Advanced Doesn’t Mean Doing The Hardest Moves

What Most People Think Advanced Looks Like

Balanced on one arm in a twisted pretzel position. Legs everywhere. Moving fast. Looking difficult.

Snake on the Reformer. Teaser. Handstands. Big Backbends. The exercises that look impressive.

You can do complicated movements with beginner understanding. It happens all the time.

Snake isn’t impressive if it’s just choreography without deep connection from your powerhouse - if you’re just pushing out from the shoulders. Teaser isn’t advanced if you’re hinging up into a V and balancing on your sit bones, losing your round shape.

What Advanced Actually Is

Doing the Hundred and understanding the connection between your arms and your back. The pump of the arms coming from your powerhouse, not your shoulders. The coordination of your breath with the movement. Getting your whole body and mind working together from the start.

The Roll Up with complete control through every inch of the movement. Not just getting up and down, but understanding the engagement of your centre, the opposition in your body, the work happening throughout.

Standing and knowing precisely what’s happening in your feet, your inner thighs, your seat, your powerhouse. That’s not a beginner position with beginner thinking - that’s foundational work with deeper understanding.

The Difference

A beginner does an exercise to complete it.

A skilled practitioner does an exercise to connect more with it.

The movement might look the same from the outside. The difference is entirely in the brain.

Why This Matters

If you’re chasing complicated exercises, you’re missing the point.

The method isn’t about collecting difficult moves. It’s about understanding simple principles so deeply that they transform how your body works.

You can spend years doing complex variations and learn nothing. Or you can spend years connecting more deeply with fundamental exercises and completely change your body.

The Real Work

The real work is in the Footwork. The Hundred. The Roll Up. The fundamental exercises that Joseph Pilates designed.

These aren’t beginner exercises. These are the exercises.

What changes isn’t the exercise. What changes is your understanding of it.

That’s what being advanced means.

Where We Go Wrong

We’ve made “levels” in Pilates that don’t exist in the method.

Mat isn’t beginner level. Reformer isn’t intermediate. Complicated apparatus combinations aren’t advanced.

All the apparatus, all the exercises - they’re just different ways to work the same principles. Different tools for the same job.

A skilled practitioner brings deeper understanding to all of it. A beginner brings beginner understanding to all of it. The apparatus doesn’t change that.

What To Focus On Instead

Stop worrying about whether an exercise looks impressive.

Start asking yourself: Do I understand what I’m doing? Can I explain the purpose of this movement? Do I know what’s working and why? Can I feel the difference between doing it correctly and just getting through it?

That’s the work.

That’s what mastery looks like.

The Truth About Progression

You don’t progress by moving to harder-looking exercises.

You progress by understanding simple exercises more deeply.

The same exercise you did in your first session - you should still be doing it years later. But with completely different understanding. Different control. Different precision.

That’s progression.

That’s mastery.

Final Thought

If someone can do a complicated exercise but can’t explain why they’re doing it or what it’s meant to achieve - they’re not there yet.

If someone can do a simple exercise with complete understanding, precision, and purpose - that’s what we’re aiming for.

The difference isn’t in what you’re doing.

It’s in how your brain engages with what you’re doing.

That’s what we mean when we talk about being advanced.