Pilates Ladies

South Bay People Magazine (Beach Magazine)

By Paul Teetor

Lauren Rauth’s core message for her students
was simple:focus on your core.

“Keep your tailbone planted,” Rauth said as
she walked around a group class at Pilates
Manhattan last week. “Inhale on your
way in. Exhale on your way out…SLOWLY.”

Tall, lean and radiating fitness in stretch pants and tank top beneath her beachy-blond do, the 28-year-old Rauth moved with the lithe grace of a panther as she leaned down to offer some hands-on help for a young woman still fighting the lingering effects of a car accident.

“Keep your head down,” she said. “Reach away from your body.”
Another student, an older man with a well-trimmed beard, was having trouble maintaining a difficult position for more than a few seconds. Rauth stopped and spoke to him in a low voice.

“Find your vest,” she urged him, meaning to locate his abdominal core. “Button your vest. Keep everything in. Push with your stomach.”

Bathed in ribbons of late afternoon sunlight that poured in through the huge windows overlooking the Strand and the ocean, the group listened and responded with the positive energy of true believers. It was clear they had faith in the power of Pilates to heal their aching bodies and in the power of Rauth to navigate them through the tricky intersection where a willing mind meets an unwilling, no-longer-youthful body.

“Nothing else was working for me before I came to Lauren,” Isidrio Quintas of Manhattan Beach confided moments before the group lesson began. “I had upper and lower back problems that weren’t getting any better. Finally my chiropractor suggested I try Pilates.”

The result eight months later is near-miraculous, at least for anyone who has suffered from chronic back pain and knows the devastating, depressing effect it can have when it simply won’t go away.

“Pilates has really loosened me up and strengthened my core,” Quintas said. “A lot of my back pain is gone.”

Another student, Kat Walker, had a similar story. She is still dealing with the aftermath of a car accident several years ago and said working with Rauth and the Pilates exercise program has changed her life.

“After the car accident the lingering pain was so bad I thought my active life was over,” said the owner of the boutique pet shops Kat Walk in Hermosa Beach and Kitten in Manhattan Beach. “My job is very physical, so it was impacting me both personally and professionally.”

But after working with Rauth, she said, she is able to lift and carry heavy objects like she could before the car accident. Friends and family have noticed the remarkable recovery.

“A lot of my friends come to Pilates now and ask for the Kat Special,” she said with a laugh. “Even my husband comes to Pilates Manhattan now.”
Pilates Incubator

There’s an exercise evolution going on in America as the health-and-fitness revolution of the 1970’s and ‘80’s continues to evolve into highly focused niche specialties. Among today’s madly exercising crowd you’ll find sub-groups like devout dodgeballers, manic medicine ballers and passionate Pilates people like Nick Schneider.

An all-star volleyball player at Mira Costa High School a decade ago, Schneider is a hard-working businessman now who splits his precious leisure time between beach volleyball at the 21st St. courts and run-and-gun style hoops at Live Oak Park. He’s known on both courts for his big hops and fearless, go-for-it style that used to leave him feeling the pain the next day.

“I used to have all kinds of aches and pains after a few hours of volleyball or basketball,” he said Tuesday. “My hips, knees and back were always killing me. But after doing Pilates for eight months with Lauren, I just don’t have that achy body anymore. My core is so much stronger than it was a year ago.”

The Pilates Manhattan studio upstairs at 815 Manhattan Ave., blessed with a sun kissed, soaring view of the Pacific Ocean, is just one small incubator in the exercise evolution. But it’s an incubator that is growing fast: in the 24 months since it opened in March 2005, the weekly client load has skyrocketed from 100 to 700, mostly on word-of-mouth referrals.

A lot of that growth is due to the hands-on, personal approach of Rauth, DeWeese and their staff.

“Lauren even calls my chiropractor so they can compare notes on my progress,” Quintas said. “That’s the kind of holistic approach she uses.”
But the tidal wave of new clients - most of them highly educated, successful professionals who value health as much as wealth - also came in because the Pilates Method has generated growing buzz as a smarter approach in the never ending struggle to get fit and to stay fit and healthy.

