Chat EYT Episode #4: When Your Insurance Won't Cover That Instagram Trick

Episode Summary:

Jessica's back from Miami with a fresh batch of studio-floor wisdom — what really sets boutique studios apart from the franchises, how to handle clients chasing viral Instagram tricks, why posting reformer "fails" online is hurting the whole industry, and a practical fix for the eternal subbing headache. Plus, a brand-new recurring segment: Jessica picks one exercise per episode and tells you exactly why she loves it. First up? Double Leg Kick.

In This Episode:

• Boutique vs. Franchise: A conversation with a friend in Miami reveals an underrated reason boutique studios win — real community, not just instruction quality
• Building Connection On Purpose: Jessica shares how she started a 25-person walking group in her own community, and why studio owners should be the ones organizing book clubs, walking groups, and quarterly get-togethers
• Listener Q&A: A client wants to recreate a risky, unspotted standing balance sequence she saw online. Jessica breaks down exactly how to decline without shutting her down — including the "my insurance won't cover this" script
• The Problem With Posting Fails: Why sharing reformer accident videos on social media isn't just bad optics — it's an open invitation for industry regulation
• Solving the Subbing Crisis: A practical playbook for studio owners — building an outside sub list, partnering with other studio owners, and creating a points-based incentive system to reward subs
• New Segment — Exercises I Love: Jessica kicks off a new series with Double Leg Kick, breaking down why the extension, cervical rotation, and shoulder-opening lift make it one of her all-time favorites (kick optional, apparently)

