Bill: Well I assume you’re referring to stage four lockdown in Melbourne, Australia at the moment where we are still open to business but we’re only treating people who require essential care. Steve might want to elaborate on what essential care means. Steve: Essential care is that we can’t see people for routine treatment so people who might be coming for regular maintenance. However, we can see people who genuinely need care that may deteriorate or worsen to a point that they may need to see someone in an emergency department or a specialist.  So the best way to decide if we can s ..read more

 Steve: The best way to start your day would be, once you’ve gone to the toilet as most people do when they start their day, go to the kitchen and as you’re making breakfast while the kettle’s boiling, so do some exercises, do a couple of stretches, couple of backbends, couple of squats, couple of whole-body movements to get you going and get oxygen in the muscles because oxygen brings the life into the body and into your muscles and help prepare your body for the day, I mean you don’t know what you’re going to do necessarily that day.  You might lift something a little bit heavier, y ..read more

 Steve: Well, I always like to say, if you’ve got a pet dog or a pet cat, what do they do when they wake up? Does anyone walk up to your dog or your cat and say, Hey there, grumpy! I’m not a dog person. I’m not sure what you call your dog. Hey there Winston, I think you should stretch now that you’ve woken up! There you go, now you’re ready for your day. These movements that a dog or cat or other animals do is innate. Sometimes we’re so conscious of what we should and shouldn’t do we, just, again, I guess we get caught up in not doing the basics.  So when we wake up, stretch, you’ve ..read more

 Bill: Steve and I have gone on record before saying that the most important exercise in the world that’s ever created is the squat and the version of the squat will be sit to stand. So standing up from the seat so much that your feet go out of the top of the spring. Touching the seat not necessarily sitting all the way back down, and then just coming back down to the seat. It’s normal that you should be able to lift your own body weight like this between 10-20 times and not really having an issue doing that. So you notice I’m not pushing up with my hands or anything I can just lean forwa ..read more

 Bill: The original pilates program is actually called controllogy. So Joseph Hubertus Pilates was not so bovaristic to actually name it after himself and that required those 34 movements, movements required no equipment whatsoever.  However, when he set up his studio, he devised all sorts of equipment which may have a fully functional pilates studio so you can have equipment based and what’s called mat pilates as well. Steve’s been around a few pilates studios in his time do you wanna add something to that? Steve: I was just gonna say it’s exactly the same as Bill, you just need a fl ..read more

 Steve: So, in our experience by running telehealth and Zoom classes and appointments, there’s actually quite a few advantages. One, you don’t have to leave your house which, I know we’re isolated at the moment and in lockdown, but it means you don’t have to find a park, you’re not running late, running from the office from here to there, you’re really comfortable in your own environment so it can be quite confronting when you meet a health professional for the first time that you don’t know them, and for someone it takes a few minutes to build that rapport, we’ve found that that rapport ..read more

 Steve: Pilates is as easy or as difficult as you make it. So we at mhealth target the exercises to challenge the person whether they’re elderly or adolescent or anything in between. And we are equipped to get the person to move better and move well.  So without challenging anything in life, there’s no growth, but of course, we don’t want to make exercises impossible and hurt the client, so the exercises might start off a little bit easier and build, but the idea is to make them challenging because the more you challenge the muscle, the more it learns, the more it grows, the more eff ..read more

 Bill: The mental wellbeing and physical wellbeing are like a handshake. They are so intimately associated and there’s a lot, there’s a lot written at the moment in the popular press so we can go from people like Mark Divine with his book with Unbeatable Mind to, I’m just looking beside me, here I’ve Shannon Harvey’s book which is The Whole Health, which talks about the connection, there’s actually a film done on that book called The Connection. They’re just, they go hand in glove.  Steve: Yeah, I was gonna say it’s very rare you find somebody in a lot of pain who has a clear head an ..read more

 Steve: You need yourself. That’s the most basic thing you need. You need a body, once you have a body you can do physio. You can stretch, you can flex, you can mobilise, you can do everything, strength and everything.  However, things around the house like a can of beans or an ice pack, kitchen bench, a chair, you don’t need anything special in your home to do physio except all the things you have around you.  If you want to do some more and you want to lift your game and do more high-level stuff, sure, there’s things like air bands, handheld weights, balance boards, the stuff w ..read more

 Steve: Absolutely, it’s a movement discipline that focuses on the breath and on moving with mindfulness. So we find a lot of people feel recharged and re-energized after a session because they’re focused on what they’re doing and not thinking about lunch later that day or picking up the kids who are probably at home with them at the moment. But we find that certainly with Pilates, just bringing that mindfulness to movement means 1. You’re in tune with the movement. 2. You know what you’re feeling. So if that left shoulder feels different to the right how can we make adjustments and what a ..read more