What Is March Matness?

You may have seen a recent influx of people posting Pilates mat exercise on social media in March. Tune in to today's episode to learn about the inception of March Matness, what is is, how you can get involved, and why seeing lots of people sharing their version of Pilates exercises on social media is a fabulous thing.   

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Show Notes:

Check out March Matness and on the web and search #marchmatness and #marchmatness2024 on Instagram! 

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to Pilates Students' Manual, a podcast helping you get the most out of your Pilates classes. I'm Olivia, and I'll be your host. Join the conversation and share your thoughts on Instagram at @pilatesstudentsmanual. You can support the podcast by visiting buymeacoffee.com/ Olivia Let's learn something new. 

[00:00:46] Hello. Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. It is the end of March. So I thought I'd spend some time today talking a little bit about March Matness, which is just wrapping up. [00:01:00] But I just wanted to share what it is, what it does, why it's important, why you might consider participating, and also share a little bit of the history behind it, as well as what its current evolution kind of looks like.

[00:01:15] You might have seen on social media this month, teachers, students, you know, people who love Pilates posting the different mat exercises on Instagram or TikTok or Facebook or however we're engaging with social media these days. And these are people that, you know, they might be in the United States, they might be all over the world.

[00:01:37] There are people who participate in March Madness all over the place, at all ages, at all parts of their Pilates career. And March Matness is a play on March Madness, which is a college men's basketball championship tournament where all the top teams play each other to find who is the champion team.

[00:01:59] People [00:02:00] are really excited about it in the United States. You know, everyone picks the teams that they think they're going to win in these 63 games that happen. And no one ever gets all of them right. If you think of the odds on that, it's like one in a, like beyond a billion, like a, I think I saw quintillion or something, like it's nearly impossible to pick all the games, right?

[00:02:19] Not even the computers that run the stats are able to pick who's going to win, uh, let alone random people, but there was a person in 2019 who got the first 48 games right. They picked the winning team in each game 48 times out of 63. And that's when their streak broke. I think they actually ended with like 53 out of 63 games right, or something. That's wild. So you don't really do it because you're going to win, but you like play with your friends or you play with the office. People suddenly care about men's college basketball. It's a fun time. 

[00:02:51] So March madness with a T is playing on that idea. And instead of making it a competition where it's, who's going to win in [00:03:00] these games, it's looking at-

[00:03:03] I think what they put on their website is it's like March Madness for Pilates people, where we can look at the mat work, Joseph Pilates' Matwork, celebrate a different exercise each day, or sometimes there's two exercises on one day when they're like closely related exercises. 

[00:03:20] And March Madness has changed over time. When it first started in 2013, Benjamin Degenhardt, who you might know from Pilates 360, he's a trainer for Balanced Body. I've met him a couple of times on Pilates on Tour when it's visited Chicago. He had a smartphone in 2013, and, you know, March Madness is going on, and he thought, well, what could I do for Pilates people that might be fun?

[00:03:49] And so he started sharing one exercise a day, and then talking about it. Pilates people love Pilates, and this idea kind of blew up. So [00:04:00] now I think this year you will see thousands of posts every day using the hashtags for the exercises. You will see people from, you know, dozens of countries, hundreds of people are participating in it.

[00:04:14] And some years were, uh sort of heavily curated in that they had a theme or they had, you know, a color scheme. Like, I don't know, there was like heavy curation and planning that went into it. And then a year like this year is a little bit more free form where the reason it happens is not because one person is leading it, but just because Pilates people love Pilates, and we want to share, uh, the joy of mat work, which is really where all the Pilates exercises came from. Like, it starts with the mat. And it's just great to see the love and enthusiasm for Pilates beyond language barriers, beyond location barriers. Uh, social media does this great thing where it can bring people together, um, even people of, you [00:05:00] know, from different places with different beliefs, with different ideas about Pilates, but we can all celebrate the Pilates mat and how much joy it brings into our life.

[00:05:10] The guidelines for March Madness are pretty simple. Every day in March corresponds with an exercise in the order that Joseph Pilates put his exercises in, in Return to Life through Contrology, which was published in 1945. This is the essence of Pilates in the words of Joseph Pilates himself. So if you haven't read that book or checked it out, it is a trip and it's got pictures of Joe doing the exercises, which is iconic, and his description of how to do the exercise, how to breathe, what you should be doing with your body while you do it, all the different steps. It's pretty awesome. 