Connect with Jessica:
📧 jessica@eytpilatesteachertraining.com

Produced & edited by: Kristy Carrubba, Next Chapter Exchange

Transcript

0:06

hello. Pilates pod community. It's Jessica from chat, EYT. I'm back with another episode of Pilates Topics that make me excited and if you're listening, probably make you excited too. Coming off of a little vacation in Miami, which was fantastic, and visited a friend who has dabbled in Pilates here and there. She needs to get into an exercise routine. She's going through some transitions in her life. And I brought up again, why don't you get back into the studio. You need a community. You need some, structure in your life. 'cause she's going through some job changes. And she said that she had gone to a couple of sessions at one of the franchises and the class was good. But she said everybody just, gets up and walks out at the end, and it didn't give her the vibe that there was any space for community there, which I found actually interesting. It's a comment that I hadn't heard about the franchises. At all, actually, usually you hear about the quality of the classes or you hear about the fact that they oversell memberships and people can't get in. So this was an interesting comment that made me think. I said, look, I don't want you to go to one of the franchises. I actually brought up a couple of your studios. I pulled up your studio websites and, sent them to her and said, these are the studios I want you to go to. It's a boutique studio. You're gonna work with the owner or a member of her staff, and. In the boutique environment, community is built and we all know each other's names, and we get into a routine where we see the same people in the same classes and we know what's going on in each other's lives, with each other's kids or parents. If there's any caregiving going on it's a nice place that becomes the second place or the third place after home and work. She said Yeah, I hadn't really thought of that. I guess she went to the franchise 'cause it was just closer to where she lived. So she is gonna book at the boutique studios that I recommended and maybe take a couple of privates before joining into a class. Another recommendation I made. But I found it really interesting that she made that comment about there just not being community and. This is another way to separate ourselves this is another way that we stand out. It's not just the quality of instruction. It's not just the number of people in the class and the ability to make corrections and give tactile cues to people. That's very difficult when you're teaching 10, 15, 20 people at a time. But it's the connection that's made and the community that's made, and we have such an erosion in that in our private lives that. Wherever it can exist. I think people are craving and gravitate towards it because it's so needed. People need to be seen right now. People need to feel value. People need to feel like they're connected to others. We all know there's a loneliness epidemic, yet we're more interconnected than we've ever been because of social media. But that human contact, that human engagement, the knowing that someone sees you, knows what's going on in your life, asks questions, is so critical to our health. And that's something that a boutique studio offers, that the big boxes that the franchises don't, because they're all about their volume. They're all about making their numbers, they're all about their image. That was a big takeaway for me. I knew it obviously, because I love the community that I've surrounded myself with. I just went out to lunch with one of my old clients. I love that and I think that people take it for granted and when it's gone it's so deeply missed and it's something that. You really should lean into and find ways to deepen and strengthen that sense of community. I don't know whether you do, a quarterly evening out? I'm not saying you have to pay for this, but just organize it. Maybe you do a book club with people who are in the studio. Maybe you do a walking group. This isn't my, studio that I did this with because I don't see clients anymore. I did it with women in my community. I just sent out a text message to, I think it was 20, maybe 25 women, all different ages, all different backgrounds. They're just people that I know and I like, and I said, Hey, I'm starting a walking group. Every Tuesday, 7:00 PM meet at the school and we're gonna do the route of the 5K. And everybody was like, that's great. I love this. This is so blue zone of you. And we go out and they meet new people who are all wonderful humans and maybe they just hadn't crossed paths because kids are different ages. Some are grandparents who I invited. Others have young children who invited. Everybody's coming from different places, but it's building community my takeaway from that conversation with my friend is lean into that, my friends. Do what you can do to strengthen the communities that exist within your studio, and be the leader, be the one who pulls people together. Be the one who organizes and pulls people in from the fringes into the fold and make them a part of something. And it will only benefit your studio health and everybody's mental health and everybody's physical health, but also your studio business health. Okay, so with that, i'm gonna read this question and it's also going to launch me in another direction with some thoughts that I have on the topic. Alright, hey Jessica. I have a client, she's been with me for about four months. Intermediate level, good body awareness. And she came in last week with a video she saved on her phone of someone doing this insane standing balance sequence on the reformer with the straps wrapped around her arms. No spotter, shaky carriage, the whole thing. She said, I wanna do this by the end of the month. I didn't know what to say in the moment, so I just laughed it off, but she brought it up again this week. I don't wanna just say no and have her feel shut down, but I also don't think she's anywhere near ready for something like this. And honestly, I'm not sure I'd even feel comfortable teaching it. How do I handle this without losing her trust or making