What Pilates CPD Should I Choose?
Improve Your Teaching Before You Extend It
Many Pilates instructors search for CPD courses that improve their teaching, extend their scope of practice and strengthen their long‑term professional development.
For these Pilates Instructors, Continuing Professional Development follows a fairly predictable path. We qualify in Pilates Matwork, add Reformer Pilates, perhaps move on to Tower, Wunda Chair or Barrels, and gradually accumulate additional specialist courses along the way.
There is nothing wrong with that progression. Comprehensive Pilates education can be an extremely worthwhile professional goal, and extending our knowledge and scope of practice allows us to offer considerably more to our clients.
But before choosing your next Pilates CPD course, there is another question worth asking:
Do I need to learn more, or do I need to become better at what I already know?
They are not necessarily the same thing.
More Pilates Qualifications Do Not Automatically Mean Better Teaching
Consider two Pilates Instructors who have completed exactly the same Matwork qualification.
One has subsequently developed an excellent personal Pilates practice. They regularly question what they are doing and why, observe movement carefully, adapt exercises intelligently and have developed increasingly effective cueing and communication through experience.
The other is competent and safe, but remains relatively dependent upon learnt repertoire. Their observation skills are less developed, their own practice needs attention and they do not yet have the same confidence in adapting what they know to the individual standing in front of them.
Now put both Instructors through the same Pilates Reformer training.
Both may successfully extend their repertoire and scope of practice, but the additional qualification itself is unlikely to remove the difference between them. We may simply end up with an excellent Pilates teacher who now also teaches Reformer and a less accomplished teacher with a wider range of exercises and Apparatus available to them.
A wider scope of practice is not necessarily evidence of a higher standard of practice.
For the second Instructor, the best Pilates CPD investment at that particular point in their career might therefore be something that produces no additional qualification at all.
Sometimes the Best Pilates CPD Is Not Another Course
Professional development can take many forms.
It might mean investing in private Pilates sessions with an experienced teacher to improve your own practice. It could involve mentoring, observing excellent Instructors, having somebody observe your teaching and provide feedback, developing your Anatomy & Physiology knowledge, attending workshops specifically to improve teaching skills, or simply spending a period consolidating and questioning the repertoire you already have.
None of those necessarily gives you something new to advertise.
They may, however, make you substantially better at delivering what you already sell.
This is an important distinction because professional development can broadly do three different things:
1. Maintain what we already do.
2. Improve how well we do it.
3. Extend what we are able to do.
The Pilates education market naturally makes the third particularly visible. A Reformer qualification, Tower course or Specialist Qualification has an obvious outcome and creates an additional credential. Improvement is harder to display on a website or add to a biography, but for some Instructors it may provide a much greater professional return.
Choose Pilates CPD for the Instructor You Need to Become
This does not mean waiting until we consider ourselves an excellent Matwork Instructor before learning Reformer, nor does professional development have to follow one prescribed sequence. Education, practice and teaching experience can develop alongside one another.
The point is much simpler.
Before investing in another Pilates Instructor course, identify the limitation you are actually trying to address.
If lack of Reformer knowledge is preventing you from progressing towards the career you want, Reformer education may be precisely the right investment.
If your clients are increasingly presenting with Osteoporosis and you do not understand the condition sufficiently well, specialist Osteoporosis CPD may deserve priority.
But if you already know plenty of exercises and your real limitation lies in movement observation, cueing, programming or the depth of your own Pilates practice, another fifty exercises may not solve the problem.
The most useful question may therefore not be:
"Which Pilates CPD course should I do next?"
It may be:
"What currently prevents me from becoming the Pilates Instructor I want to be?"
The answer should help determine where your next investment in professional development belongs.
Planning Your Pilates Professional Development
This raises a much bigger question. If professional development should respond to the Instructor we are trying to become, should we really be choosing our education one course at a time?
Perhaps Pilates Instructors should approach their own careers in much the same way that we expect a well-run Pilates studio to approach its business: with short-, medium- and long-term objectives, realistic financial provision for development and regular reflection on whether those investments are actually taking us where we intended to go.
In my latest Pilates Consultant Industry Perspective, I explore that question in considerably greater depth, including why I believe professional development should be planned before the course appears; whether Instructors should establish a dedicated development fund; how three-to-five-year career planning can influence CPD choices; and why the return on professional education should be measured by considerably more than the certificate we receive at the end.
Chris Onslow
Pilates Consultant, Educator, Industry Specialist
Chris Onslow has worked within the Pilates industry for more than 30 years, supporting Pilates Instructors, studio owners, education providers and equipment manufacturers. He is the founder of Pilates Consultant and Director of Mbodies Training Academy, where he develops online and hybrid Pilates education and Continuing Professional Development designed to support Instructors throughout their careers.
Through the Pilates Consultant blog, Chris shares practical observations on Pilates education, professional development, studio business and the wider issues shaping the Pilates profession.