptoms that an outsider would never guess that they have the disease, while others can be quite debilitated it. For the MS population, the Reformer can be invaluable for work on functional changes in areas where motor control or muscle function is compromised.

Multiple sclerosis is an autoimmune disease that affects the central nervous system. It is a chronic and usually progressive disease in which the immune system attacks the myelin—the layer of insulation around nerve fibers—in the brain and spinal cord. This leads to a decrease in nerve function, which causes symptoms that vary from patient to patient and in severity, such as weakness, fatigue, spasticity (a condition we’ll discuss later on in this article), bladder dysfunction, pain, vertigo, decreased balance, cognitive deficits and speech and swallowing difficulties. Because multiple sclerosis affects motor control, the majority of people diagnosed with the disease experience walking difficulty at some point. Research indicates that number is somewhere between 64 and 85 percent. In fact, 70 percent of MS patients report that walking is the most challenging aspect of their disease. Within 15 years of diagnosis, 50 percent of multiple sclerosis patients require assistance walking and, in later stages, up to a third of patients are completely unable to walk. More than 400,000 Americans have multliple sclerosis: most are between the ages of 20 and 50, and women are twice to three times as likely to be affected than men. Worldwide, MS may affect 2.5 million individuals.

Though Pilates exercise will not change the disease process, it can help people maintain strength and function longer than would otherwise be possible. There are, however, special considerations that a Pilates instructor should be aware of when working with someone with MS.