her feel unheard? Alright, so I think that a lot of you are probably encountering things like this at your studios these days because there is so much stuff that's getting posted out there that are interesting choreography, cool looking acrobatics. Whatever it might be. Maybe you have clients who are competitive with themselves and they look at that I wanna do that. That's a goal for me. All understandable. But I think in this case one of the things that you need to, stand and hang your hat on, is what you're seeing here. And it doesn't matter what it is, right? If you are not comfortable with this client doing it, if you're not comfortable teaching it, if it's made up stuff, I think that the answer has to be, A lot of the content you see out there in social media are teachers or dancers who are challenging themselves in their own work, and they're posting it on Instagram, their bodies. Have been developed and have the strength and mobility to be able to pull some of these things off, that the average person, even above average person cannot. And then you can even throw yourself under the bus there and say I can't even do that, and I'm not comfortable doing that. I'm not comfortable in this environment to teach you something like that, and if I don't feel comfortable doing it, I'm certainly not gonna be comfortable teaching you and letting you do it. So I think that's a first way to handle it. That would be, I think, an excellent thing. If it's a legitimate exercise, let's say flying squirrel, like people love to do flying squirrel on Instagram, but there is such a small population that can actually do that. And I don't think it's safe, regardless of the fact that it's an actual Pilates exercise. I don't think it's safe to give to the average person who comes to Pilates twice a week. I don't care how many years they've been coming. It doesn't matter. It's their bodies just may not be built to do something like that. That's can be your answer in that type of environment. If they come to you with some sort of a made up scenario something that you know is not in the repertoire, something you know that is just experimentation, that we're seeing all over the place, I think you can shut it down pretty easily by saying what you're seeing there is not actually a Pilates exercise and my insurance won't cover me. If you get hurt, because I would be teaching you something that I'm not trained to teach you, and I think that would probably. Cover you and shut it down, and you probably wouldn't get any pushback. Maybe if the person was really ballsy, they would say oh, I'll sign a waiver. I won't do it. And you could say, I'm sorry, but I wouldn't be able to live with myself. Waivers aren't strong enough. I am not comfortable. This is not something that's in the repertoire. I have not been trained on any of this stuff. These people are making it up, and that's their prerogative. But I cannot allow you to do that in this studio. If you wanna rent a reformer and do something on your own, knock yourself out, literally and figuratively, chances are, but you're not doing it here. So I think that's always an easy way to answer those questions. Which brings me to an adjacent topic, and that is about some of the things that we are seeing on Instagram. And there seems to be a trend, and I'm sure many of you know it and see it yourself, of people posting accidents that happen. Something that's gone awry and somebody falling off of the reformer losing their balance, the box flipping over them doing a standing exercise and face planting. You name it, we've seen it. My first question is, why in the world are you posting this? I'm actually struggling to find the words. Do you think that this is something that's going to increase your popularity as a teacher or something that's going to make people wanna book with you? Because if I saw that., As a client or a potential client, my instinct is this teacher is irresponsible and does not know what they're doing. That they either didn't set the exercise up correctly, they didn't teach it correctly, or they are doing something that they should not be doing. So why in the world would you post. A picture or a video of an epic failure that could have led to potentially a concussion. People may have lost a tooth somebody may have broken a wrist. These are the things that I've seen. Those would be very legitimate injuries that could come out of these accidents. So I'm really quite perplexed as to what the end goal with a post like that would be. Everyone I think needs to be reminded that we are an unregulated industry. And I think that when you post videos like this, you are basically screaming for regulation and oversight. You are inviting the insurance underwriters to drop you. You are begging the. Powers that be, whether it be at the state level, whether it be at the federal level, whatever country you're in, you are basically throwing up the flag and saying, we are a unregulated, unmonitored, irresponsible, and unsafe industry. Come and help us. And the vast majority of us would never, ever teach these things. We would never allow our clients to try these things on our watch, and we would be immensely safe and conscientious and provide excellent cues and guidance to our clients so that safety is the number one outcome of their session. You are making us all look bad. You are making us all look like we need, big Brother to come in and take care of business and clean us up if that's a second reason that I'm begging you to please stop. We are all going to have problems as an industry. If you keep doing this, and I don't care if you're out of the country or if you're right here in the United States, it doesn't matter. It cascades over all of us. It cascades over just the apparatus. It makes the apparatus look unsafe. So I'm begging you to please stop. Okay, so that's that. Couple things that have come up in the studio owners network, I've shared with you that I use that group that I moderate as a little bit of inspo for some of the topics that I talk about on this podcast. And a topic I wanna talk about is subbing. So subbing is a challenge. I think it's important that teachers who are