This Mat & Chat was hosted on on Instagram Live on Saturday, March 27th, 2021. The chat followed a 25 minute mat workout.
Victoria: The floor is yours! I want you to give your elevator pitch, and then we can get started with the workout.
Emily: I am Emily Hoffman, aka @NoPityPilates, aka @EmilyxSmiley aka @EmilyBemily1014- I’ve got a whole bunch of them.
Victoria: Yes- I follow them all.
Emily: I started teaching Pilates in 2008 when I was in grad school. I had been doing Pilates since 1995 after I had spinal fusion surgery the first time. Through the surgery, through the spinal problems, I started doing Pilates afterwards. I did a mat certification while I was in grad school because I wanted to enhance my own workout and understand a little better what I was doing. As everyone who does classical Pilates knows, it’s not just the exercises. It’s the how and the why. So I wanted to understand more the how and the why, and what I was doing. So I did a mat certification and really just enjoyed it, and started teaching friends. Afterwards, down the line, I decided to do a full comprehensive certification. I looked around to find the best program, and landed on Romana’s True Pilates certification, which is where our boss-lady Alycea also did her intensive- and everybody sort of branches off from there. So, that’s where I started and I ended up doing my apprenticeship there- all that fun stuff.
When I was just about to finish the program there, I started interviewing places and interviewed at Real Pilates. I didn’t know who Alycea Ungaro was at the time, but a friend of mine said: “You know, that’s Alycea Ungaro’s studio.” And I was like: “Holy crap! I can’t believe I’m auditioning for this person tomorrow!” But I auditioned, and got the position, and that was that! That was in 2012. I worked for Alycea from about 2012 to 2017, and then started teaching at a studio in Brooklyn, where I live- and that’s it! I was in Brooklyn teaching until 2019, when my life took a totally different turn. I had just gotten hired for a new position as a personal trainer and had stroke one day. Boom. Went to bed with a migraine and woke up missing half of my skull. My left side was totally paralyzed, but it’s coming back.
Victoria: Yeah girl! I like seeing your updates on your @emilyxsmiley page.
Emily: It’s the year of the hand.
Victoria: Great, I like that goal. Awesome.
Emily: So that’s my very long elevator pitch.
Victoria: That’s okay, everybody’s elevator pitches are getting much more detailed. But I think it’s our desire to get back and talk to people because of Covid, you know. Things are coming back together.
Emily: So much to share!
Victoria: Yes, so much to share- and we will talk about it a lot more after the workout.
Emily: The basis of everything I do is always classical Pilates. Any other training I do, the base is always classical Pilates. It always comes back to: how does your body move? It moves from your powerhouse. No matter the lingo- your “core”- but it’s not just your core- you’re not an apple. It’s your powerhouse. It’s everything that supports your spine- and every part that or your body comes out of the powerhouse, comes out of the spine. Your legs come out of your spine from your pelvis. Your pelvis is attached to the spine, your arms are attached to your spine without even realizing it. The bones of your arms connect up into your collarbone, which connect to your sternum, which connects to your ribs, which connect to your spine. So it’s all connected. So anything you do comes from a strong powerhouse base- everything that supports your spine. And that’s why classical Pilates works and applies to everything else. That’s my spiel I always give people about classical Pilates- it gives you the base, the foundation to using your body correctly in every other way.
Victoria: That will be your quote, Emily. I can see it now- when I post a quote from you.
(workout happens)
Victoria: So the reason I’m so excited to have you here, aside from knowing you from work, Real Pilates, is that your life, which you described at the beginning of the mat, the fact that almost two years ago (May of 2019), Emily said that she went to bed with a migraine and then woke up basically having a stroke. It’s amazing to see you here on my screen because you’ve just come so far from that moment. I remember- Emily has an Instagram page detailing her recovery so far- and it’s really remarkable to see. You said this at the beginning, but half of her skull was removed. There’s a photo of Emily online and there’s a dent in her head. It’s crazy. It just looks like someone scooped out a chunk.
Emily: You could touch my brain, you could touch my head underneath. So weird.
Victoria: Crazy. Well, what did they do about that?
Emily: I have a plate that they put in, so when people joke about having metal plates in their head- I actually have a metal plate in my head.
Victoria: Do you have a card in your pocket that you have to bring with you when you fly on planes?
