Red Thread of Pilates: The Mat – Study Guide
By Tracy Maurstad
Feb 14, 2018
There’s a mythical creature I call Nicc. Nicc is short for No Injuries, Compensations or Challenges. Nicc walks into your studio and wants to learn the traditional Pilates mat work. How and in what order do you teach Nicc the mat repertoire? Should you follow along with your copy of Return to Life – Joseph Pilates’ book with all the mat exercises? Good luck with that … the Roll Up is the second exercise. This is Nicc’s first lesson, and while he/she may not have any injuries, they’re not very strong. Following Joe’s instructions for The Roll Up likely isn’t going to work out well for Nicc. So, you teach Nicc a variation of The Roll Up. But which variation? (I know what you’re thinking … “that depends”).
OK, moving on to the third exercise in Return to Life … The Roll Over. Are you kidding me? The Roll Over?! Sorry, that’s not happening in any variation in Nicc’s first lesson. Down the road, it might be appropriate to teach Nicc the Roll Over. Two years from now the Roll Over might well be the third exercise Nicc does in his Mat workout, but not on lesson one. So, you skip the Roll Over and move onto something more achievable, a variation of the Single Leg Circle.
When teaching a client a new exercise, it’s often necessary to do some variation of the exercise, not the “full expression” of it, and the ultimate order of a mat workout (traditionally Hundred, Roll Up, Roll Over, Single Leg Circle, ….) is not the same as the order in which you’d introduce the exercises to a new client. This is true no matter what style of Pilates you teach. So, what variation is the right one for that client? And what should that order of introduction be?
Those are the questions answered in one of my favorite book about Pilates, The Red Thread of Pilates: The Mat by Kathryn Ross-Nash. In addition to detailing hundreds of variations, Kathi has taken all the mat exercises and assigned them a sequence number in which you’d introduce them to a client like Nicc. She calls this the “Add Next” number. Kathi also segments the entire repertoire into “threads” or families of exercises.
The threads help you adjust the order of introduction for your clients, because Nicc is mythical – most real-world clients require real-world adjustments. The Add Next sequence number is only a guideline as the sequence of introduction gets adjusted to suit the client. We all have exercises we’re good at (we love those!), and those that are a struggle. Understanding the relationship of the exercises to each other – their threads – helps you logically build a client’s mat routine. You continue to add new exercises in threads where they’re strong, but you don’t take them deeper into threads they already find challenging. Each exercise in a thread is like a toll booth to get to the ones farther down the road. If you can’t pay the toll that is the Roll Up, you don’t proceed to the Teaser. For instance, here is the Articulation Thread chart from my Study Guide. Can you see how these are related to each other?
So how do you begin to wrap your brain around this way of seeing the repertoire? At a workshop in 2016, Kathi suggested to a group of us that we go through her mat book one exercise per week, exploring all the different variations, in the Add Next order. Take that week, or even longer, learning the different variations to better understand why you’d select a particular variation for a client. That sounded like a great idea for a Facebook group, which I started, the KRN Red Thread Reader’s Group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/KRNRedThreadReaders/).
Posting the exercises for the group, going through my own study and answering questions from group members led me to create some helpful tools to help work your way through Kathi’s huge book. I wanted to make these tools available to everyone to do their own self-paced study of Kathi’s book. So, I wrote a Study Guide for it – The Red Thread of Pilates: The Mat – Study Guide. Amazon doesn’t like my nice long subtitle: “Tools to facilitate a deeper understanding and logical progression of study through the Pilates Mat repertoire as presented in ‘The Red Thread of Pilates’”.
Here’s how it works. It’s Monday morning, time to start a new exercise-of-the-week. Grab your copy of the Study Guide and see what exercise comes next in the Add Next scheme (Kathi’s book presents the exercises in Performance Order and there is no list of all the exercises by Add Next order, one reason the Study Guide is handy). Then grab Kathi’s book and turn to the pages indicated.
If you notice, The Roll Up takes up five pages in Kathi’s book – five! Kathi gives us 12 variations for the Roll Up, seven Building Variations (to build the strength and connections required for the Baseline Variation), and then another 4 Challenge Variations. Sorry, you need to have Kathi’s book to get the nitty-gritty details on all of those wonderful variations!
Let’s get this out of the way … Kathi’s book is expensive, almost $400. But her book isn’t just another Pilates mat book, it’s huge and detailed. Kathi was trained by Joseph Pilates’ student Romana Kryzanowska and she spent many years working with and learning from Romana. The variations she presents are tried and true variations she learned from Romana and other first-generation Pilates teachers. Think of her book as a comprehensive Mat workshop with one of the great teachers and practitioners of the Classical Pilates Method with the world’s greatest notes. The problem with a workshop is that there’s never enough time. You may learn a variation you love for your body or one that you think might help a particular client. But in a workshop setting, you’re lucky if you have a few moments to scribble some notes that hopefully make sense later. More often than not, by the next day it’s a blur. But now you have all the time you want and the notes are fantastic!
To explore the different variations, you can spread them throughout your workouts that week or devote one day to exploring them all. OK, maybe not all of them! Some of the Challenge Variations of even the early exercises are pretty crazy and may have to wait until later. [Side note: that’s another bonus – you’ll be building your personal practice as you go through the book]. Get together with a colleague and explore the different hands-on spots Kathi shows. Take special note of the “why” – the purpose noted for each variation. It’s all about the “why”. Kathi is very clear on this; the variations are not for variety’s sake but to address some specific need of the client. Feel how each variation assists or challenges you. Make some notes in your Study Guide, highlight some passages in The Red Thread. Don’t rush. You have a week (or more) to imprint these variations into your body and into your brain so you can call them up when the right situation arises. Begin to teach them, pulling the right variation out of your hat to suit the client. Make no mistake, Kathi’s book is about teaching the exercises, not just performing the exercises. At the end of the week, flip to the back of the Study Guide and check off the variations you’ve tried on the Progression Checklist. As you look through the Variation names can you recall them all? Do you know why you would choose one over another?
I hope I’ve piqued your interest to delve deeper into the Classical Mat work, or to apply Kathi’s approach to your Contemporary repertoire. It may be confusing at first as there’s a lot of information packed into its pages, but The Red Thread is a worthy investment – a world-class comprehensive mat workshop you can do at your own pace. And I hope my Study Guide helps you get the most out of that investment.
The Study Guide is available on Amazon.com and (in English) on Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de, Amazon.es, Amazon.fr, and Amazon.it
is an integrated health practitioner drawing from a wide range of study, certifications, and experience. Her numerous areas of expertise include flexibility, strength, movement, fascia, nutrition, psychology, Pilates and the Nia Technique. Tracy is a lifelong student of healthy and natural living. Her wide range of study and more than 30 years of experience give her a uniquely informed point of view on living life with spontaneous Zest and Pleasure. Tracy maintains a small private practice. She also organizes teacher trainings and publishes in the hope of helping many others achieve a healthy, happy and well-balanced life. Find her online at ZestAndPleasure.com