listening that you hear and understand the importance of finding subs and having teachers agree to sub from an owner's perspective and owners, I think it's important for you to understand and to respect why it's challenging to find a sub. Okay, so setting the stage, we're looking at it from all sides. Subbing is a challenge because we all already have teacher shortages for the most part. Most of our studios, we have the exact number of teachers that we need, if not fewer to teach the exact schedule that we publish. And if our teacher who teaches on Tuesdays at 8, 9 and 10 has the flu and cannot teach. Chances are we don't have a teacher who's available at eight, nine, and 10 to take the place because our other teachers are already booked. Or perhaps they work at other studios, and those other studios have them booked for eight, nine, and 10 maybe. They spend Tuesdays, in a different community, working in a different studio, and they give you Wednesdays and Thursdays and they give that studio Mondays and Tuesdays. I think for an owner, you need to understand that a lot of times these teachers are not just saying no to you because they're not being agreeable. They work in multiple places. They may even do privates out of their home, and they have clients who rely on them. So one person's flu shouldn't become that other teacher's problem, but. I understand that when you don't have a sub and when you can't find a sub, you are either in the position where you have to teach it yourself or you are in the position of having to cancel the class. Canceling the class creates. Cashflow problems, right? When you cancel the class, you are saying goodbye to revenue that you need to pay your bills and to keep your cashflow healthy and regulated. So when a teacher is unable to deliver whether it's by choice, whether they're sick, whether they have an emergency, it doesn't matter. It really screws everything up and creates a tremendous amount of stress for everybody. So what's the solution? So the solution I think is first and foremost, I think studio owners need to have a list of subs that is not overly reliant on the studio's own in-house teachers. So let's say you have five teachers who work for you regularly. You can have those teachers as a first call, right? But chances are they're already booked with somebody else or working somewhere else. But I think that you should have a running list of teachers who work in other places that you can call upon to sub those people. Perhaps they're even apprentices. Call up a your local teacher training program. See if they have any apprentices who are early in their career or recent graduates who are early in their career and would wanna go on your sublist. Chances are you will find someone who's eager and hungry to prove themselves to you, who doesn't already have a full schedule. So you're giving someone an opportunity. The other is don't be afraid to call another studio and ask if they have teachers who would be willing to go onto your sub list. And I think building bridges with other studio owners is important and something that so many of us avoid. We look at it as competition, but we really have to look at it as collaboration. Every studio has its strengths, it's the clients who are attracted to it for different reasons. And if you extend the olive branch to a studio owner and you say, Hey, listen, I wanted to give you the names and phone numbers of some of my teachers. If you ever need a sub, here's their name. Would you mind sharing yours? And then we might be able to help each other out in a given situation. I went on vacation one time. I usually took off the whole month of August when I was seeing clients and I would work with, my teachers and reappoint my clients to some of my teachers. But it was generally pretty easy because August here in the Northeast is a quiet month. Our schools don't go back to school until after Labor Day, whereas I know other parts of the country, they go back earlier. So August is a big vacation month. But I ran into a jam where one week of the month where I had some clients who were around. But I didn't have any teachers available to sub, so I called the studio that was literally one block away and I called the owner and I said, listen, I'm gonna be away. I need a sub. And I was wondering if you or any of your teachers would want the income or be available. And she was actually stunned into silence. She just couldn't believe that I was calling her to ask that. I was trusting her with my clients, trusting her with the keys to my studio, and she was so appreciative and she was so respectful. And from that point forward, we called each other whenever we needed it, and she was literally one block away. But she taught a different style than I did. She had a completely different type of client who went to her place versus mine. So it worked and we backed each other up. We recommended each other. We recommended our each other's studios to clients who we may not have been able to fit in or we weren't the right fit for. She was a little more PT based than I was. So if I had clients with serious injuries and I couldn't take them on myself and I didn't feel any of my teachers were the right fit. I sent them there and it was such a nice, peaceful, collaborative relationship. I didn't have that with every one of the competitors in the area, but I certainly had it with her and I would say give that a try. Call a studio owner. See what she might be able to do. Even if a teacher is only certified in mat, and it's typically a reformer class, convert it for the day, to have everybody teach, do MAT and bring on that mat teacher. And say, Hey listen, can you teach a MAT class for me? It's normally a reformer class, but if you can sub, I'll do a mat class some people might cancel, but some people might stick with it, and you're trying something new and you're giving your clients something new to chew on. With that said, I also think there needs to be an overhaul in how we incentivize and pay subs. Subs, should get paid more than just a regular teaching shift because you're asking them to be available for a spot hour of a day or a spot two hours of a