The Art of the Experience
Designing Pilates Classes People Want to Return To
What makes a Pilates class stay with someone after they leave the studio? It isn't always the exercises we choose, but the experience we create around them.
Workshop Includes:
3 Hours of Online training (12-3PM Eastern)-
3 NPCP Credits
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30 Days unlimited access to the recording after the live date
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Live Online: December 19, 2026
Workshop Overview:
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In this interactive 3-hour virtual workshop, we’ll explore the teacher as an experience designer. Drawing from Pilates, HeartMath research, motor learning, and Principles of Movement, we’ll examine three interconnected elements of teaching: the state we bring into the room, the experience we create through movement, and the culture that develops through repeated shared experiences.
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Using familiar Pilates repertoire, participants will experiment with attention, intention, cueing, questioning, pacing, sequencing, silence, challenge, and choice—and experience how changing the way an exercise is delivered can change what the mover takes from it.
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We’ll finish by redesigning a traditional Pilates class around an experiential intention, giving participants a practical framework they can immediately apply to their own teaching.
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Come prepared to move, teach, experiment, and rethink what it means to design a great Pilates class.
Workshop Objectives:
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Explore how teacher state, attention, and communication influence the movement and learning experience.
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Use familiar Pilates repertoire to intentionally create different experiences without simply changing the exercises.
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Apply cueing, questioning, pacing, sequencing, choice, and observation to support individual learning and agency.
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Understand how consistent teaching experiences contribute to studio culture, community, client engagement, and retention.
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Design a Pilates class around the people being taught and the experience they want to create.
About Christi Idavoy, Senior Polestar Faculty
Based in the lush tropical mountains of Costa Rica, Christi shares her insight as a movement and mindfulness coach. Guided by the belief that all bodies are telling a valuable and honest story, she asks us to notice how we feel in the present moment and guides us to find balance by honoring what is. Inquisitive awareness lies at the heart of her teachings.
Through respect, acceptance and gratitude the body-mind alter restores itself and achieves deep states of gratitude and self-love. The chemicals released in the body by these thankful and loving emotions are the main ingredients of the Movement Medicine that Christi shares.
Originally trained in 2000 in the tradition of Swami Rama’s Himalayan Yoga Science & Philosophy in New York City, Christi is also a dedicated Pilates Practitioner and Senior Polestar Pilates Educator with a background in Feldenkrais, GYROTONIC® and somatic healing. Her most recent certification in Mindfulness Training is from The Pacific Institute.
