The method, step by step

Why everyone gets the same seven steps

People are sometimes surprised that a woman of 31 with a stiff neck from her laptop and a man of 74 with a new knee start in exactly the same place with me. They expect a beginners' route and an advanced route, and something gentler for the older ones. There is only one route. What changes is how long each step takes.

I learned this the slow way. Before Movelara I taught mat classes for six years, and when I opened the back room in 2018 with three second-hand reformers I had restored myself, I treated the machine as a harder kind of mat. It is not. A reformer is a moving floor held by springs, and a moving floor finds out everything you are hiding: the hip that rolls out, the shoulder that rides up, the breath that stops the moment the work gets interesting.

So I set up every new body the way I set up a restored machine. I check, I adjust one thing, I check again. The seven steps below are that order of work. Some people pass through steps one to four in a single Arranque private. Others spend most of their three sessions on step two, and that is a good use of the time, not a slow one.

If you are coming back from an injury or an operation, bring the written note from your physiotherapist or doctor. I read it before step one. Without it, I do not start.

Lara

On This Page

Step One · First Arranque Private

Listen before the springs

The first twenty minutes of your first Arranque private happen with the reformers standing empty. We sit on the bench by the window and talk: what your days look like, how long you sit, what hurts and when, what you used to do and gave up. If there has been an operation or an injury in the last two years, I read your physio's note here, slowly, and I ask what they told you that is not written down.

Then I ask you to walk across the room, from the hooks to the window and back, and to sit down on the low stool and stand up again without using your hands. That is all. I am watching which foot you trust, whether your head arrives before your hips when you stand, whether one arm swings less than the other. People walk the way they have lived, and the room is not long, so it is quick.

Nobody gets on a machine until I can say in one sentence what I am going to look after. Usually it is something like 'right hip turns out, breath holds on effort'. That sentence goes at the top of your card, and it decides everything in steps two to seven.

Step Two · Setting the Carriage

Feet on the bar

Now you lie down on the carriage. Before anything moves I set three things, in this order: the footbar, the headrest and the pelvis. The footbar goes up or down a notch until your hips and knees sit at roughly the same angle with your heels on it. Too low and the lower back lifts to reach. Too high and the knees crowd the chest, and the breath has nowhere to go.

Which notch, though, depends on the body in front of me, and two people I see often make the difference clear. Someone with a new knee, a few months after the operation and with the physio's note on my desk, usually starts with the carriage set one gear further back from the footbar. That way the knee does not have to bend as far to reach the bar, and the note nearly always tells me how far it may bend for now. I would rather the first footwork happen well inside that range than at its edge. As the weeks go by the carriage comes forward a gear at a time, and each gear goes on the card with the date beside it.

Someone with a stiff lower back, the kind that comes from twenty years of sitting, needs something different. With the bar too high the knees come towards the chest, the tail curls under and the lower back flattens hard into the carriage, which feels like relief for a minute and then like nothing at all. So the bar goes a notch lower, the hips open a little, and the back is allowed its natural curve. If that curve will not settle, the towel comes in, which I will come to in a moment.

I check the notch three times in the first session: once lying still, once after ten heels, and once at the end, because a body that has warmed up often wants a different bar from the one that walked in. Most people are surprised how much one notch changes. It is a small step on the frame, and it can be the difference between a knee that complains and one that does not.

The headrest goes up for most people on the first day, especially anyone with a stiff upper back or a head that has drifted forward after years at a desk. It comes down later, once the neck has stopped working on your behalf. I would rather start with it up and lower it in week three than watch someone strain to look at the ceiling.

Then neutral pelvis. I slide a hand under the small of the back and ask you to rock gently, tail down and tail up, and settle in the middle. If the middle will not stay, a folded hand towel goes under the sacrum, the flat bone at the base of the spine. It is not a correction. It is a shim, the same as I would put under a frame leg that rocks on an old floor, and it comes out the day it stops doing anything.

Step Three · Under the Carriage

Choosing springs

Every reformer in the room has four kinds of spring hooked under the carriage: heavy, medium, light and feather. New clients assume heavy is the hard setting. Usually it is the other way round.

A heavy spring is a firm floor. The carriage only moves when you push with intent, and when it comes back it brings you with it, steadily. That gives a new body something to lean on. A light or feather spring is a floor that slides, so every centimetre out and every centimetre home has to be controlled by you. That is why someone who sails through footwork on heavy springs can shake through the same exercise on light ones.

I choose springs for the job, not for anyone's age or how fit they look. Here are the four, from heaviest to lightest, with what I use each one for.

Four Springs

Heavy to feather

Swipe, scroll or use the arrows. The coil thins card by card.

01 · Heaviest

Heavy spring

The carriage barely moves unless you mean it, so the legs can find their line. Nearly every first session starts here.

Its job
A firm floor to push from

Try it in
Footwork and the leg press

Often easier
02 · The Workhorse

Medium spring

Enough give that the trunk has to join in, enough hold that nobody loses the carriage. Most of a Flow class lives here.

Its job
Steady work for legs and trunk together

Try it in
Bridging and lying leg circles in the straps

Every class
03 · Honest

Light spring

The carriage moves at the first hint of effort, so the shoulders and the middle of the back have to hold everything still.

Its job
Arm work where the trunk must stay quiet

Try it in
Seated rowing and kneeling arm work

Often harder
04 · Lightest

Feather spring

Almost nothing, which is the point. The carriage wants to run away, and every centimetre of it is yours to bring home.

