My Stretchy Pilates journey

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So this week I got my certificate to say I’m certified to be a Pilates Instructor! It seems like a pretty random qualification to have, and is not something I thought I would ever do, so here’s why and how I ended up doing it…

  As well as going to the main gym during summer, I tried lots of extra classes including Pilates and this really interesting class called Nova (a fusion of yoga and Pilates). I ended up loving Pilates and made it a weekly thing.


Coincidently, I got an email from Groupon the next week. I have NO idea how my email was subscribed to Groupon as I’ve never used it before, and normally I consider them as spam and put them into junk mail, but one caught my eye. It said ‘Pilates Trainer Professional Diploma’ and was a course you could take online to certify to be a Pilates Instructor. Long story short- I wanted to do something different in the few weeks of summer I had left, so I went for it!

You do the course on this website called ‘Online Academies’. The Pilates Instructor diploma had 8 lessons. Basically, whenever you finish a lesson, you do a multiple choice test just to make sure you’ve got everything in your head. You also have a tutor you can email if you need help, who I never used but it was good to have the option if I needed it.


Once you’ve done all the lessons, you do the tests. Once you’ve passed all the tests (at least 70% in each one) you’ve completed the course and you get your certificate.

The content itself varied from common sense to seriously hard- I had to learn the whole anatomy of the spine and the different spinal conditions, as well as hundreds of Pilates exercises… but it was worth it because now I have a qualification from it (which may be totally useless, I don’t see many job adverts for a Pilates Instructor) but still, I enjoyed it and it was something different to do.

So there you go, the story of how someone who had never done Pilates 3 months ago is now certified to be a Pilates Instructor! Online Academies has hundreds of different courses, so if you’re bored then I would recommend doing one. However, the courses are really pricey and honestly I wouldn’t have paid full price for the course I did, so thank you Groupon! Maybe those annoying emails aren’t so bad after all… but I am still going to work out how to unsubscribe myself.
                                                    

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