Dr. Michael Gervais

So there's a basic kind of knowing what the mechanics of the machinery are, right?

The same true as in psychology.

What are the basic skills?

So on a reformer, you've got a platform that moves, you've got some springs, you've got a bar behind you that you can leverage.

In psychology, you've got self-talk,

you've got emotional regulation, and you've got imagination as the three main parts to psychological skills.

On your first session in Pilates, you would maybe do something kind of easy, right?

You're not going to load up a bunch.

You need to understand how it works.

So we start in an easy path and then we move our way up to something a little more challenging.

And eventually it's like,

really at the edge of what's hard, okay?

So there's a stacking of intensity, if you will.

The same is true for psychological skills.

If you're going to do, say, breathing work, you would start something relatively easy, understand the mechanics of the breath, and then you would progressively work into a more intense practice.

Let me give a more concrete example.

It sounds easy.

It's not a trap question here, but how many parts to a breath are there, Hala?

There's four.

There's the inhale.