Just because you’re cocooning at home doesn’t mean you have to veg out, chub up and miss your exercise classes.
If you plan ahead and cough up a little extra dough, you can have your class instructor–especially those yoga and even some Pilates–come to you.
Yoga
Dawn Hayes, assistant director at Chicago’s Moksha Yoga, explained there are two general ways to arrange for private yoga instruction.
“If a student is consistently working with a particular teacher and has a relationship with them, he or she would approach the teacher themselves after class and propose the idea of a one-and-one situation,” she said. “And they could coordinate the details sometimes out of a student’s home or teacher’s home.”
The other way applies to someone who was newer to yoga. “If they don’t have a particular teacher they want to work with, then they would call either one of our locations and talk to us about their practice history, any injuries and what style they’d like to practice,” she said. “Then we could match them up with a teacher who would be a good fit.”
Prices vary depending on time, level, distance and teachers, but Hayes estimates that they should run between $75 and $125 an hour. If the student had a friend or two with similar yoga interests and enough space in his or her home, the cost of the lesson could be shared, Hayes said.
Hayes stresses that students do need to come into the studio first and get to know it a bit, noting that she or other teachers would be “hesitant to go to a student’s home if I didn’t know them, because you could be putting yourself in a potentially uncomfortable situation.”
Moksha Yoga, 700 N. Carpenter St.; 312-942-9642 and 3334 N. Clark St.; 773-975-9642, www.mokshayoga.com
Pilates
Private Pilates instruction can be a little more difficult to arrange because many of the advanced classes are done on special “reformer” machines. Still, some teachers are willing to come to your home to teach a mat class. And with resistance tools such as “magic circles,” they can deliver a very challenging workout.
In booking a home Pilates instructor, students should follow many of the same rules they’d follow in booking a yoga teacher. Veteran yoga and Pilates instructor Kym Costa, founder of Chicago’s Pure Pilates, suggests starting at a reputable Pilates studio and seeing if its teachers and instruction styles fit with your needs.
Costa encourages students “to ask about the teacher’s qualifications. Ask if they got their certification in a weekend or week or if it took one to two years.” Also important is to “find a teacher who you click with personality-wise, and who you’ll have fun with and who can advance your progress.”
Most in-home Pilates sessions will cost $65-$120, Costa said.
Chicago’s Pure Pilates, 344 N. Ogden Ave., 2nd floor (as of February); 312-208-1603, www.chicagospurepilates.com.
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meng@tribune.com
