Theme descriptions for all weekly classes

“FOUNDATIONS OF BALANCE”
- Mondays 7.30-8. 30pm (UK)
ONLINE
- Tuesdays 7.45 - 8.45pm at The Haelan Centre, London, N8

"WALKING EASIER"
Wednesdays 10-11am (UK)
ONLINE

"PELVIS - Power and Agility"
Fridays: 1.30-2.30pm
The Crouch End Fitness Centre, London N8

June 5th- August 2026

These on-going weekly classes are stand-alone so that you can drop-in as you wish and start in any week. If you are able to come regularly you will get a more complete picture. All the themes overlap and interweave, so coming on different days works too.

In each series of lessons we will address how we put our movement together, exploring and improving the fundamental habitual ways we tend to use ourselves, or get in our own way!

We will discover more approaches to reduce unneccessary difficulty and strain and find clearer movement pathways that use our whole selves to move with less effort and more clarity of intent.

Balance for humans is no mean feat given our tall narrow structure and small base! We are so inately unstable that uprightness is more the ability to continually lose balance and 'right' again than to fix ourselves somewhere 'stable'. And it gives us our range of mobility and the advantage of simply toppling into motion in any direction with very little effort.
Our apprenticeship for finding balance begins as babies on the floor: rolling, shifting weight, finding support from the ground, pushing up against it, and discovering the transmission of force through the skeleton. Then comes counterbalancing the different curves of our spine and the heavy weights of pelvis and head over our feet to be able to stay on them - in motion!
(Look at the picture, many of those elements are there.)
This is a truly fundamental theme, worth spending time with and refining at any age or level of skill.

Another fundamental theme, walking is a basic human skill that we use all the time. But no one's way of walking is the same. Look at the picture - taken at a random moment in a park. Nothing unusual in it. But look carefully and you see some people tilt to the side, some twist a lot or a little or not at all, some do different things with knees or the width between feet.
Watch people in the street. For some walking is an easy swing, for others a laboured pacing or lilt.
We will spend time feeling what we do when we walk: our own personal and very individual patterns, and then explore different aspects of those patterns, finding variations to discover new and easier possibilities - or just fine tuning.

The pelvis is our power house. Our centre. A big bony structure that includes the base of the spine, connects the legs via the hip joints and has some of the biggest muscles attached or passing through it. The little one pictured here is learning what that means for her movement.

We are often encouraged to fix it, stabilise it, keep it still - and absorb that as a universal rule for one reason or another. But if we lose our awareness of it and its dynamic role in everything we do, from being upright, to bending, sitting, getting up and down, running, reaching, pushing, lifting, dancing, and so much more - we lose one of the most important foundations of our ability to move and function with ease and power.