Video: Cheryl Turnquist shares the impact of Pilates on overall well-being.
If you know me, then you know it’s hard for me to talk about myself, let alone do it on video! But my experience with Pilates over the past 22 years has been so rewarding I really wanted to share my story.
Before Pilates, I was working my full-time career as a licensed clinical social worker in one of the Rhode Island public school systems. And it was at a time in my life where I had a lot of anxiety. What I didn’t know when I first got into Pilates back in 1999, was all the mental health benefits I would be gaining (along with the more obvious physical ones). Like so many people out there, I’ve struggled with anxiety in my life. I had tried all kinds of methods to help offset the anxiety, but unfortunately that didn’t help as much as I would have hoped. When I really started doing Pilates though, the combination of movement with the meditation, the breath focus, the mind focused connections really made an impact on me. As I've gotten older, I actually feel stronger and fitter than I did back in my twenties. And it keeps me sane in so many ways!
But the benefits of Pilates for me haven't stopped there either. Since opening my own studio in 2001, I’ve learned so much from becoming a business owner. I already knew how to teach Pilates, but I had never run a business before - so all that was a big learning curve for me! I was able to take business classes, which I never had done in my former social worker career. And it pushed me to expand the studio and open multiple locations as well as push myself to start teacher training. I just love developing new instructors and taking them from that beginner place through being an amazing instructor who has a 20 hour a week clientele base and just loves what they do.
Pilates has taught me so much about my body, my mind, my physical connections, but then it goes way beyond that. It’s really a lifestyle. It's something that is part of me. It’s not just an hour workout or a day of work that I come and do and go, and it's gone. It's who I am, it embraces everything that I do, and I wouldn’t want it any other way.