Fit & Bendy Flexibility Training

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08/27/2026

Here are three somatic movement practices I use for myself and with clients to reconnect my brain and body and reduce chronic muscle tightness.

If you’ve been following along you know I’ve been talking about muscle guarding — where your nervous system tightens everything up because it doesn’t trust your body’s ability to move safely.

Somatic movement is one of the most powerful ways to fix that. Somatic movement is a massive category of practices united by the goal of helping you become more aware of how your body is moving. It is shifting the focus away from performance and outcome goals in favor of really feeling the sensation of movement.

I used to resist any kind of somatic movement because I felt like all training had to be focused on performance goals and anything else was a waste of time. Now that I know so much more about the inner workings of movement I see how that mindset actually held me back.

I hope these three practices sound useful. They don’t take the place of something like Fledenkrais or Alexander technique but they are very simple and accessible and easy to fit into my daily life. Maybe they will work for you too!

More details in my free weekly newsletter. More info on the retreat with Kerri Kresinski and Sweet Retreats at Casa Chango Mexico for women and femmes over 45 in the usual spot.

Stretching isn’t always the way to manage chronic tightness. And I say this as both a stretching coach and lifelong addi...
08/25/2026

Stretching isn’t always the way to manage chronic tightness. And I say this as both a stretching coach and lifelong addict to the feeling of passive static stretching.

But the body is so much more complicated than that, and we can’t just keep doing the same thing over and over expecting better results next time.

Our brain plays an enormous role in determining our movement patterns, including whether a not a muscle is tight. Understanding the root causes of tightness can help us choose better tools to bring us relief and improve movement range and capacity.

I love learning this information and it has completely changed the way I coach and train. If you are also obsessed with flexibility and body mechanics, let’s need out together on the homunculus and neurokinetics and somatics and stuff!

My newsletter is where I get into the most detail. Sign up you know where 🤘

08/14/2026

I’ve been training and coaching flexibility for over 20 years, but this summer I was shuffling around the house like I was 90 years old.

I’d just had major knee surgery and even though my surgeon had cleared me to walk, my whole body felt like a haunted house. Every joint creaked and rattled and stuck.

And here’s the thing — I may have moved like an old lady but it wasn’t my age. It wasn’t even just my injury—because how would that effect my whole body?

It was my nervous system doing something called guarding.

When your brain doesn’t trust your body’s ability to move safely, it uses this strategy to keep us safe — it contracts all your muscles at once to keep you from flailing about and hurting yourself.

Brilliant short-term strategy. Absolutely miserable long-term experience.

We associate guarding with aging, that cautious, limited movement. Guarding can get worse as we age because the brain is getting less information from the body due to:

-reduced muscle mass

-reduced bone density

-dried out fascia

-poor eyesight or balance

-reduced physical activity

Less information means less confidence. Less confidence means more guarding. More guarding means you feel like a haunted house. And while we associate this with age, younger people may be relating to this too — especially my fellow hypermobile hotties out there.

The good news? This is not inevitable. Older bodies and injured bodies respond to training just like younger ones. You can actually retrain your nervous system to trust your body again.

I’ve been doing a deep dive into how guarding works and what to do about it in my free weekly newsletter - so if you want all the nitty gritty you know where to find it. Follow me if you’re also obsessed with understanding how to move better in these crazy meat suits!

Happy Bendings!

Nothing makes you confront mortality like feeling as if your body has turned into a creaky haunted house. We think of th...
08/10/2026

Nothing makes you confront mortality like feeling as if your body has turned into a creaky haunted house. We think of this as an inevitable part of aging, but in fact ‘guarding’ strategies can kick in any time your brain does not trust that you can manage your movement safely.

This can include after an injury or illness, because of sensory issues, or as a result of hypermobility related challenges.

There are ways to reduce guarding tendencies at any age, although they do become more important for older folks since we develop more of the conditions that can cause guarding as we accumulate mileage.

I’ll be talking about this a lot at Body & Vibe Over 45, a retreat I am co-leading with Kerri Kresinski at Sweet Retreats in November. More info LIB

Also I have a whole post about this in my free weekly newsletter where I can get more depth and detail. Also LIB.

Happy bendings fellow humans!

Aging is the inevitable result of not dying — a triumph, honestly. But it does come with some new physical plot twists. ...
07/09/2026

Aging is the inevitable result of not dying — a triumph, honestly. But it does come with some new physical plot twists. Swipe for what’s actually happening to your body and some useful strategies to combat it... 👉

Is staying strong and mobile as you age something that you’d like to learn more about?

07/03/2026

Never thought I’d end up in a James Cameron movie but here I am! Even better that Hit Me Hard and Soft The Movie captures one of the most beautiful experiences of my life: supporting the luminous and brilliant BILLIE EILISH

If you are looking for something to watch this weekend the movie is now available on streaming services. It really does a great job of showing not just the electric live show but all the work that goes into making it happen. Could not be more proud to be part of this world class team.

