Starting Pilates again in September: what your first session back should feel like

The holidays are over, the school run is back, and the mornings in Harrogate have gone from bright to cool almost overnight. Something about that first proper week of September makes people think about their backs again. If you did Pilates before and let it slide in July, or you have been meaning to start for two years and this feels like the month, here is what I would say before you book anything at all.

Don't try to pick up where you left off

The thing that fades over a summer off is not strength — it holds up better than people expect. It is control. Your body forgets the positions: where your ribs sit, how to keep your pelvis still while your leg moves, when to breathe. So your first session back needs to be about reminding yourself of those things rather than proving anything.

In practice that means the springs come down and the repetitions come down, and we spend longer than you would like on movements that look simple. That is not me being careful about your age or your fitness. It is that a movement done properly at half the load is worth more than the same movement done badly at full load, and the second one is how people tweak something in week one and then don't come back.

The day after, you should feel like you worked. You should not feel like you hurt yourself. If you do, tell me and we will change what we did.

Three things worth sorting out before you book

Anything that started hurting over the summer. A knee from too many miles in Nidderdale, a shoulder from a summer of gardening, a lower back from a long drive to the coast and back. Tell me about it when you get in touch, in a line. If something is genuinely painful, get it looked at properly first — I teach Pilates, I am not a physiotherapist, and a session with me is not treatment or a diagnosis. If you are already under a physio or an osteopath, tell me what they have said and I will work inside it, and keep up the exercises they have given you rather than swapping them for mine.

How often you will honestly come. Once a week suits most people. Some come twice, some fortnightly, and fortnightly that you actually turn up to beats weekly that quietly stops in October. I would rather we picked something realistic in September than sold you a schedule you resent by half term.

When in the week it can actually happen. Sessions here are by appointment, 9am to 3pm, and clients travel in from Harrogate itself and from Knaresborough, Wetherby, Ripon, Pannal and the villages in between. The slots that go first are the ones straight after drop-off and the ones before school pick-up, so it is worth telling me two or three days that work rather than one.

What the first one actually looks like

You come to the studio, which is a room at my home in Harrogate set up for reformer work and nothing else. It is one to one — no class, no queue for the machine, nobody watching. We start with a proper conversation: what you did over the summer, what aches, what you want out of this. Then I set the springs from what you have just told me, and we work.

Because it is only the two of us, I watch every repetition and correct as we go. That is the part people underestimate. Most of the progress in these sessions comes from small things — a rib position, where the weight sits in your foot, whether you are holding your breath through the hard bit — and those are exactly the things that get missed in a room of twelve people.

We finish with something to take away. Sometimes that is a couple of movements for the sitting room floor. More often, in September, it is one thing to think about at your desk, because the single most common complaint I hear this time of year is a neck and upper back that were fine in August and are not fine now that the laptop is back.

If you have never used a reformer, or it has been years, start with the introductory session at £45. It is a full 55 minutes, with time at the beginning to talk properly. After that a single session is £55, or a block of five is £220, which works out at £44 each. Mat sessions are priced separately.

Call or text me on 07960 746480 with a line about where you are and what you would like to get back to, and I will tell you honestly what I would suggest.