Welcome to this week’s Newsletter, the last one for August 2024, and we are heading into September and the Autumnal colours are already showing themselves.

This week’s Newsletter is all about getting back to school … well, not necessarily school, but getting back to routines after having time out during the Summer. For some it may be the time when you take your time out after helping out with grandchildren or maybe your timetable has changed as you no longer need to keep to school holidays. For us here at JTP it's always the start of a new year as we get back to our regular timetable of face-to-face classes after the Summer Timetable, so as teachers we start to plan our Autumn Term of classes, and what we want to focus on in order to fully benefit the JTP family.

So here’s a couple of housekeeping points that I want to bring to your attention.

First — for One-to-Ones with me here at my home Pilates Pod — I no longer have an electronic, online booking system, so if you have been used to using this in the past please just contact me directly, either by phone or email to book a session. 

Second, if you have a Hotmail email account, any emails that I send to you directly, or that Keith sends directly from our email address seem to once again be having trouble getting through to some people. It happens from time-to-time. For some obscure reason Hotmail sometimes seems to think we are junk/spam so for some people (not all, again for some obscure reason) will dump our emails into Junk/Spam folders instead of your Inbox. Something to also point out is that if you only check your emails on your phone it won’t always show these Junk/Spam folders so you won’t be able to check these on your phone. On a computer, on the other hand, the Junk/Spam folders are visible. The only way of resolving this sems to be by making us a trusted contact or known email address. I should also point out that this Newsletter comes from a different email source to my or Keith’s direct email (Newsletters come from a mailing list — aWeber) so even though you may get Newsletters every week with no problem, that may be different to our direct emails from our personal addresses. We have a page on the website about junk mail problems here. I hope this clarifies a few issues that some people experience, and can only apologise for things that are totally out of our control. 

That’s the housekeeping over, now for the rest of the news.

After a few discussions over the last couple of weeks I am doing the Plank in this week’s Exercise Of The Week. 

Listen and watch the video to hear my views on this exercise. I demonstrate where to start in terms of practising and performing the Plank safely for your body. 

Please work appropriately for your body and keep away from pain.

Message me if you have any queries regarding this or any of my Exercises of the Week.

As we head into September it does always feel for me like heading back to school. So my question to you this week is do you feel like you are heading back to anything in September?

I know that for some of the JTP family they have had busy summers, becoming full time carers for children, other family commitments or even holidaying and off visiting making the most of the weather when they can, and I know that when this happens often other things such as exercise and activity take a back seat. September is a great time to get back to better balance with life, so you start caring for your physical self again.

In order to do this we can look at our ‘Life Pie’, which invites us to think about each area of our life and start to build a better balance with our whole self.

Think of our Life Pie broken down into 8 sections — some will feel more relevant than others — the sections are:

1. Money
2. Time Out
3. Adventure
4. Relationships — Friends and Family
5. Emotional Health
6. Passion Project
7. Health and Wellness
8. Daily Routine — (for me this is Business)

At different times and seasons of the year the sections will vary in how much time they take out of your life, how you might score them, each section is scored out of 10.

So over the summer your Adventure section, or Passion Project, or Relationships could be high scoring as you are off on holidays, full time caring for children, visiting friends and family more. 

These sections cross over and affect Time Out, Emotional Health, Health and Wellness, Money and Daily Routine. Some of these sections will  be low scoring as a result of the high scoring in others. Balance of life, therefore, can be out of sync which can lead to many feelings some positive, some not so positive. For example very positive in terms of family, friends and relationships, Time Out, but perhaps not so positive is Health and Wellness for our Physical self, and even Emotional Health can be affected when we haven’t been moving our bodies, and we feel tired!

I had an email from one of the JTP family who, because she hadn’t done any classes for a while due to those summer commitments, felt embarrassed about coming back to class, out of practice, a loss of confidence about what her body would be able to manage, and these feelings were creating a barrier to getting back to class. All feelings very common when you haven’t done something for a while.

So I want September to be all about getting back, returning to a better balance, so if your Life Pie has been heavily loaded in one section to the detriment of others then this month is a great time to focus on which parts of the Pie are going to give you a better feeling.

When things are in balance everything starts to feel better, more manageable, we have more energy, we have better self-care, and then we feel more confident.

Take a piece of paper, draw a big circle, divide into 8 sections and name the sections as above, then sit down and score them all out of 10. Be honest about each section. Then break down what you can do to start getting back to a better balance.

Have a great week— getting back to moving, feeling and looking good.

With love
Jane xx