1)    You have got very specific goals – for example you have been told you need to strengthen your ankles, or you are recovering from a very recent injury. You would probably be best to have a face to face one-to-one session with someone who can create a custom plan for you. This is classed as Clinical Pilates. My Beginners Pilates course doesn’t focus on any one body part – it is working on building overall strength and flexibility throughout the whole body. If you have some specific exercises that have been given to you by a physiotherapist, but have been told to do Pilates to build overall strength, this course would work well as a compliment to that.

2)    You need the support of an in person Pilates teacher – someone you can ask - “Am I doing this correctly?” It’s impossible for me to give you any individual advice when I can’t get a 360 degree view of you doing the exercise or be able to give you hands-on assistance as you do the exercise as I would in face-to-face situation.

3)    You aren’t in the right place mentally. To make changes to your lifestyle, you need to REALLY want it. If you don’t REALLY want it, you won’t make the time for it and therefore you won’t see any benefit. I know how hard it is when you get home from work and you are tired, you’ve got home responsibilities etc. To succeed with completing the course, you need to schedule this into your calendar or diary and treat the sessions as though you’ve booked on to an in person class and are going to lose the money if you don’t turn up!

4)    If you think that completing the 10 weeks of this course will be a silver bullet – and then you won’t have to practice Pilates any more after that. Like other aspects of living a healthy life, Pilates is something that needs to be practiced on a long term basis to improve your overall wellbeing. In the same way as the benefits from eating healthily for a few months will be lost if you stop eating healthily again, it’s the same thing with this – to continue to receive the benefits you will need to continue to do the exercises, so at the end of this course to continue experiencing the benefits (and to continue to progress), you will need to continue to practice Pilates – either with me on my Intermediate course or at an in person class. If you stop practicing, the benefits that have been gained will be lost again.

5)    You are not realistic about the benefits – Joseph Pilates famously said that within 10 sessions you’ll feel a difference, within 20 sessions you’ll see a difference and within 30 sessions you’ll have a whole new body. My understanding is that was based on doing a 50-60 min session a day, so if you start at the beginning of Jan and you’ve completed the 30 sessions by the end of Jan you are clearly going to get different results than if you take until the end of July to have completed 30 sessions. You get out what you put in - so the more time you commit to your practice the better the results. If you aren’t going to make the time to do this, it will just be a waste of your money and I don’t want you to waste money – I want you to fall in love with Pilates and your new stronger and longer body!

6)    You just want to focus on juicy peaches – there are lots of workouts online that focus on building a juicy bum. As the muscles work in pairs, overwork of one muscle group in the pair (glutes in this case) will lead to a muscle imbalance which can result in problems down the line. Pilates as a discipline focuses on some of the smaller supporting muscles – and there’s very good reason for that! I’m not here for the latest trends – I’m here to help you build a balanced body, that can move well and avoid injury in the long term.

7)    You are in your second or third trimester of pregnancy. There are quite a few exercises in the course that are not recommended after week 12 of your pregnancy.