Emily: No, it’s titanium. Titanium isn’t detected in metal detectors. People ask me that, though. When they find out I have a spinal fusion, they ask the same thing. The bolts in my back are also titanium. People ask me: “Do you beep when you go through the metal detectors at the airport?” No, I don’t . Titanium is undetectable, which is good and bad, I guess. Works well for me.
Victoria: I think that’s mostly good. I felt in that moment, when I was hearing from you- because you were posting in the immediate aftermath of being hospitalized. We spoke earlier about how you experienced some aphasia. I mean, hello! Is that a traumatic brain injury, a stroke?
Emily: It’s not necessarily a TBI, but it is a brain injury. I didn’t get hit in the head with a board or anything, I didn’t get in a car accident- that would be a TBI. Mine’s just a regular old boring brain injury.
Victoria: Well it seems really exciting and not regular to me, but it’s just amazing. You were posting on Instagram and it was jumble of letters and words, and it was very- I don’t know. I remember thinking: “Oh my God.” It’s incredible to see you two years from that moment, and you’ve just come such a far way. I want to talk about that. It’s insane. Here you are teaching Pilates. What was that recovery like in that immediate aftermath. I know you’re still dealing with a lot. Yesterday when we spoke on the phone, you said: “Oh, can I call you back in a few minutes- I have an interview for a home nursing aid.” And then when we spoke on the phone, there was someone else there! I know it’s a long recovery process. Talk to us about that.
Emily: I’m not even sure where to begin. When I first woke up from the migraine- well basically, I had a migraine. I got home early from work and I texted my boyfriend Matt and said: “I’m coming home early, I have a terrible migraine.” And I’ve had migraines since I was a little kid- so he’s seen me have a million of them. He said: “Do you want me to come home early from work?” And I said, “No, I’m just going to take my pills and go to bed.” And that was it. And then many, many hours later, he came home and he found me in bed, and my left side was clearly not functioning.
Victoria: Were you just sleeping?
Emily: I was asleep, yeah. He came in to wake me up to say: “How’s your headache?” and right away he saw that my left side wasn’t moving. You know when you’re doing open leg rocker and you can do that fancy transition of sitting up and reaching for your ankles and just pulling them up? I tried to do that. I tried to sit up and grab for my leg, and nothing on my left side worked. I remember trying to sit up and do that, but it was dead weight on my left side. Nothing moved. The next thing I remember is being wheeled through my apartment on my stretcher from 911. He called 911 obviously. I remember being wheeled through my apartment on the stretcher and hearing it go “bump, bump, bump” down my building stairs and into my lobby.
Victoria: Wow.
Emily: We were riding in the ambulance up the FDR. They originally took me to Brooklyn Hospital, because it’s right by where we live. From there, they sent me off to Presbyterian in Manhattan. I remember kind of waking up in the ambulance as we were going up the FDR. It was so bumpy, that I woke up and asked if there was a CT in the van.
Victoria: A CT?
Emily: A CT scan.
Victoria: Oh, oh.
Emily: It was so loud and bumpy, and an MRI machine makes this big sounds- and a CT does the same. And I thought that the bus had a scanner in it. They took me to Presbyterian, and did a bunch of scans. They saw that there was significant brain swelling, and that was why they had to take that section of my skull out, to relieve the brain swelling. I had just finished growing my hair out from having cut it short years earlier, and it was just long enough that I could do braids and then, they shaved it all off and left me with a stupid chunk of hair here *points to one side of her head* This area was shaved, because that’s where they took the plate from. This here is the growth from two years ago- yay! It’s coming back a little bit.
Victoria: Yay!
Emily: Eventually, when I first woke up, the biggest challenge was siting up in a chair. They couldn’t sent me to acute rehab if I couldn’t sit up in a chair for a few hours. When you’re in acute rehab, you spend a lot of time in your wheelchair. Sitting up is not an easy thing to do. You think about the stages of motor development for babies- they have to learn how to sit up before they can cruise, before they can practice walking. So when you get to 6 months for a baby, they figure out how to sit up. So had to make sure that I could sit up for three hours or so in a chair. The first PT was just learning to sit in the chair. Once I got the sitting in the chair down, they put me in this crazy little contraption where I sat up and I could rest my arms on a frame in the front and really hold my body up just using my arms. From there, I could take a few steps.
Victoria: What’s the left side of your body like now?
Emily: The arm is starting to move, the hand is starting to move. The hand is taking the longest. The leg is 60-ish percent. Maybe 60-80%. I can walk really well. I’m not in the wheelchair anymore- I got rid of it in February of 2020. I got rid of my cane in October 2020, so I’m no longer using any assistive devices for walking.
