If you don’t know who Blossom is, I wouldn’t dare take away the joy of going down the rabbit hole that is pilates history - but I'll give you the short version. Blossom was Kathleen Stanford Grant’s protégé, training, assisting and teaching under Kathy, who herself was one of Joseph Pilates’ students. She later went on to be certified by Romana Kryzanowska. It would thus be an understatement to say that she is indissociable from the history and lineage of pilates as we know it today.

And yet, if you’ve ever taken a class with Blossom, you would know she is so much more than her CV. She teaches like no one else, with vivid imagery, intuition, and a quick sense of humour. Playful and grounded, she knows her pilates inside and out and shares it in a way that feels infinitely alive. It was a real pleasure (and a bit surreal) to pick her brain.

Here’s our Q&A.

Hi Blossom!

Hi!

You have so much experience under your belt. What has changed the most in your teaching since you started?

When I first started, I had a friend, who has now passed away, who teased me once as I was teaching someone. He went, “Anything else, Blossom?” I think back then I was like and then do this and then do this and do this. I think I was just trying so hard to make sure I got all the words out, and now it's sort of like, okay, pelvic lift, lift your hips up. Now I wait more. I want them to show me, so that I know what I'm dealing with, as opposed to let me tell you the perfect way to do it. That idea of perfection has also changed, it's more like, what is the goal here? What am I trying to do? What does this person need? I think before I was looking for perfection and now I'm looking for a little more.

You’re well known for your imaginative and innovative cueing. Can you give me an underrated one?

There's a cue that I just heard of recently, literally last week. It was from Irene Dowd, and she was just talking about the pelvis, and how we often are trying to cue it to go forward. In thigh stretch, for example, when people often have their pelvis just a little back, everyone wants to squeeze their butt and go forward. I’ve tried so many things, but she had this great cue : bring your sit bones forward. That’s it. I think it works because of the location of it, too, because it's behind and low. That's my new favorite cue that I've been using everywhere.

What’s your favorite and least favorite exercise?

My favorites are the really simple tell-all ones like footwork. It’s simple, but there's so much going on! I don't really have one that I dislike. In fact, I really try to make myself do lots of exercises that I don't like, because there's been lots of discoveries in them, like tendon stretch with one leg on the chair. 

Years ago, I had this client come, a very dear client, and she asked to do that one. We did, and I thought, actually, that was a really good exercise! So I try not to categorize them into like / dislike and I try to make my clients do them, but also myself, teaching-wise.

I also remember that Kathy, at one point, she would beg people, *please do the chair, because if you guys don't do the chair, I lose it. *And so that is definitely something that I try to do, making myself do kind of everything so that I don't lose it. There's always something to learn within all those harder bits.

I wonder what it was like to work under Kathy. What’s a mistake you made early on and never forgot?

Once when I was helping Kathy out at her class at NYU, she was running late or something, which was a rare occurrence. Usually I assisted her but that time I actually taught the whole class. She quietly sat there and watched me, which was nerve wracking. Bless her though because I knew she wasn't gonna embarrass me, so I wasn't afraid of that. I taught and after the class, we went upstairs and she went, that exercise, you weren't ready to teach that, were you? And I said, no, I wasn't.

And she said, honey, you can't be me. That was a hard one, because, you know, I love my Kathy Grant, she's still the GOAT as far as I'm concerned. But I was trying to be her, and in that moment, she released me, in a certain way. I realized that I didn't have to teach like her. 

The other part of it is that I knew the choreography of this thing that I tried to teach in front of Kathy, but I didn't know it from a place where I could help people who weren't understanding, where I could use different language or a different image to communicate it. 

So I guess it's twofold. You have to be you, but also, for me, to teach something, I need to know it on a visceral level. I need a very clear idea of what I'm trying to get them to do and what it means. That was a big lesson that I learned early on in my teaching.

Lastly, what’s your best piece of advice for new teachers?

I think people who become Pilates teachers go to it because they love doing Pilates themselves, but that's one of the big things that falls by the wayside. So you should try to make sure that, at least even once a week, you go take care of you. That would be my biggest advice, to just make sure that you keep a movement practice within that, once you become a teacher, because it's so easy to say, oh, I've got to run to that other thing. My movement practice is also finding teachers that I trust, and saying, hey, let's go and do this thing together. A friend of mine has a guillotine, and so I asked him, hey, will you teach me on that guillotine again? I try to dabble in those kinds of things when I have time. 

Blossom, where can we find you?

I have a tiny little studio on the edge of Brooklyn, literally. It's called Bridge Pilates and that's where I work physically. I also teach people online and I have my own streaming site, called Blossom Pilates, if you want to learn from me, virtually, because, you know, the world is big, and I'm just one person. I also travel all over the world, not a lot, but that is by choice and by design. 

Oh and people can always email me at bridgepilates@gmail.com! When it says ask us a question, it’s really just me.