Prenatal Pilates Instructor Guide, 121 Exercises, Signs to Watch (PDF)

She tells you at the door. Two minutes before a class you planned last night, with three supine exercises in the first block and nine other people already on their mats. You have about twenty seconds and what you can remember is that there is a rule about lying on her back and you are not sure what it is.

Here is why you are not sure. There are three rules. ACOG and the UK say avoid it after the first trimester. Japan and Norway say sixteen weeks. The most recent of the three, the 2019 Canadian guideline, names no week at all: it says that a woman who feels light headed, sick or unwell exercising flat on her back should change position, and it grades its own evidence as very low quality. Every free article you have ever read flattened those three into one number and did not tell you it had.

A week number is not something you can use in a room. A sign is. This reference gives you the published default for each of four stage bands, shows you exactly where the sources disagree and who says what, and then gives you the thing that overrides the default: what you can see from three metres away.

That is the half nobody has written. The Pilates trade already knows the watch list, breath holding, doming, pelvic discomfort, dizziness, gripping through the neck. Every article stops at the list. None of them attaches a sign to an exercise, says what change to make, or says what her answer to that change tells you. And there is a reason: every one of those articles is addressed to the woman who is pregnant, and she cannot watch her own midline under load. You can.

So every sign in here carries one change, written the same way each time. One thing you alter, then the words "everything else stays the same." That clause is what turns a fix into a test. Take the lever shorter and watch the midline. If the ridge goes, the lever was the problem and the shorter version is hers for now. If the ridge is still there, the position is loading the seam and the row sends you to the one that does the same job without it. You know inside one set.

Then there is the index. All 121 reformer and mat exercises, each with what it carries, the band where its default changes, the option that keeps the job, and the one sign to watch on that exercise. Sixteen of the 121 do not change on the calendar at all, and not one row in the whole index tells you to leave something out. That is the point of it. This is not a ban list, and the physiotherapy guidance it is built on says so in as many words: if an activity does not increase her pain, it is not automatically restricted.

Thirteen line drawings and three diagrams, made for this reference, show the signs you have to be able to recognise and the positions you build instead.

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WHAT'S INCLUDED
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✔ 121 reformer and mat exercises indexed, each with what it carries, when its default changes, the option, and the sign to watch
✔ 14 signs you can see, ten on an exercise and four across a session, each with one change, both branches of what her answer means, and a referral line
✔ 4 stage bands, each naming every published threshold that falls inside it, who published it, how strongly, and exactly where the sources disagree
✔ 14 positions to build instead, with the set-up in order and the near-miss set-up that looks like it and is not
✔ 12 moments in a group room, including the one where she asks you not to tell anyone
✔ 12 reports that end the session, each with one sentence to say and where she goes
✔ A one minute screen to run over the plan you already wrote
✔ An A to Z finder for all 121 exercises across both apparatus
✔ 16 line drawings and diagrams, drawn for this reference
✔ Two PDFs: the booklet (65 pages) and printable sign, band and stop cards (11 pages)

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PERFECT FOR
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• Group mat and reformer teachers who meet this in a mixed class and have twenty seconds
• Teachers in years one to three, whose training covered this in an afternoon or not at all
• Private teachers keeping a client through a whole pregnancy, where the answer changes every few weeks
• Studio leads who want two teachers to make the same call on the same Thursday

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WHY YOU'LL LOVE IT
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✓ It shows you where the published guidance disagrees with itself instead of picking one and pretending
✓ Every change moves one thing, so her answer means something
✓ Every one of the 121 rows keeps the exercise in her class, and none of them says leave it out
✓ The stop list outranks every other page, so the hardest calls are the ones with the least to decide
✓ Where a rule comes from Pilates trade practice rather than from published guidance, the page says which
✓ Nothing is diagnosed, nothing is measured, and nothing in it decides whether she may exercise

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WHAT THIS IS NOT
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It is not a prenatal qualification and it does not make you a prenatal specialist. It is not medical advice and it is not written for the person who is pregnant. Whether a client may exercise at all is a decision for her maternity care provider, and the first page shows you how to establish that before anything else.

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INSTANT DOWNLOAD
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Two A4 PDFs, ready to print or read on a tablet. Files are delivered as they are at purchase.

Sources are listed in full at the back: the 2019 Canadian Guideline for Physical Activity throughout Pregnancy, ACOG Committee Opinion 804, the international guideline comparison, POGP guidance on pregnancy related pelvic girdle pain, and Cleveland Clinic on abdominal separation.

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