Business Spotlight:

It’s been four years since Dawn-Marie Ickes launched a Pilates program for a group of about 35 Burbank students, and she has had a tough time expanding into other campuses and school districts.

In 2005, as a member of the board of directors for the Pilates Method Alliance, Ickes launched a pilot program in Burbank to teach kids Pilates for 40 minutes one day a week. She took 35 children from a fifth-grade class at Thomas Jefferson Elementary School and taught them Pilates every Thursday.

Ickes owns Core Conditioning Physical Therapy, Pilates and Gyrotonic in Burbank.

“The reason I agreed to do it was because they said one of the things they were missing in Joseph Pilates’ mission was that he felt that everybody should be doing Pilates,” Ickes said. “He said, if children did Pilates and grandparents did Pilates, everybody everywhere would feel better and be better contributors to our society.”

Basically, there is no community- or school-based programming to teach Pilates to children, Ickes said. Formal training for physical education and classroom teachers also does not exist, Ickes said.

There are also no teaching resources for a form of Pilates that differs for adults and youth, she added.

“You just can’t go out and randomly teach what works for adults to small children,” Ickes said. “There’s all kinds of safety issues and ramifications involved.”

She launched the pilot program based on inspiration from a former adult patient who had been stricken with spinal stenosis and received physical therapy and Pilates under Ickes’ care.

“He told me: ‘If I’d only learned those simple things you taught me about Pilates when I was a young boy, I wonder if I would have avoided all the problems I’ve had throughout my life with my posture,’” Ickes said.

But there is no one Pilates routine that covers all ages, she said, adding that movements need to be tailored to the child’s age.

The pilot program measured core strength, how long children could hold a push-up, flexibility, how their hamstring length was, and single-leg-standing balance.

“After 10 weeks, we had some pretty remarkable improvement,” Ickes said.

“There was a 96% improvement in hamstring length.”