Endurance, St rengt h & Flexibilit y
Tysons Pilates Opens to Offer Affordable Exercise in McLean
BY LINDA BARRETT
When owner Caryl Raport opened Tysons Pilates on April 6, 2015, she took the final step to
realizing her dream of offering affordable and amazing workouts for people in the McLean, Virginia community. “Pilates has traditionally been an expensive form of exercise, and because of that, people have not been able to experience the benefits if they can only afford to take it one time a week,” she said. “My objective was to make it affordable so that people could take Pilates more than once a week and really feel the benefits from it.” She recommends taking Pilates three times a week to see results in all parts of life including posture, bone density and flexibility. While Pilates isn’t used as a weightloss strategy, it will build muscle, which revs up metabolism and burns more calories than fat. “It also creates a real mind-body connection, and when that happens, people naturally want to eat better, Raport added.”
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JULY // AUGUST 2015
Growing up, Raport wanted to be a physical education teacher. However, her college counselor advised her against it, stating that there was a moratorium on hiring teachers at the time. So she ended up with a degree in behavioral science and a substantial career in the banking business. All the while, she kept up her passion for exercise and its healthy benefits. She taught group exercise for the past 28 years, was an aerobic director for a chain of women’s health clubs, and trained aerobics instructors. However, as she got older, Raport’s body began to rebel against the high impact exercises and she began to look for a gentler, yet thorough workout. She found it in Pilates.
Raport became trained as an instructor in all types of Pilates and took the plunge to open her own studio. “I always wanted to do this, and didn’t want to get to an age where I regretted never having opened it.” She is a Certified Pilates Teacher through the Pilates Method Alliance, and a member of the American Council on Exercise, and teachers must complete 450 hours of teaching just to sit for their exam. Being a new facility, Tysons Pilates is stocked with the latest equipment, including 12 Allegro 2 reformers, 12 EXO chairs, and 12 Pilates springboards within its 1,500-square-foot space. Exercise on these machines is led by qualified instructors, and uses resistance in lifting and abducting body parts in a gentle way to create fitness results. “We need to have resistance in both ways to work muscles in a positive way and a negative contraction as well. You are strengthening while lengthening your muscles,” Raport said.
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