About karin
Karin has been teaching Pilates for over 25 years. She received her original certification in 1997 from The Pilates Center in Boulder, Colorado. In 2012, Karin completed the Heritage Training, studying Cara Reeser’s offerings from her studies with Kathleen Stanford Grant, one of Joseph Pilates’ original students and a brilliant and innovative movement educator in her own right. She received a BA in American Studies, with an emphasis on dance from the University of California, Santa Cruz and a Certification of Massage Practitioner from the Cypress Institute of Health in Santa Cruz.
Karin has taught pilates in both Los Angeles and the Bay Area of California as well as in Boulder, Colorado. She now teaches in person in San Francisco and Oakland as well as over zoom and plans to be a life long student of Pilates and movement science.
what is pilates?
Pilates is a form of exercise that Joseph H. Pilates created to develop the greatest sense of balanced strength and flexibility in any one body that that body can achieve. Pilates named this form Contrology because of his focus on using the mind to control the body through what we now call mindfulness, breath, precision and other skills. Thus, not just improving strength and flexibility, but positive structural alignment and general well being.
Though Joseph Pilates, born in 1880, died in 1968, the power of his work lives on brightly. It lives on through his philosophy, the equipment he created, the choreography of the exercises he developed and through his lineage of students who were also students of his wife Clara Pilates, also an incredible teacher. Many of these students including Kathleen Stanford Grant, Romana Kryzanowska, Eve Gentry, and Ron Fletcher became pioneers of movement education themselves.
Pilates in its varied styles continues to be a vibrant form of exercise that is effective in improving one’s fitness, a complement to physical therapy, and also as a method of injury prevention, by educating students about movement and their own bodies.