It’s not about clean-and-jerking heavier and heavier weights or mindlessly racking up more and more miles on a treadmill or a lap pool. Instead, Pilates aims to take the best of both of those old-school approaches and combine it with a strong dose of new-age mental discipline and a sophisticated understanding of the body’s bio-mechanical process.

The core of Pilates is strengthening and supporting the body’s core - the abdomen, the lower back and the buttocks. When the core is strong and sound, it will liberate the rest of your body to reach its full potential. And it will do wonders for those terribly debilitating backaches that leave sufferers lying flat on their back for days on end, knees up to relieve the stress on the core.

A Guy Named Joe

Pilates has been around since the 1920’s, in vogue since the mid-1990’s and now is increasingly popular with sports stars like the pro volleyball husband-and-wife team of Kerri Walsh and Casey Jennings. In the highly competitive world of pro sports, the search for the slightest edge - in physical conditioning and/or mental strength - has brought a stream of new clients to Pilates Manhattan.

“I’ve learned a whole new body awareness from Lauren,” Olympic champion Kerri Walsh said Monday. “I didn’t realize how inefficiently I was using my body until I started Pilates. Now I’m using all sorts of little muscles that I never triggered into before. It’s really helping me on the volleyball court.”

The ahead-of-his-time physical trainer Joseph H. Pilates designed the Pilates Method in 1920 as an exercise system focused on improving total body flexibility and strength. It was designed to leave you looking toned, feeling revitalized and moving with ease.

The Pilates Method is a series of controlled movements engaging your body and mind, performed on the mat or on specifically designed equipment - at Pilates Manhattan they’re called The Cadillac and The Reformer - and supervised by extensively trained instructors like Rauth and her business partner, Pilates Manhattan co-owner Danielle DeWeese.

It is this complete coordination of body, mind, and spirit that Joseph Pilates referred to as Contrology. Contrology body conditioning develops the body uniformly, corrects posture, restores physical vitality, invigorates the mind and elevates the spirit.

Regardless of age or physical condition, Joseph Pilates preached, balance and physical harmony can be achieved.

“Physical fitness is the first requisite of happiness,” Pilates said in 1929. “In order to achieve happiness, it is imperative to gain mastery of your body. If at the age of 30 you are stiff and out of shape you are old. If at 60 you are supple and strong, then you are young.”

The Biology of It All

Lauren Rauth has been around sports and physical fitness all her life. But it wasn’t until cancer hit her family that she was inspired to make fitness and good health - her own and that of others - her life’s work.

Combine that physical fitness passion with her born-to-be-a-mogul entrepreneurial talents and you have a successful young businesswoman who came to Manhattan Beach just six years ago looking for work as a personal trainer and now co-owns the hottest, hippest, most happenin’ little workout spot in the Beach Cities.

“Lauren made it all happen by herself,” Schneider said. “She just kept pushing, wouldn’t take no for an answer from the city, and finally got the studio open. And now look at how it’s taken off in just two years. I don’t know where she gets all her positive energy.”

Rauth was born and raised in in the hills outside Oakland in a little town called Montclair.

She was a high school All American swimmer recruited by UC Santa Barbara, where she played varsity water polo for four years.

She says her passion for fitness and health started in high school when her mother developed breast cancer. Then one of her biology teachers wrote a book about healthy eating and how food is medicine.

“That got me studying the biology of it all,” she recalled Monday. “I learned how the body can heal itself from within, and about how our bodies maintain good health.”

In June 2000 all that passion and research culminated in a degree in nutrition and exercise science from UC Santa Barbara. But not before she met her future husband, Rick Rauth, an All-American volleyball player at UCSB.

“We very much see eye to eye on health and fitness,” she said. “And yes, he does Pilates.”

A Fun Town

During her last year at UCSB Rauth was invited to Manhattan Beach for the traditional, once-you’ve-seen-it-you’ll-never-forget-it six man volleyball tournament featuring outrageous costumes and world-class beach volleyball.
From the moment she came down Manhattan Beach Boulevard and saw the magnificent vista of the MB pier on the Pacific Ocean, she was blown away. And the weekend action on and off the court just confirmed her initial reaction.

