Pilates in South Africa

To Whom it May Concern:

The PMA (Pilates Method Alliance, the international professional association and certifying agency for Pilates teachers, based in Miami, FL) has been asked to write a letter offering our perspective on the establishment of REPSSA as the only official register of Pilates teacher in South Africa. We think that this would be a damaging and negative thing for the Pilates field in South Africa, because REPS only validates graduates of Pilates mat training courses, and Pilates mat work is only a portion of the Pilates teacher’s skill set. Pilates teachers who are fully trained are called ‘comprehensively’ trained Pilates teachers; comprehensive training includes mat and all of the Pilates apparatus. REPS has no frame of reference for this, and as such, is seriously lacking with regard to the full-time career Pilates professional. Further:

1) Including Pilates mat teachers within REPS in whatever country is an understandable outcome of efforts to create quality control with regard to Pilates mat teachers working in the health club context. While it is not ideal, as the REPS standard has no relationship to a Pilates-specific role delineation study, it serves a useful purpose in its particular context, namely, the fitness world.

2) Having said that, Pilates is not merely a fitness modality. REPSSA may be relevant for some Pilates teachers that are only mat trained and work within the fitness paradigm, but this manner of qualifying a Pilates teacher does not do justice to comprehensively trained (fully trained) Pilates teachers who work in many other environments with higher risk clients.

The job of the comprehensively (fully) trained Pilates teacher entails proficiency on apparatus including the reformer, trapeze table, barrel and chair. This area is completely absent in the REPS Pilates paradigm. The result of this in countries where REPS dominates the landscape is that 1) there is no awareness of the distinction between a partly trained mat teacher and a fully trained comprehensive teacher, and 2) the identity of the fully trained Pilates teacher is being reduced to only a portion of what it actually is. This is a bad thing. While there may be many wonderful Pilates mat teachers who work in the health club environment, to entrench only this one aspect of the Pilates professional in the national consciousness does a tremendous disservice to the Pilates Method, to Pilates clients, and to comprehensively (fully) trained Pilates teachers of South Africa. The potential for the vast variety of applications of the Pilates Method, taught by comprehensively trained teachers in a wide range of contexts, disappears. This outcome must be avoided.

Conclusion

The PMA supports the position of SAPEPA, namely, that REPSSA is a useful register and serves a function for fitness professionals such as personal trainers. However, it is completely inappropriate for REPSSA to be the ‘only’ and ‘mandatory’ register for Pilates trainers in SA. We agree with SAPEPA that there is a place for various registers appropriate to different working contexts, and that individuals should have a choice in which one to join depending on their level of training and the context in which they work.

Elizabeth Anderson, Executive Director
Pilates Method Alliance