Maureen Shea

Maureen SheaPilates Instructor Movement integration is at the heart of Maureen’s movement teaching and practice. She has taught Pilates since 2004, originally training with Jacqueline Ethier in Fletcher Pilates® in Ottawa, Canada.Maureen graduated from Polestar Pilates’ Comprehensive teaching program in 2014, and has mentored teachers in training both in Hadley and Montreal. Maureen is also […]

How To Take The Boredom Out Of Planks

Planks are a favorite in the fitness world, and there is no question why. They are the superfood of exercises- densely packed with benefits.In its purest form, a plank is a position similar to the start of a push-up but held steady for a specific duration of time. While it’s a powerful, simple position to […]

Here’s a Quick Way to Improve Wrist Strength

One of the best ways to build muscle and bone strength on the mat is weight bearing exercises. The trouble is, wrists.Wrists commonly complain when they are called upon to support the body in positions like: hands and knees, plank, push up or downward dog. We can’t blame them. That’s a lot of performance pressure to […]

How to Fast Track Your Way To Mastering The Roll Over

The Roll Over is a challenging and complicated pilates mat exercise. Once you have a good amount of spinal mobility, and abdominal control the roll over becomes a restorative exercise rather than an ambitious one. Joseph Pilates believed roll overs could calm the nervous system and help you sleep better.Before you roll right into the […]

Here’s a Quick Way to Give Your Neck Some TLC

First it was good ole’ fashion mental stress. Followed by upper cross syndrome. Then we added text neck, and Laptop-itis to the problem. And just recently we have the Zoom hunch making neck and shoulder tension worse and more common than ever before. Prior to 2020 people spent, on average, 6 hours 31 minutes a day in front […]

Don’t Try Squats Without Doing These 3 Exercises First

Dormant butt, Dead Butt or Gluteal Amnesia. All unfortunate terms used to describe the same thing: weak glutes. Whether we sit most of the day or only stick to one form of exercise most of us aren’t properly using our glute muscles and more people than you think are experiencing this condition. Weak glutes can […]

3 Easy Twists For A Happy Spine

A lack of thoracic spine mobility means that the lumbar spine, pelvis, shoulders and surrounding muscles all compensate to allow you to move how you want to move. Long term, those compensations can lead to stiffness, strain, pain and injury.What causes thoracic immobility? Immobility. As a society we aren’t moving very much. We’re sitting in […]

How I Swapped Painkillers for Pilates

Janice, a 69-year-old retail supervisor, was fit, active and passionate about her job. When a back injury prevented her from working and made the simplest tasks difficult and painful, she was left feeling miserable and frustrated.I could barely move“I hurt my back at work right around the beginning of the pandemic. I could barely move. […]

When Taking It Easy Wasn’t an Option

Share 0 Tweet 0 Share 0 For 47-year-old nurse, Charlotte, long days and the heavy lifting of patients was starting to take its toll. She had started to notice the gradual build-up of pain on the inside of her elbow. More and more often, she would have to ask a colleague to help her with […]

Pilates Has Become an Unexpected Lifeline

Amy, a 61-year-old mature student, had finished her studies and was about to embark on an exciting new career in art restoration when the pandemic hit. “I was so disappointed.””I was due to join a small team of restoration professionals at my local museum, but due to COVID restrictions, the museum had to close to the […]

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