Instructor — Rehab & Recovery, Tower & Chair
Ruth Ferreira
Asks more questions than she gives instructions. Will spend ten minutes of a fifty-five minute class finding out what your back actually does before anybody touches a spring, and considers that ten minutes the class.
Suits — People with a back or a neck that has been grumbling for years, people coming out the other side of physiotherapy, and anyone who wants to be watched properly rather than counted.
she/her
Ruth is not a physiotherapist. She wants that at the top rather than buried, because the courses she has taken were designed with physiotherapists and the initials look like they might mean something clinical. They do not. They mean she has been taught to work sensibly with people whose bodies are already complicated, and to recognise the point at which somebody needs a profession she is not part of.
She is the person at Halcyon most likely to tell you to go and see someone else, and she keeps the list of local practices at reception.
What she teaches
Rehab & Recovery, six times a week, and Tower & Chair. She also takes the Sunday morning Foundations, which she describes as the same job at a different speed.
How she came to it
Fifteen years as a paediatric nurse at the Bristol Royal Infirmary, and a right shoulder that finally objected in 2016. She met pilates as a patient, retrained while still on the wards, and went part-time in 2019 before leaving nursing altogether in 2021. She says the useful transferable skill was not anatomy — it was being comfortable asking people direct questions about their bodies without making it strange.
What she is like to be taught by
Slow. Unhurried in a way that some people find takes a couple of weeks to adjust to, particularly if they have come from a gym where the metric was how destroyed you felt afterwards. Several members have described the Rehab & Recovery class as the only hour of the week where nobody wants anything from them.
Outside
Grows an unreasonable number of tomatoes on an allotment in St Werburghs and brings the surplus in every August, whether or not anybody wants them.
The other three
Nadia Kellner
Explains the reason for everything, sometimes at more length than the class strictly needs. Will stop a room of twelve to fix one person's shoulder and make it feel like a group discovery rather than a correction.
Priya Raghunathan
Fast, precise, and cues with her voice rather than by demonstrating, so you learn to listen instead of watching the front of the room. Counts in a way people find unreasonably calming.
Elin Sowerby
Loud, funny, and completely uninterested in whether the class looks elegant. Counts out loud, plays music at a volume the rest of the building can hear, and will absolutely notice if you have quietly taken a spring off.