[00:05:52] So March 1st is the 100. It's the first exercise in mat. Everyone posts their 100, and it could be a video, it could be a picture, it [00:06:00] could be, you know, something related to it, but we all celebrate the 100 on the 1st of March. Day 2 is the roll up, and we just go from there. As I said, some days we put the exercises together, so things like high scissors and bicycle, which happen in the same body position, and the exercises flow together really nicely. Those you post on the same day, same thing with like seal and crab or leg pull front and back. So we do have to double up because there's 34 exercises in Joe's mat work and only 31 days in March. So that's how we make it fit. 

[00:06:37] In past years, I followed the theme. In other times, I do my own theme. I did a theme one year where I posted songs that reminded me of the exercise, like twist and shout by the Beatles for spine twist, or for the roll up, Fitz and the Tantrums has a song called Roll Up that is a banger. So I linked [00:07:00] it with music. 

[00:07:01] This year I did building blocks. As a teacher, how would I build up each exercise if I was teaching it in a group class? And I do that on my personal Instagram at @OliviaBioniWellness. I think that the first March Madness that I tried participating in is probably 2018 and I don't think I got through all the exercises. I tried again in 2019. It's really difficult to post every day. And I got better because I started doing the bunch at a time, like I would do four or five exercises at a time and then be able to like edit stuff and post it. But it is a little bit of a marathon in terms of social media if you are like, I'm on social media, but I'm not on social media, if that makes sense. Like my notifications are not on. 

[00:07:54] Coming up after the break. I'll tell you why I love March Madness as well [00:08:00] as why it matters that it exists and why it's important that as many people as possible participating in it is a great thing. That's coming up next.

[00:08:17] Hi there. Enjoying the podcast? Me too. Make sure you subscribe wherever you're listening so you get notified about new episodes and visit buymeacoffee.com/OliviaPodcasts to support the show. There you can make a one time donation or become a member with a donation of as little as $5 a month.

[00:08:38] Members get some awesome perks, including a shout out in the next episode, a monthly newsletter, a monthly zoom call with me and more. You can also visit links.oliviabioni.com/affiliates and check out some sweet deals on products I use and love. Now back to the show.[00:09:00] 

[00:09:16] There is so much to love about March Madness. I love and I encourage people, both students in my classes and other teachers to participate it in their own way if they feel called to, which could be posting exercises, which is what I've talked the most about, but it could also be just scrolling through the hashtag and checking out other people's versions, variations, the way they learned the exercise, maybe their spin on the exercise.

[00:09:44] Like this is where I first learned about the reverse hundred, which instead of doing the Lying on your back, legs lifted, arms pumping by your sides. You lie on your stomach, legs lifted, kind of like part of double kick, but instead of interlaced fingers, [00:10:00] you're pumping your arms up towards the ceiling, which hits the back body instead of the front body. Like, so cool and awesome. I would not have learned that had it not been for March Madness one year. 

[00:10:11] It could be liking and commenting and on other people's posts, it could be participating in stuff in the real world. A lot of studios will do special mat workshops, even if it's like a reformer studio, or they will incorporate mat exercises into their equipment classes.

[00:10:31] It could be rereading your copy of Return to Life and trying to do the Pilates exercises Joe's way. It could be having conversations about Pilates or Pilates mat with your Pilates teacher or your Pilates besties and, you know, looking for the things that you do in your reformer class or talking about, you know, Oh, wow, you know how these exercises go together. Like the transitions between the exercises in mat [00:11:00] are some of my favorites, because in equipment, you've got to change springs. You've got to move stuff around. You've got to pick stuff up and put boxes on reformers. In the mat work, it's you and the mat, so it's just moving yourself around. And it's a really cool flow and I really love that and exploring that. 

[00:11:16] I think that it matters that March Matness exists because Pilates is a living breathing thing that is affected by all the teachers who teach it and all the students who do it. Everyone who teaches Pilates, practices Pilates, loves Pilates is contributing to what Pilates is.

[00:11:40] You don't have to be a fitness model, perfect Pilates, professional person to post on Instagram, share not only, you know, the finished pose, the finished exercise, but the process of what you're working on. Like the [00:12:00] process is so important. And if you've looked at those Pilates mat exercises, they are wild. Wildly difficult. And the fun part is how you work on them, how you build up to whatever the pinnacle is for you. Some of the favorite posts that I see are ones where people share what they struggle with, what's really hard for them, how they've worked around it, how they've used props, how they've, you know, changed parts of the exercise in a way that they're still able to do the exercise when it comes up, even if, for whatever reason, their body doesn't do the exact thing that is in the picture in Joe's book.

