It is that awkward time of year for yoga and Pilates studios. Schools are starting, and attendance in classes is falling off. Teachers, who had the summer off and were able to take daytime classes, are either back in their classrooms during the days, or preparing feverishly to go back to work. Parents, who had school-age children at home for the summer, are now free to go to the daytime classes they were missing but are still getting back-to-school duties managed. I expect them to start showing up next week

I too will be going back to school, but as a student and not a teacher. I have enrolled in the Pilates and Dance Conditioning certification program at Orange Coast College and will be commuting down to Costa Mesa on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I will be taking the Pilates Methodology class, the Kinesiology for Dance class, and a Gyrokinesis class. The latter two classes are taught by my long-time body mechanic Donna Place.

My objective in going back is not motivated by a desire to be a teacher, but more a desire to learn more about my body and the methods I can use to maintain and improve it. When I started practicing yoga six years ago I was frustrated by the lack of opportunity to ask questions in class. My solution to that problem was to do a teacher training program even though I had only been practicing for 8 months when I started. That was the perfect opportunity to ask those questions I had.

Now I have been practicing Pilates consistently at Pilates X Studio for over a year, and it is time to up my game!

With respect to my own training, my right foot still has not forgiven me for beating it up almost three weeks ago! I can now walk pretty normally unless I try to go too fast or too far. On Friday I managed to walk almost 1.5 miles without a problem, and that gave me some hope for extending my range.

Saturday, however, was a different story. I went to the Fit Expo at the Anaheim Convention Center to watch my training partner Anna’s sister Diana who was entered in a Powerlifting competition. Diana did great, winning the 60kg weight class. That’s her in the video with her final squat of 237.5 lbs. I think I got caught up in the rushing here and there, all on unforgiving concrete floors, and wound up hobbling back to my car after only a couple of hours. I do have an appointment with a podiatrist tomorrow and I hope he can assist in getting me back on the road to a full recovery.