My Unlikely Origin Story

It doesn't matter where you start. I know that sounds like something you'd see on a motivational poster, but I mean it practically. The entry point shapes what you notice, and what you notice shapes everything that comes after.

My entry point was a group Pilates class.

In 2006, I walked into an affordable group Pilates class because it was the only option I could find. I wasn't looking for a career pivot or trying to build something. I just wanted to move. That one class changed the trajectory of everything.

The Industry Didn't Approve

The classical Pilates world had a gatekeeping culture. Where you trained and who certified you gets discussed in a way that can make someone feel like an outsider before they've even started. A group Pilates class wasn’t exactly a prestigious on-ramp.

But I loved it!

I got certified, opened my first studio, and for the first time understood what it felt like to run something that was mine. To teach in a space I had built and see clients week after week and watch them emerge with confidence and joy.

But the more I taught, the more I started seeing a gap. The method was good but the equipment wasn't built for what I believed bodies actually needed. And it certainly wasn’t enough for the movement I wanted to share. Once you see something like that, you can't unsee it.

What the Unconventional Entry Point Made Possible

Around that same time, I started working with Marie-Jose Blom, a world renowned Pilates Master and movement educator with over 25 years of expertise in anatomy, deep core conditioning, and Pilates teacher training. Those two experiences happening in parallel changed everything. MJ was teaching me what the body was capable of at a level I hadn't encountered before, and I was standing in a studio every day watching equipment fall short of that potential. I had reformers, but I wanted to teach on Wunda Chairs, Ballet Bars and Jump Boards. My studio simply didn’t have the space for all of those things. 

If I had come up through a traditional certification path, I would have absorbed its assumptions along with its techniques. The reverence, the hierarchy, the "this is how it's done." There's real value in that tradition. But coming in from the outside gave me permission to question things that insiders had long stopped questioning. The gap I saw in Pilates equipment wasn't visible to people who had trained themselves not to look for it.

That combination of entrepreneurial spark and the depth I was gaining with MJ is what eventually led to the WundaFormer at the heart of WundaBar Pilates. And it’s now evolved into the Aurum reformer shining at Pilates Addiction studios nationwide.

Your Starting Point Isn’t Your Ceiling

Whatever brought you into movement, a cheap class, a YouTube video, a doctor's recommendation after an injury, that entry point isn't something to apologize for. It's the thing that shaped what you pay attention to. The WundaFormer exists because I was willing to build something the industry hadn't built. None of that happens if I start somewhere more conventional.

It doesn't matter where you start. It matters what you do with what you notice.

Your path in life doesn't have to look like anyone else's. Mine certainly hasn’t. 

WundaLove,

Amy