Jennifer Pilotti has a 2,100 square foot space in Carmel, California, that she shares with a couple of other trainers and where she sees private clients only. If you have never been to Carmel, the city that once boasted Clint Eastwood as its mayor, then you’re missing out on one of the most beautiful parts of the world, and Pilotti’s studio fits right into the landscape.
You’re also missing out on working with a coach who coined the phrase fitness improv. This a coach who can usually be found contemplating the mysteries of movement in her studio and helping her trainees discover their own best practices through an improvisational style that emphasizes their own awareness of their bodies.
Pilotti believes that if she can get people to feel themselves in space to understand how the different parts of their body connect then they can feel stronger and more stable in whatever other activities they do.
Jennifer Pilotti’s articles on Breaking Muscle are full of profound observations delivered in a soft-spoken manner with warmth and intelligence. You feel like you’re really learning something and not just following along while someone teaches you to contort yourself.
Educating yourself, the way Pilotti found her own path to knowledge, is an important part of your opportunity to create a better physical experience for yourself. While some people have an innate understanding of their physical presence, most people need to be taught how to find it.
Educating the Educators in Fitness
It was after the great recession of 2008, disgruntled with the fitness industry when Pilotti decided to seek advice to find a path for her self. The result was a decision to become the best trainer that she could be and the way she ran with it was to go back to graduate school to educate herself some more. For Pilotti, the usual industry courses and reading materials weren’t telling her what she needed to know.
What Pilotti discovered in her own quest for knowledge was that in order to be a better teacher and trainer she had to read, do and explore movement more deeply than she had ever anticipated.
She is still on a constant quest to better herself and gain more experience and knowledge of movement. It’s part of why she is passionate now about training other coaches and trainers; she understands the shortcomings of the fitness industry and is trying to do her part to help everyone raise their game.
In the video below, Pilotti explains it best herself when she says, “I was able to begin figuring out how to queue and how to draw attention and how to help clients put things together in a way that made them feel more integrated and people started to do really, really well. Little neck aches and pains that had been bugging people dissipated.”
Pilotti found she was helping people become more efficient and more coordinated, gaining more strength in the process. Today, her space is like her little lab where she continues to learn, research, share, and educate. You can find Pilotti’s studio on her Be Well Personal Training web site, as well as her schedule of online courses and offsite seminars and events.
Take a listen to Pilotti in this video, and remember that we need, we want, more independent coaching minds like her to be accessible to everyone. Articles like this are here to support people like Jennifer Pilotti and her work with trainees and other coaches because we don’t want the limits of the mainstream fitness world of magic elixirs, quick fixes, and false promises. Pilotti and her peers are educators, they are the real deal.
Fitness Influencers are picked by coaches and Breaking Muscle editors in a purely subjective manner. They are coaches who are known to Breaking Muscle through their posts on the site and or through the recommendations of their peers. We look for coaches who exhibit a dedication to their craft, who have a physical practice that is respectful of all trainees, and most of the time we err on the side of promoting coaches who are probably too shy or modest to be great self-promoters themselves. It’s about supporting the independent coaches and gyms that need our support and admiration.