“I thought this is a really fun town, a really beautiful town,” she recalled. “And I fell in love with the charm of Manhattan Beach. It’s a little more laid back than Santa Barbara.”

So in 2001 she became certified as a personal trainer and moved to Manhattan Beach to become a trainer at the Spectrum Club.

“That’s where I first heard about Pilates,” she said. “I was looking for an overall workout that challenges the mind and the body, and Pilates is like doing meditation.”

In 2002 Rauth enrolled in the Pilates Institute of Southern California, also located in Manhattan Beach, for a year long program of intensive workshops, practice hours and rigid testing on the ability to teach all the different Pilates exercises.

After 750 hours, Rauth got her Pilates certification in September 2002. She spent the next three years as an instructor at the Institute, working her way up the certification ladder to the level of Principal Instructor.

My Own Space

By 2005 her entrepreneurial spirit was calling. She was ready to leave the institute.

“I always wanted to have my own space,” she said, “but I knew I couldn’t handle it financially on my own.”

So she approached DeWeese, also a trainer at the Institute, who by now had become her best friend. The plan was to become business partners in a Pilates Studio.

“The amazing part is that we’re still best friends,” DeWeese said Monday. “It doesn’t always work out like that.”

They became 50/50 partners and took out a business loan for seed money. And they quickly found the perfect space at 815 Manhattan Ave., upstairs from the pet store.

Then came the hard part: navigating the city bureaucracy.

“The city didn’t want to give us a business license because we had no parking spaces,” Rauth recalled. “We went to City Hall almost every day. After a while they started giving us dirty looks.”

But just when it looked like the dream was dead one of DeWeese’s loyal clients - who wanted the convenience of having his Pilates workout downtown - agreed to give the new business two parking spaces. The city finally granted them a license.

Next they had to order the special Pilates equipment and opted to get the top-of-the-line product. Thus the nickname Cadillac. The other primary machine is nicknamed The Reformer because it re-forms your body.

Now they needed clients. Luckily, between them they already had more than 100 loyal customers who followed them to their new studio.

Soon the word-of-mouth was bringing in pro volleyball stars like Walsh, Jennings, Matt Feurbinger and Terry Polo. Then came Mira Costa’s Alix Klineman, the Gatorade National high school player of the year who is on track to become the next pro volleyball superstar after a detour at Stanford.

Kicking Butt

Of course it’s not just the traditional Pilates Method as devised by Joseph Pilates in 1920 going on at 815 Manhattan Ave. Rauth has customized her workouts for different customers who require different approaches due to their various aches and pains.

“I’ve incorporated a lot of hands on work,” she said. “I’ve added some Thai massage for some customers, some deep tissue massage.”

Schneider said he benefits from that hands-on, customized approach as he’s doing Pilates exercises with Rauth.

“She’ll get right behind you and put her knee in your back to massage it,” Nick Schneider said. “It breaks up the lingering scar tissue.”

Schneider sounded like someone who had found the fountain of youth.

“I always walk out of Pilates feeling stronger and taller, like my spine has been decompressed. It’s like no other workout I’ve ever had,” he said. “I’ll probably never go to the gym again.”

Kerri Walsh admitted her private, twice-a-week workouts sometimes get extremely physical.

“It’s only an hour, but I always leave there exhausted,” Walsh said. “She kicks my butt every time.”

Walsh, the Olympic Gold Medalist with her partner Misty May-Treanor, had already achieved great success before she started working with Rauth last year. But she said Pilates has been critical in making those small, subtle improvements that have helped keep her on top.

“It’s helped me bring new body awareness to the court. I’m moving more efficiently and I’m way stronger because I’m using my tiny muscles so much more efficiently,” she said. “I’m so much more stable. Lauren has given me the strongest foundation I’ve ever had.”

Finally, she offered - unsolicited - the ultimate compliment in the world of elite athletes and those who train them.

“Just look at Lauren. She’s a walking testimonial to the benefits of Pilates,” Walsh said. “She practices what she preaches.”

SBP
Contact: paulteetor@verizon.net