Find Your Voice
Teaching Pilates virtually has been a very interesting experience. Of course, I can’t wait for my clients to come back into the studio, but the progress I am seeing (and my clients are feeling) from the mat work is amazing. I had to ask myself, “why are they seeing so much progress in this short amount of time?”
I put my Motor Learning nerd cap on, and it really got my gears turning thinking about this. I practice what I preach in my courses, so when I am teaching clients in the studio I tend to give a lot of verbal feedback, and rarely give manual corrections or demonstrations. However, I realized that sometimes I have deviated from strict verbal feedback, especially if I was tired from teaching a lot of clients in a day. I would cheat a little by relying more on tactile feedback rather than using my words. And so clients began to rely on that tactile feedback for their performance as well.
Now, since we are in a virtual setting, I have no choice but to focus on EXACTLY what I am saying. Teaching virtually is essentially putting my thesis (and case studies that I worked on in graduate school) into practice and giving me a series of data points around specific measurements. I can’t use manual corrections or tactile feedback, and I don’t use demonstrations at all when I’m teaching virtually, so I can track client progress in response to the exclusive use of verbal augmented feedback.
This is the beginning of Week 4 of virtual teaching, and here is what I have gathered so far from the experience: clients are getting stronger physically, but they also have a much stronger mind-body connection. I really believe that this stronger mind-body connection is what is driving their overall gains in physical strength. Motor learning research reveals how important verbal feedback is to learning a new skill, and how a student needs to participate actively in order to retain the learned skill. Relying on verbal feedback forces clients to set up their bodies on their own, as well as execute the exercise and the corrections on their own. In the process they forge a stronger connection between the cues to an exercise, and what it feels like to execute them step by step. Over time the brain is able to leverage neuroplasticity to create lasting change in the form of corrected and strengthened motor patterns.
Now this surge of strength and progress cannot be attributed to just speaking and giving lots and lots of feedback. Teachers who speak the most are actually the least helpful when it comes to a client being able to learn a correction and make neural changes in their brains. So what are you supposed to do--just talk less? That would be an easy solution, but it’s more complicated than that.
The way I’m presenting verbal feedback for my clients is systematic and unique to each client based on their level of understanding. I’m using a motor learning concept called bandwidth to adjust feedback based on predetermined error limits I’ve set for each client. Using this framework forces clients to stay highly engaged and take responsibility for connecting the verbal instruction to a physical outcome, and that is what ultimately strengthens the mind-body connection.
As an optimist, I try to find the silver lining in a terrible situation. Covid19 has upended life as we know it, and it’s scary and challenging for so many reasons. And yet I feel that virtual teaching is the silver lining because it’s keeping me laser focused on my clients throughout the day, and it’s forcing me to grow as an instructor. Of course, I can’t wait until my clients are able to safely come back to the studio and I can give them a hug, high five, or a pat on the back for doing a great job. However, it feels like I’ve come full circle being forced into a situation where I have to use all the verbal skills and motor learning concepts that I studied during my Masters program, and which I’ve translated into continuing education courses for the entire Pilates community.
Change is all around us, and we have an opportunity to use it for our growth. No matter how scary it feels, I invite you to step out of your comfort zone and analyze your verbal feedback. Are you setting your clients up for progress by giving them specific, tailored cues, or are you just verbalizing a script that you have memorized? Find YOUR voice, because during this time of uncertainty that’s the voice your clients want to hear.