Transform how you teach

Movement specialist and owner of Movementality in Melbourne, Ashleigh Berry explains to us how we get our clients to move is just as important as what we ask them to do.

Pilates Journal talks to Ashleigh Berry

When was the last time you explained something in detail to a client and they looked more perplexed than before you started explaining? We’ve all been there. In this moment did you make the assumption that they didn’t get it, and that they were missing something? It may sound harsh, but if the client is confused, it’s more likely a reflection on how you’ve demonstrated or explained it, rather than something they’ve done wrong. Perhaps you said too much or overcomplicated the answer. Maybe it’s time to take a breath, revise your approach and try something different.

Pilates Journal asked Ashleigh Berry, movement specialist and owner of Movementality in Melbourne, for her insights into how we make clients move better. Ashleigh understands all too well the nuances involved in working with our clients and how we get our clients to move is just as important as what we ask them to do.
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By Ashleigh Berry

We are taught to be specific and detailed as teachers. And while it’s important that we understand the specifics and the details as practitioners, it’s not always our role to communicate all of that to our clients. It was when I realised this, that my approach to teaching came full circle.

When I first started, I explained everything in a lot of detail, almost as if I was trying to prove how much I knew. I wanted to appear qualified and knowledgeable, but looking back I now know I was wasting a lot of energy. These days I am much more distilled in my approach. I try to meet the client where they are, and give only exactly what they need for that moment, in that class. I keep it simple and direct. For example, this is your focus here (often giving them an external cue focus like ‘reach out as long as you can’) and I wait until they start asking questions and getting interested in their body before I add in any additional information.

By taking this approach the client is more likely to be open to a conversation and to want to learn more. It’s not imposed upon them, they’ve actually come searching for it. With this approach, I feel like I save energy and clients get much more out of their sessions because I am not spoon-feeding them every detail. They have to figure some things out for themselves, in an ‘implicit’ learning environment – let me explain more on that concept in a moment.

I took this approach driven by my desire to create the optimal environment for learning to take place. I had a background as a professional contemporary dancer, choreographer and teacher throughout Australia, UK and Europe. I was teaching Pilates at Movementality when I went to a workshop with Janet Karin about how people learn to move well. I attended another with Philippa Ziegenhardt focused on Carol Dweck’s mindsets research and it was these sessions that inspired me to build a workshop for practitioners and clients alike that detailed the best ways to learn. I wanted teachers, especially, to see how just a few tweaks to their teaching practices might seriously improve how well clients learn and retain Pilates movements and information and how life-changing that can be for the client and the Instructor.

Let’s take our learning environment as an example. Implicit and explicit learning environments are best described as unconscious and conscious learning environments respectively. Explicit learning is how we are traditionally taught at school. For example a teacher talks, we listen, we are told the information and are expected to retain it. We are very aware that we are learning something. Implicit learning on the other hand is where instead of relying on someone else to give you the information, you learn via your own sensory system. An example of this is learning to ride a bike. The focus is placed on what you are actually doing, for example, the action, and you learn through the doing of it rather than learning it cognitively.

This example really hits home for me because it took me until I was seven to successfully balance on a bike and now I know it was because I was trying to analyse it. I was anxious and nervous and trying to understand it cognitively, rather than feel my way. This can happen with clients too when we over-cue or talk too much, you’ll notice they’ll start asking questions like “am I doing it right” or “does this look ok?” and seem quite puzzled. This is your opportunity as a teacher to reflect and use your language, as well as other tools, to help them reconnect with their own sensory system, rather than worrying about whether we think they are doing it right.

Understanding internal versus external cueing strategies can also make a significant difference to our teaching. Research by Emma Redding, PhD and Clare Guss-West, MA* shows that cueing an external focus of attention is consistently more effective compared to using an internal focus of attention for performers and athletes. This is the case for all levels of ability.

So what is the difference between internal and external cueing? Internal cues bring your attention to internal factors with instruction often focused on body parts – so think muscles and bones. Guss-West refers to internally attentional cues as being “focused on the body parts”.

External cues, however, are considered more effective because they orientate your attention externally. They describe what is going to happen rather than how to execute it. They may be direction-based, or involve the use of imagery to give the person an idea or picture to aim for. For example if I was to cue a bridge, I'd focus on cueing with verbs such as "reach" or "pull" because they can cue an action and a direction. An internal cue may focus on the activation of hamstrings and glutes, whereas an external cue will describe the desired movement intention or the movement trajectory itself. I may just say “roll up through your spine and reach your knees to the wall.” This is super simplistic, but once I see the client follow that direction, I can address what is missing, rather than giving them lots of cues before they’ve started moving.

Once I started to practice external cues, I realised that my Pilates training has been mostly focused on internal cueing. This really rattled me, in a good way. I started to see how I needed to potentially change some of my own language around teaching exercises so that I could incorporate an externally focused approach at the right times.

If we take a seated roll back for example. An internal focus would perhaps cue abdominals and spine - which I actually think is very important for this exercise, don’t get me wrong. But to make it more external I could say “imagine rolling back like a wheel, keep turning the wheel under yourself when you feel stuck”. It uses an image and a direction, rather than any body parts. Contrastingly, for a pike on the Wunda Chair, I may start with an external cue “Imagine a ribbon wrapped around your waist and pulled you up to ceiling from this point” and then follow it with an internal cue to fine tune, for example: draw your sitz bones underneath you to access a deeper abdominal curl”.

I am still interested in incorporating both internal and external cues in my teaching, but the difference is, I am not setting them up with three or four internal body cues before they’ve even started moving.

The Research goes on to state the benefits of promoting an external focus of attention: improved movement quality, effectiveness and efficiency, enhanced motor skills (for example balance, speed, precision), improved learning capacity (for example the speed of learning and retention), greater cognitive reserve and autonomy in their learning.

In addition to this, during my time at The Australian Ballet School as a Conditioning Specialist, I noticed that external cueing helps performers and athletes to keep attention away from ‘self’ or a conscious body-part adjustment and more towards the quality and desired effect of their movement.

I still use a balance of both internal and external cueing, which is recommended. However, if I can see a person really struggling to grapple with an internal cue, I’ll switch it to an external cue and straight away they will grasp this concept more easily.

I try to make sure they are learning implicitly, through their own sensory system. You can do this with imagery, use of balance, use of breath and even by actually saying “copy this” and moving and getting them to watch you. These are implicit learning strategies. Then you can wait for a question, for example, “When I do that my back feels too arched, am I supposed to be that arched?” Now they are invested in your explanation because it solves a problem for them. The conversation is enriched back and forth, this is when I would ask them to try it again with new information and feedback to me the difference or contrast. They are doing the learning for themselves, we are not telling them what to do, we are facilitating their experience with points of info here and there, yet ultimately they are feeling their way through the movement experience.

There’s a lot to be gained from this approach. So what is my goal in trying to make our clients move well?

I try to meet the client where they are and give only exactly what they need for that moment, in that class. I keep it simple and direct.

Let teaching be a conversation, a dialogue. Both you and the client have a role to play. Let them ask questions but also give them space to figure things out on their own.

Be open to changing the way you do things. Just like anything else our teaching should evolve. Be curious by exploring different approaches. We can all learn to be better teachers by trying something different!

*2021 IADAMS (International Association for Dance Medicine and Science) conference

 
Ash is running a session Movers & Shakers series in June this year. You can find the full lineup of presenters this year via Movementality education.