Pilates with Tasha

13/08/2026

06/08/2026

I love sprinkling this series into my classes because we all need more back strength, rotator cuff stability and scapular retraction (hello, desk posture!) After all the sitting on planes and in cars that travelling requires, this one feels particularly good. For clients who struggle to kneel, I modify and put them on a short box. It’s a satisfying way to finish a class, and a real crowd pleaser.

16/07/2026

The brutal reality of being a single parent and teaching 30 classes a week is that self care is the first thing to go. My life is a lot of driving between studios, pacing around studios, setting out and tidying away props and machines, domestic chores, and childcare. Fatigue comes as standard. I’m as good as the next person at finding any reason why I shouldn’t get up and force my body to move and lift weights…It’s hot, I’m tired, my hip/knee/back is niggling, I need to send that email/mop that floor/water those plants, I don’t have the right bra (true story)…. but future me just called and asked me to stop sabotaging her. So here I am getting the work done before work; filling my cup so I can fill yours.

08/07/2026

The community we build here is one of the greatest joys of this job. I’m so grateful we can all come together in such a gorgeous space, and explore our unique potential. Each week I see bodies of all shapes, ages and sizes show up for themselves and share the journey with the people around them, and it never fails to move me. The job is physical and hard, but the laughter in studio, the little lightbulb moments of deepened understanding and the tiny wins make it wonderful. The cherry on top today was having in class, as the nature of our job means we often pass like shops in the night!

05/06/2026

Bits of a week. Grateful for: sunlight in the studio , learning how to make time for self practice and self care (even if it means getting up at 4am), and a job I love.

06/04/2026

Postcards from a week in Cape Town. Can you even call it a holiday if you did 12 pilates classes in 6 days? Answer: yes. Yes you can. Movement is often the only thing that makes sense to me.

06/04/2026

Postcards from Cape Town. Can you even call it a holiday if you did 12 Pilates classes in 6 days? (Answer: yes. Yes you can)

03/04/2026

Ok, the Gym…relationship status: It’s Complicated. At various stages in my life, the gym has been a place I could go to be utterly anonymous or very visible. As a young dancer, it carried a whiff of defiance as I lifted weights that could make me look less than light and wafty (not desirable). As a marathon runner, I mashed out miles on the treadmill and got lost in my headphones. I once met someone I loved in a gym. As a personal trainer, it was my office and yet I always felt a fraud on the gym floor, surrounded by brawny, often steroid-riddled men spitting out Latin names and figures with supreme confidence while passing not-so-silent jugement on women’s bodies or training form. But since discovering Pilates, the gym is none of that anymore; it is no longer a familiar space. I can no longer disappear into myself there as I could before: only a reformer studio does that for me now. The machines feel archaic and restrictive; they don’t flow with me. I count down the seconds until I feel I’ve spent a respectable enough amount of time and can leave. But I know my body needs to build muscle and gain strength at this stage of life, and so if I have to be in a gym, then it better be this one: the Vineyard hotel’s gym, which throws its doors open onto the slopes of Table Mountain and the well-loved gardens and permits you be to admire a jackal buzzard from the Stairmaster. I spent a happy hour there, doing weight stuff with a mandatory side serving of core stabilisation and didn’t count every single second. And the biggest win is realising that now I only care about two people’s opinions of my body: my own, and my doctor’s. And that freedom tastes good.