day. They're not hired by you to have a regular schedule. You need to grease the wheels a little bit to make it worth their while. So that I view is important. So if you normally pay your teacher, let's say $40 for the class, I'm making that number up. We all have our different formulas that we use. I would say to sub you get 50 or 55. So there's a little incentive. There's a little extra bonus in there. Then from your in-house teachers, I think there should be another layer of incentive. Maybe you create some sort of a point system. I'm making this all up. Every class you sub, you get five points, and at the end of a quarter you can add up your points and you can trade them in for something. You can trade them in for a cash bonus. Maybe, there can be different levels. If, I'm thinking like Jersey Shore style, right? When you have your tickets and you hand in your tickets and you, if you only have 15 tickets, you can only get this stuffed animal. If you have 35 tickets, you can get something bigger. So maybe you apply something like that to create an incentive situation that rewards them for. Going above and beyond to help you out to keep the studio healthy and moving forward, but also gives them, something to strive for. Maybe, if they collect their points throughout the whole year, they could trade it in for a night in a fancy hotel or a nice dinner out, or. An expensive bottle of wine. I'm making all this stuff up. You have to come up with what your own point system is, and you also have to figure out what the currency is like, what are the things that your community gets excited about, and figure out how to trade on that currency. If you have a lot of young teachers and cash is the most important, then you give cash bonuses. Maybe it's a paid day off, right? Maybe you say, I will teach all of your sessions on a given day in the month of April, and you can take a day off but you still get paid and so it's a paid day off. That might be awesome for somebody, right? 'cause a lot of people who rely on each and every single class. To go into their bank account so that they can pay their bills, that's valuable. So figure out an incentive system to build out your subbing structure. I've been working on ideas for how to close this podcast, and I've decided that I'm gonna pick and exercise each episode and talk about why I love it. Every semester people ask me. What's your favorite exercise? And if you ever watched any of my seminar replays, you'll hear me say, oh, this one's one of my favorite. But I tend to say that about a lot of exercises. So I'm gonna pick an exercise each episode, and I'm just gonna talk about why I think it's yummy, why I think it's valuable. I'm not gonna talk about how to teach it. I'm not gonna talk about its technique or its breath cues. I'm simply gonna try to make you know why I love it and maybe have you fall in love with it a little bit yourself. So for the first one, I bet everybody's gonna be surprised when they hear what? My very first exercise is going to be. Dun. Drum roll please. Double leg kick. I'm going with double leg kick from the intermediate mat system. Probably a shocker, right? Okay, so here's why I like double like kick so much. First of all, I love that it's an extension exercise. We as a society need more extension. We live in an anteriorly focused world, right? I'm gonna put that on a t-shirt one day. We walk forward, we drive leaning forward, we sit at our computers leaning forward. We cook leaning forward, we wash dishes leaning forward. We carry laundry baskets leaning forward. We drive leaning forward. We text all of it. We are so anteriorly dominant, it's ridiculous. So I love the extension piece. That's number one. Number two, I love the cervical rotation. So when you turn your to head to a cheek, whether it's the right cheek or the left cheek. And you get that elongation, that very first one, you probably feel that the rotation is only so much that you feel like it's part of your cheek that's close to your nose is really all that you can get down onto the mat and you do it a couple times. You go back and forth and all of a sudden you're getting the full side of your face. Touching the mat, maybe even over to your ear and the stretch and the lengthening that's giving you through those neck muscles into the anterior deltoid shoulder head is so spectacular. It makes. Headaches go away. I find it's loosened up my jaw, my TMJ has improved. If I just lay that way, I don't even have to do the kicking part, quite frankly, I think the kick part annoys me, so I don't even like the kick part. I just like the position of my arms on my back. I like that turning of the rotation of the cervical spine. I like seeing how that rotation and range of motion increases with each repetition. I love the lift in the middle where I'm stretching open my collarbone, reaching those arms long towards my feet, clasping those hands together, and really feeling that connection down the back and was my shoulder blades draw together, and then getting the second rotation and really feeling the opening of the second side of my neck. To me, it's a little bit of magic. I have a lot of TMJI get headaches from staring at a computer too much and tension in my muscles all through my neck and in my jaw. And to me, double leg kick has been part of my own physical therapy. So if double like kick is something that you avoid or skip or don't really see the value in, take another look. Do it on yourself. Yeah, just go through it and sit with it. Feel how everything is opening and moving, and how you get that range of motion and how important that is. And I bet you're gonna fall a little bit more in love with it, like I have. Okay. All right. So with that, I am signing off on this latest episode, and again, if you wanna reach out, please contact me at Jessica at e yt pilates teacher training.com. Talk to you soon Thank you for listening to Chat EYT, the podcast. And a special thanks to Christy Carrubba at Next Chapter Exchange for producing and editing. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And of course, leave us a rating and a review if you like what you heard. We'll see you next time