We Speak Pilates

I’ve been teaching and doing Pilates exercises for two decades. Two decades in, the method is not the variable. The spring load, the reformer order, the overhead have not changed. What changes is who shows up and who I am for them that day.

Last year I set out to become an excellent user of Claude. Not because I wanted to automate anything, but because, at 44, I consider myself a native user of digital tools and here was a thing that answered me in sentences, and I had no idea what it was. It felt like standing in one of Yayoi Kusama’s infinity mirror rooms; light going forever in every direction and no floor, no ceiling, no walls.

I started where everyone starts: spreadsheets, audits, handbooks, copy for the studio. It was productive and it was boring, and it was boring because nothing was at stake. I audited my own habits and purchases. I built artifacts to automate my life and then forgot to use them. I made study guides for my son. None of it told me what the thing was or really made me better at understanding what I was.

Then last winter my husband and his team recovered the bodies of two drowned family members off our coast, a father and son. The boy was nearly the same age as our own. When they can, first responders put their lives on the line to save people in the water; when they can’t, they console the living, they retrieve the dead. A mother stood on the sand and watched the ocean “sneak” up and take her family, not knowing that the conditions that caused the accident are predictable.

I couldn’t stay silent. I wrote to the newspaper. I wrote to the parks department. I raised enough of a stink to force signage: “people have drowned here.”

Static signage wasn’t enough, so I used Claude to build a website that gives real-time conditions at Bay Area beaches. I am not an engineer. I’m a mom, a wife, a poet, a Pilates practitioner and an open-ocean swimmer. It was a slog and the UX still isn’t right, but the site exists, and it will tell you the period and swell height for the ocean you’re looking at. If there is a long-period swell that day, oceansafety.info could save your life.

That project taught me that the machine is available, patient, tireless, endlessly waiting. It doesn’t know what the ocean is, how a long-period swell shows up on shore, what a body is, or what it costs a father to pull someone’s son out of the ocean. Claude does not care if the site gets published just as the reformer doesn’t care if you get on. I had to show up every day, for weeks, badly, with no technical training; just a longing to save a life. The tool was never the variable. I was.

The Pilates method is not the variable. Nobody ever got stronger because the exercise was correct. The exercise is always correct; that’s what a method is. People get stronger because they show up and pay attention inside it, and stay present through enough overwhelm to find clarity. I can give you a perfect cue. I cannot give you the attention you bring to it. Attention and understanding are two things I cannot supply, and they are the only things that determine whether any of this works.

Which is why the best teaching is mostly restraint. The instructor who cannot stop cueing produces a student who cannot move without being told. If I fill every silence in this room, you will never find your own breath in it; you’ll only ever find mine. The hardest skill I have is knowing when to shut up and let you arrive. Twenty years and I am still working on it.

AI cannot do that. It fills every silence. It is built to. Ask it anything and it will give you a fluent, confident, immediate answer, and it sounds exactly the same when it’s right and when it’s making things up. There are no walls in that room. It will go as long as you go.

So I built the walls. I wrote it rules; over two dozen of them. “This room is mine.” “You don’t write for me.” “You are a thinking partner, not my proxy.” And Claude breaks my rules on the way to being helpful. I catch it, and the catching hones the understanding between us. The rules are nothing without the vigilance to protect them. I am the walls in this hall of mirrors. Not the machine, the method, the springs, or the cue that hits. This is true of an AI and it is true of a Pilates studio and I suspect it is true of most things people hand you and call a valuable solution.

So: can Claude make me a better teacher?

Nothing but time under tension can make you a better teacher. But it taught me, faster and more brutally than years of teaching did, that usefulness is somebody being present enough to hold a line, every single time, with no help from the equipment.

Claude has made me better at deciphering what I’m trying to invite you to do: show up, pay close attention, stay vigilant through the confusing parts. Some days are better than others. You are the variable. The tool is as skilled as its user.