[00:12:42] All of us have stuff going on in our knees and our hips and our shoulders, and you know, some of our spines don't flex as much or extend as much, or twist as much. Or maybe you're pregnant while you're doing March Matness, and so the exercises are going to look different to [00:13:00] reflect the pregnancy contraindications.

[00:13:03] Maybe you're rehabbing an injury, you know, and putting weight on your hand while you're recovering from this is not something that you can do, so how else could you do leg pull, things like that. 

[00:13:15] I love seeing people of all different ages, both really young and flexible people and people who are older and maybe really flexible, um, but I love seeing lots of body shapes and sizes, you know, how jackknife looks when you have a smaller chest is different than how jackknife looks and feels if you have a larger chest and your chest is up in your face when you're upside down, you know, like there's these little things that because we're just in one body, we may not know what it feels like for other people, but seeing other people do it, we can a little bit expand our compassion, expand your knowledge.

[00:13:53] I'm also a teacher, so it's how can I teach to people in different body shapes in a way that they're going to feel [00:14:00] supported when they're doing the exercises. 

[00:14:02] And I think the most beautiful thing to see is the power of consistency and hard work. Just like the mat exercises are the same exercises in the same order all the time, when you're doing March Matness from year to year, you can see, you can measure a change in how the exercise looks, feels, all of those things, because you have like a little thing to reflect back on. You have a benchmark. You can use the mat exercises as a benchmark to measure your own progress, see how far you've come because that progress often comes incrementally and sometimes it takes looking back on a post from a year ago to say, Oh my gosh, my extension in my swan dive, like I wasn't able to swan dive before, and now I am. 

[00:14:50] I had a light bulb moment in shoulder bridge. Last year when I did shoulder bridge and Joe's version. You do a bridge the way you regularly would feet on the [00:15:00] mat, knees bent,

[00:15:01] lying down arms by your side. You lift your hips and then in Joe's version you walk your hands underneath your butt, so your butt has to be as high as the length of your forearm, which is like pretty intense. And last year when I did this, I may have even talked about it in the episode about shoulder bridge, but I would get this tingly numbness in my arms when I did it and I was like, well, I guess that is what it is. But then I did it again this year and no tingly numbness and I wouldn't have known that if I hadn't tried to do it Joe's way and said, this doesn't feel great, and then tried it again and be like, Hey, this has changed. Like I've changed. 

[00:15:40] The Pilates mat work is beautiful and intelligent and hard and challenging. And as much as, you know, posting about it as a marathon on social media, doing the mat work in order is a marathon of exercise and a marathon of Pilates.

[00:15:57] And just like Pilates [00:16:00] itself, March Matness belongs to all of us. This year was not curated at all, but people are still posting, people are still excited, people are still celebrating. And I think that is something that's pretty cool and sets the Pilates community apart. You can dive into Pilates Matwork whenever you like, but it's fun to do it in March when everyone's on the bandwagon and we're all talking about it together.

[00:16:23] It's really fun to do with the greater Pilates community, with your studio. If your studio isn't doing a March Matness thing, maybe ask if they could next year. I think this is only maybe the first or second time that I've made it through, and we're not done yet, but I've prepared posts for the entirety of March, so, uh, it's pretty incredible to see the changes that happen both in yourself and the variety and diversity of experience that people have with Pilates. It's just really great. 

[00:16:56] Huge thank you to all my supporters on Buy Me a Coffee [00:17:00] that March newsletter just went out, which has the link to schedule a coffee chat with me. So if you want to hang out and talk Pilates, talk March matness or anything else, please go to that, Buy Me a Coffee page and sign up.

[00:17:13] Also looking for reviews on the podcast. So if you're listening to this podcast and you love it, please rate and review it on Spotify or Apple podcasts or wherever you listen so that more people can find the Pilates love. Have a great couple of weeks and I'll talk to you again soon.

[00:17:40] Thanks for tuning in to this week's episode of Pilates Students' Manual, a podcast helping you get the most out of your Pilates classes. Be sure to check out the podcast Instagram at @pilatesstudentsmanual and subscribe wherever you're listening. Interested in teaching Pilates too? Check out Pilates Teachers' [00:18:00] Manual, available everywhere you listen to podcasts.

[00:18:03] I hope to see you next episode. Until next time.