Its job
Control and balance, not strength

Try it in
Kneeling balance work and slow side splits

Hardest of the four

In a first Arranque private I rarely go below medium. By the third, most people have felt at least one light spring, mostly so they understand why I keep putting them back on heavy.

Step Four · Breath and Control

The return

Push the carriage out on a long breath out. Then come home. Almost everyone does the first half well and the second half badly, letting the springs snap the carriage back against the stopper with a clunk you can hear across the room. That clunk is the sound of half the exercise being thrown away.

The carriage coming back is where the work is. The springs draw you in and your muscles let them, slowly, lengthening as they go. That is the part that builds control around a knee or a hip, the part that makes the stairs at home feel different after a month. So I count the way home longer than the way out, and I listen. A carriage that lands without a sound is the best thing I hear all day.

Each spring has its own sound on the way home, and after enough years I can tell which one a person is on with my back turned. On a heavy spring a good return is almost silent until the very end, when the carriage settles onto the stopper with a low, soft knock, like a drawer closed by someone who means to close it. A bad one on heavy is a bang, because heavy springs pull hard and a body that lets go lets go all at once.

On medium the good return has a faint hum from the springs as they shorten, steady from start to finish, with no change in pitch in the last few centimetres. If the hum speeds up near the end, somebody stopped working there. That last stretch, where the springs are nearly home, is the part people skip, and on medium it is the part I listen to hardest.

On light and feather there is almost nothing to hear, so I watch the shoulders and the jaw instead, because a person fighting a feather spring holds still everywhere except where they should.

Breath follows the same idea. Out on the effort, in on the return, and never held. If I see a jaw set or a breath stop, I take a spring off or bring the range in before I add anything else.

In a private I tell people what I am hearing as it happens. By the third session most of them can hear it themselves, and that is the moment the return stops being an instruction from me and becomes something they notice on their own.

Step Five · Every Session Starts Here

Footwork counted to ten

Every session I teach, private or group, opens with footwork, and footwork in my room is counted to ten. Heels on the bar, ten. Arches, ten. Toes, with the heels lifted and still, ten. Then prehensile, the toes curled softly over the bar as if holding it, ten. Forty presses before anything else happens.

Ten is enough to warm the legs and short enough that nobody drifts off. It also gives me forty chances to watch the knees. I want them tracking over the second toe, not falling in towards each other. I want them to straighten without snapping back at the end, which I can usually see and nearly always hear in the carriage. And I want both knees to arrive at the same moment. When one is late, it goes on the card.

In a group of six I can watch all twelve knees from the front of the room. That is one of the reasons the class stops at six.

Step Six · Adding Load

One direction at a time

A body moves forwards and back, side to side, and round. I add load in one of those directions per week, and only one. If this week we are adding to forwards and back, with more spring on the leg press or a longer range on the return, then nothing new happens sideways or in rotation until next week.

It feels slow from the carriage. From where I stand it is the only way to know what caused what. If you are sore on Thursday and I changed three things on Monday, I have learned nothing. If I changed one, I know exactly which spring to take back off.

This is also how I work with anyone coming back from an operation, always with the written note from their physiotherapist or doctor on the desk. I do not take on post-injury work without it. The note tells me where the edges are, and one direction at a time keeps us well inside them.

Step Seven · Joining a Group of Six

Handing over

After the third Arranque private I decide whether you are ready for a group, and I tell people what the test is. Can you set your own footbar and headrest, find neutral without my hand under your back, and bring the carriage home quietly on a medium spring? If yes, you join Foundations, the eight week block on heavier springs that is always the first group anyone joins. Blocks start each September and each January.

If not yet, we book one or two more privates at €65 each, and nobody minds. A group of six moves at the pace of the class, and I would rather you arrive able to keep up than spend your first month catching up.

Before you join, I write your card. It lives in the box by the desk and it says, in pencil: your springs for footwork, your footbar notch, towel or no towel, headrest up or down, and the one sentence from step one. If your group is a Monday to Thursday evening, the card is for Iker, who reads it before your first class and adds his own notes underneath. If it is a morning or a Saturday, the card is for me, and I still read it, because three weeks is long enough to forget a footbar notch.

When someone has needed a fourth private, the card says so, plainly, and says why. Under the one sentence from step one I write the date of the extra session and what it was for, usually something short like 'fourth private: return on medium, quiet by the end'. When the session is over I add one word underneath, yes or not yet, and if it was not yet, another line follows for the next one. Nobody should read this as a mark against them. It is the most useful line on the card, because it tells whoever teaches the group the exact place where that body was last still learning.

I also write down what I took away, not only what I added. Towel out in session four. Headrest down one. Feather tried, back to light. A card that only records progress is half a card. The other half is the list of things we tried and put back, which saves Iker from trying them again in the first week and finding out what I already know.

Then the card goes in the box, ready for your first group class, and on that day you arrive ten minutes early so the springs can be set from it before the other five come in. After that it travels with you. When you move from Foundations into Flow, the card moves too, and the one sentence at the top is still the first thing either of us reads.

Where to Begin

Every one of these steps starts with Arranque

Arranque is three 55 minute private sessions spread over two to three weeks, €175 for the three, and it comes before any group class, every time, whatever you have done elsewhere. Slots are usually booked two to three weeks ahead, so it helps to write early.

Write to hello@movelara.com with your first name, the days that suit you and whether you have had an injury or operation in the last two years. A yes or no is enough: keep the details for the first session, with your physio's note. Lara or Iker will reply within one working day. You pay at the desk by card or cash at the first session, and you will need grip socks on the reformer, or a pair from the desk for €12.

Arranque and prices hello@movelara.com