Victoria: That’s so exciting.
Emily: It’s really cool. My balance is improving, but it’s taking practice. I’m practicing and doing all of my exercises. After we finish today, I’m going to go to the park and walk up to the top of the monument at Fort Greene Park, and then from there, I’m going to do my exercises. Every day I do something- I practice something every day.
Victoria: So the aphasia portion of that, did that just clear quickly once the swelling was reduced?
Emily: Um, yeah. That was weird because there were invisible- I hate this word- invisible cognitive impairments. When I speak, I flip some consonants. I confuse “m’s” and “n’s” a lot. They get swapped in my mouth.
Victoria: Still?
Emily: Yeah, somehow. I think they come from the same place in the mouth so much that they just get jumbled. And then there are certain words like “cognitive”, that I just hate saying. It’s hard for people even without a broken brain. “Cognitive”- it’s a terrible word. There are invisible things like impulse control and emotional management. You used to hear me teach- I had a lot of inflection and a lot of tone in my voice.
Victoria: I still think that you do have inflection.
Emily: Do I?
Victoria: You just did it!
Emily: I don’t feel like I have the same inflection or the same musicality to my voice that I used to.
Victoria: Will that come back in time? Is that something you have to train back?
Emily: I teach myself. My therapist and I talked about this the other day- I don’t actually laugh at things anymore. The part of my brain that’s damaged is the part that controls humor, so I don’t really recognize humor anymore- I don’t recognize jokes.
Victoria: Do you think things are funny?
Emily: Yes, I know when something is funny – I know when I’m supposed to react in a particular way, but if something is funny, my therapist said that even if I force myself, even if it’s a fake laugh- it still triggers the part of my brain. Or, like we were talking about on the phone- there’s the scar tissue in my head that has- the area where the scar tissue is, whatever that area was responsible for, that hasn’t healed. But the healthy areas of the brain can be taught to take over those tasks. So, things like moving my hand- you saw my hand robot machine that moves it for me? That basically retrains my brain to do this movement and associate it with certain impulses. Sometimes I lose words. Not often, but there are certain impulses that would cause my hand to move, so it retrains my brain to associate whatever the impulse is to do this. That didn’t make a lot of sense, I’m sorry.
Victoria: *laughs* No, it did. Don’t worry. I’m wondering, in your recovery at all, I see what you do because you have an Instagram page: @emilyxsmiley, but I’m just curious- do you try to utilize Pilates at all? Can you?
Emily: Yeah, a little bit. There are certain things that I just can’t do yet. Part of my balance problem comes from the fact that I really don’t have a lot of powerhouse support in my legs anymore. I was trying to get a session in with Alycea [Ungaro] for this coming week. I need to get a litt more powerhouse activation for things like supporting my legs so that when I walk- I really have trouble lifting my knee up. My whole hip flexor complex is really dormant.
Victoria: interesting. I don’t want to say there’s something in the water at Real Pilates, but Barbel, another instructor who works at Real Pilates, also suffered a stroke at the very beginning of the pandemic (last year). Hers was not as severe, so she has much more mobility from the onset than you do, or did. She comes to the studio and really uses the reformer and tries to push against it to recover. It’s hard. When you have one leg that’s working and one that’s connecting, and the signals just aren’t there- it’s really challenging. I think it’s great to see her try and use that for her recovery- and same thing for you.
Emily: It’s funny. I have a reformer at home. There’s a thing called shoulder subluxation, which is where your humerus is not longer really being held up in to your clavicle. So basically my shoulder dislocates- I can show you. See this little space here? My shoulder subluxation used to be two fingers, and now it’s barely one. It’s really improved.
Victoria: Oh, that’s good! It’s like diastasis.
Emily: Yup. And that’s part of the paralysis. You’re not thinking in your day: “How do I keep my humerus pulled up into my”- I think it’s called the glenoid process- so. You’re not thinking about activating your traps and your deltoid to keep your arm lifted up- it just happens naturally. But mine don’t always work anymore. So when I get done on the reformer, the shoulder block actually hurts it a little bit.
Victoria: I could see that- because the shoulder presses up against it.
Emily: Yeah. So, I have a reformer at home, but I haven’t been able to use it because I just can’t in position where it’s not uncomfortable.
Victoria: Okay. So so far, two years later, you’re much further than you and your doctors thought you would ever be, right? So that’s a good sign.