06/30/2026

Knee-hab update: I’m cooking

I haven’t been motivated to post about the humbling daily grind of relearning basic things like walking and standing but I’m do damn proud of this 10 lb Bulgarian split squat. It makes my foot cramp and my whole leg shake like an overloaded dryer but I’m doing it and I’m building and I’m not giving up.

Doc cleared me to get deeper into ROM so now working towards being able to sit on my heels and get active knee flexion which feels crazy because I haven’t been able to bend my knee or use my distal hamstrings for almost 8 months but what I have learned is that being a stubborn old goat pays off. 🐐

Bodies are amazing. Fallible and fragile and resilient and the only home we have for this lifetime.

Huge thanks to Dr Alex Weber and Elite OrthoSport and Aspire Physical Therapy my amazing duo Zoe and Preston. I’m so grateful 🤘

A few weeks ago I reposted an infographic about a recent study contradicting many of the claims made in the very popular...
06/18/2026

A few weeks ago I reposted an infographic about a recent study contradicting many of the claims made in the very popular book The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van der Kolk.

I really appreciated the study and its contribution to our understanding of trauma and its physical effects but some of you pointed out that the arguments made in the post did not take into account the importance of fascia in managing chronic pain.

Then Bendy Bodies from Linda Bluestein MD (hEDS / HSD spc) , which covers research and treatment of Hypermobility/Ehlers-Danlos, popped into my inbox with an article about how important fascia is in understanding the complex, seemingly unrelated symptoms for HEDS folks and I nerded out hard and wrote this week’s newsletter on fascia and pain.

The cliff notes: while fascia may not “store” trauma, understanding fascia is essential in the treatment of chronic pain and tightness. Historically we thought of fascia as just a scaffolding for muscles and organs, but it is actually packed with sensory nerves that are constantly feeding information to our brain. Fascia is also home to the interstitium, a network of tiny tubes that circulates all sorts of good stuff like hormones and proteins through every bit of our body. This means that the fascia is like our body’s fiberoptics system, providing essential communication that our brain uses to make critical decisions.

I go into more detail in the newsletter and provide links to some great resources, but the main takeaway is that the brain’s patterns may be the seat of chronic pain and tightness but the brain makes its decisions based on input from the body, fascia included. The divisions we set between “mind” and “body” aren’t always useful.

Hope this is helpful and yay for nuance

In my newsletter this week I am getting deeper into the potential harms of aspirational advertising that promotes the Pi...
06/03/2026

In my newsletter this week I am getting deeper into the potential harms of aspirational advertising that promotes the Pilates Body.

In my last post I talked about how the manosphere has pounced on the Pilates Girl trope as a coded way to indicate their idea of a desirable woman. Using fitness as means of control and restriction of women is nothing new, but it’s even harder to slip out from under these concepts when we do it to ourselves.

When we approach fitness it is important to understand what it can and cannot do for us. The fact that many people who do Pilates are skinny has much more to do with who feels welcome in a Pilates class than the ways that Pilates actually changes your body.

I’ll say it again: weight loss is a potential side effect of exercise. There is no direct correlation between working out and getting skinny.

I’m putting so much thought into this because Pilates is very important to me. I credit Pilates with helping me stabilize my joints, reduce my back pain, and prolong my performance career by many years. I want other people to enjoy those benefits in classes that are welcoming and don’t set up expectations that are impossible to fulfill. This is what I worked to create when I had a studio, and it is work I see happening in many other spaces as well.

You can sign up for my newsletter if you want my full exposition on this subject. And if you have thoughts or experiences, or people who love who are expanding the idea of who Pilates is for and what it can do, I’d love to hear them!

05/16/2026

I had coffee! And nothing pi**es me off more than a bunch of men trying to ruin something I love by making it all about them.

To be clear this is not a rant about people who love Pilates or about people who do Pilates every day or about people who are thin. This is not a rant about pop Pilates. I love Pilates and anyone who does it has my full approbation.

This is a rant about the way that the manosphere/patriarchy is perverting something I love and thereby making it less powerful and accessible for women and anyone else who could benefit from an exercise form that promotes stability, alignment, mobility, and all sorts of other good things that aren’t related to being skinny and palatable.

I think it is very important for all of us Pilates instructors and advocates to resist this use of our discipline as a dog whistle for fatphobia and male BS.

And since I know this will come up, exercise may contribute to weight loss, or it may not. Weight loss is not one of the adaptations that the body makes to exercise it is a potential side effect based on many other factors. Science.

Thanks so much to for the rant inspo. Always interesting and topical!

And as always

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