Your Feet Are the Foundation of Everything (Pilates Too)
Most people don't think about their feet until something's wrong with them — stiffness or soreness first thing in the morning or an ache that's crept in after years on your feet. It's easy to treat feet as separate from everything else your body does — the bit at the bottom that just carries you around.
In Classical Pilates, feet don't get that luxury. They're built into the method from the ground up, and Joseph Pilates designed apparatus specifically for them — the Foot Corrector, the Toe Corrector, and the 2x4 among them. These aren't pieces most people outside a Classical studio have heard of, let alone used, but they're part of the original repertoire for a reason: how your foot moves affects everything above it.
Even in a regular class, footwork already shows up more than people realise — the footwork series on the reformer, the pedal on the Wunda Chair. What's less common is spending real time on the smaller, more specific movements: the ones that isolate the joints and muscles most people have never consciously used, let alone strengthened.
For this workshop we'll look at bunions and hammer toes, and how big toe flexibility and overall foot strength affect balance. Balance depends on more foot mechanics than people usually give it credit for, and both of those come up often enough in the studio to be worth a session of their own. If you're dealing with something else entirely, bring your feet along anyway!
That's the gap Beyond the Class: Happy Feet is built to fill. Becky's leading the Pilates and apparatus side, working through exactly the kind of footwork described above. Jayne Drew, level 3 massage therapist, is bringing the other half: foot anatomy and soft tissue therapy, looking at what's actually going on inside the foot rather than just how it moves.
Neither side really works without the other. Understanding why a foot feels the way it does, and then actually doing the movement work to change it, is a different experience to getting either one on its own.
Beyond the Class: Happy Feet
Saturday 24 October, 12–2pm
£38pp, includes refreshments · Max 10 spaces