Emily: Yeah. I’m gonna say a bad word in a second…
Victoria: Do it.
Emily: Turn off your volume, kids. As Matt, my boyfriend says- I got really fucked up. I was really fucked up. It was a really bad stroke and I went from having a body that did whatever I told it to-
Victoria: Yeah, you were big into kettle bells and lifting, yeah.
Emily: As I was saying in the very beginning, that’s the base- that’s the foundation I have of classical Pilates that allows me to do all of those other things. I went from the body that did whatever I told it to, to a body that just does not cooperate.
Victoria: That would be very frustrating, especially as a movement professional- to not have a body move the way that you intend it.
Emily: And it’s getting better! It is getting better every day. I keep telling myself that, because it does get better every day. But it’s frustrating.
Victoria: Well especially for someone like me, who’s only witnessing your progress maybe bi-weekly or tri-weekly posts that you’re putting on Instagram, I’m seeing the progress that you’re making in spurts, so to me I feel like you’re making so much progress- because I don’t see every single day of your life. I see little snippets. It really is remarkable, and we’ve talked about the neuroplasticity of your brain, and your brain’s ability to form new connections when other connections have been closed off, and it’s just really special- I mean, it’s a silver lining of this situation, of course- but to be able to see your own body recover. I wouldn’t wish a traumatic injury like this on anybody, but the one benefit is being like: “Wow! My body can do this?” and it’s really special and really amazing.
Emily: It has given me a really unique perspective, and it has changed my understanding of movement for sure. It really helps me understand the real stages of motor development, really thinking about understanding the way babies move. When I go to the park, I see kids testing the boundaries of their motor ability and it’s really fascinating to watch. Running around, jumping off of stairs, doing all the things that kids do. I see it very differently now. A baby has to learn how to sit up and hold its trunk up seated, before it can hold its trunk up to cruise. They start to walk by just figuring out how to stand up first. Then they do the cruising, where they hold on to things and walk around the room or whatever. Once they figure out cruising, they can figure out how to stand up and hold their body up upright.
I couldn’t just stand up, not only because my left side was paralyzed, but I didn’t have the ability to hold my trunk upright. I had to learn how to sit up before I could learn how to walk again.
Victoria: Right. And obviously I mean, when you are 12 months or under, and even 12-24 months, you don’t have memory of learning these things. It occurs naturally in your development, and as you age as a baby. To have to think about that now as an adult- I mean you were 38 when this happened to you- which is very young. Not many people have strokes at age 38; it’s very rare. We spoke about this earlier. I said: “Do you know why this happened to you and do your doctors know why?” You explained that your doctors said: “Yeah, there could be this physiological component,” but also just in speaking to your family after the fact, realizing that there was some sort of family history of similar issues, and that crazily, there could be a genetic component too.
Emily: Yeah, and it seems to be all on my maternal side. It was my mother’s mother who had the arterial aneurism, and then it was her niece- her brother’s daughter- who died of the cerebral aneurism. It was her mother who died of the cerebral hemorrhage a million years ago. So there is something on the maternal side that affects arterial health- I don’t know what it is, or how to describe it.
Vctoria: I understand. It would probably be way longer, way deeper discussion that I’m probably not qualified to lead, but I do feel like- if you knew that, well not you but one. If one knew that history, is there even something that can be done to prevent this?
Emily: No, not really. Well- it’s interesting. Since we discovered this whole arterial thing going on in my maternal side, my mother went and had ultrasounds done of all her major arteries.
Victoria: Oh, good.
Emily: It’s something you can do to make sure there’s no issue going on. I’m in touch with a cousin of hers who’s of her same generation, and he also said that he found years ago- and he’s the son of that grandmother’s brother. It’s a big, long, convoluted thing- but years ago, he discovered that he had some varicose aneurism- varicose veins are sort of like. It’s a breaking of the arterial wall and a leaking of, or swelling of a portion of the arterial wall. So he found this out- totally independent of my stroke. He found out that he’s also got some arterial issues.
Victoria: Well it’s good. Then you can inform more people in your family and they can be prepared for something in the future.
Emily’s Speed Round
City or beach?
Sweet or savory?
Cat or dog?
Adventure or comfort?
Books or movies?
Nights in or nights out?
Summer or winter?
Early bird or night owl? Both
Pizza or pasta?
Europe or Asia?
Spring or fall?
Breakfast or dinner?