Podcast Sneak Peek: Heather and Ben on Licensing in Pilates
Heather Erdmann (founder, Rebel Pilates Collective) and Ben Erdmann (administrative coordinator, RPC) sat down to talk about licensing and certifications in Pilates. We covered the NPCP, standardized testing in a Pilates context, a little bit of social media drama, and more! Check out this excerpt below about what it means to use a standardized test to gauge an instructor’s knowledge of Pilates, and find the whole Pilates PSA podcast everywhere you listen to podcasts! (Edited for clarity.)
Heather Erdmann: …so I was calling the National Pilates Certification Program out [on social media], and someone who sat on the board came into the comments and said, “If you’re so upset about it, why don’t you sit on the committee that makes the questions?” But I think this test is beyond reform. I’m not volunteering my time to write questions that comply with made-up exercise names to be packaged and sold in a study guide that you must buy from an organization that doesn’t benefit the industry in any way, an organization that doesn’t provide any gains in safety or connection or inclusion. And what better way to get quiet than to be stuck in a room debating over how to write test questions?
Ben Erdmann: Yeah, the issue, of course, is not the way the questions are written. It’s that the questions are written at all, rather than testing your practical ability to teach. It’s that the NPCP is a for-profit—it claims not to be, but as we have said, it’s an organization beholden to generating money, at the very least—testing body that benefits from improving their margins and making you pay in perpetuity for the certification.
It’s an issue with how licensing is being sold as a commodity rather than a protection; it’s an issue where licensing is imposed on the community rather than growing out of it. These represent two different viewpoints, one which understands the NPCP as inevitable and one that cares to imagine if we had better licensing, better oversight, or at least more voices offering perspective on how it could be different.
One thing I would add—sorry, getting away from this a tiny bit—is that though it’s absolutely necessary that every instructor has a baseline ability to identify pathologies, for example, there are so many different ways of doing that. There are so many different ways even in your own body of being able to identify why you feel a certain way and different ways of voicing it. And this sort of hyper-rational, almost medicalized version seeks to turn Pilates as an industry into one that is more academic than practical.
And you can argue that’s good or bad, but I would argue that creating more boundaries around the information you’re tested on and how you’re expected to think about that information is limiting and undermines accessibility and inclusion.
HE: Yes. I think of it very much as this rigidness in thinking that leans towards authoritarianism. Like, ‘I know how this should be for you, and I fit your movement practice to my framework.’ Let’s use an example of a knee replacement.
As an instructor, I know some framework around having a knee replacement that I learned in my primary teacher training program. But I’ll go with what your PT and surgeon have you cleared for, working within those parameters. From Pilates I can see that your knee shouldn’t bend past 90 degrees until you’re cleared for the exercise, but that knowledge is contextualized within your plan.
We could go down all sorts of rabbit holes like that, but the point is, we can’t possibly know everything. We don’t all have medical degrees. Pilates instructors should be taught to say “Well, I know a little about knee replacements, but how are you feeling? What are you cleared for? What are your goals?” rather than imposing a singular framework on the particular pathology.
BE: And as soon as you lose that, as soon as you turn the movement system into a Scantron, you lose what makes Pilates so beautiful, in my view, which is that adaptability and how personal it can be while bringing you into community with others.
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