As a dancer, Andrea was introduced to Pilates more than fifteen years ago. She received full certification under the direction of Carla Hales of STOTT PILATES®. She also teaches Yamuna body-logic ball-rolling, a muscle release technique that has direct application to Pilates work.

Andrea specializes in rehabilitative exercise. Her passionate interest in mind-body fitness has lead her to study yoga, deep tissue massage, and somatics. She is continually expanding her expertise through training, workshops and lectures with internationally renowned specialists, physical therapists, and other experts in the fields of mind-body fitness. Most recently she has done anatomy and posture workshops with Marie-Jose Blom-Lawrence and prenatal workshops with physical therapist and author Sherri Betz.

She is mom to two beautiful girls and along the way has become a resource on prenatal and postpartum health and fitness.

Carie Lee brings a lifetime of devotion to the movement arts. While receiving a B.A. in Comparative Literature from U.C. Berkeley in 1991, she danced for a variety of dance companies in the Bay Area. She continued to dance professionally for many years and to date takes regular classes in classical ballet. She is also very dedicated to her personal Gyrotonic®, Pilates and yoga practice. These movement modalities have become a part of her intense creative drive and expression. Carie has raised her practice of Pilates and Gyrotonic® to an art form, especially in the advanced conditioning and rehabilitative work that she does with remarkable intelligence, creativity and compassion.

Carie began her Pilates training at St. Francis Memorial Hospital’s Dance Medicine department in 1988. She has done workshops in: the Janda Approach to musculoskeletal pain syndromes, neuromuscular re-education, muscle testing, rehabilitation and Ashtanga yoga with various teachers such as Clare Frank, Elizabeth Larkham, Tom McCook, Lizz Roman, Jayne Edwards and David Swenson. Carie is featured in two of Ellie Herman’s books, “Pilates for Dummies” and “Pilates Props Workbook”. She specializes in injury prevention and rehabilitation as well as fitness and has been certified since 2001. Carie has taught group classes and private clients for over ten years in Oakland, San Francisco and San Mateo at Pilates Plus, Ellie Herman Studios, U.C. Berkeley’s Recreational Sports Facility, Yogakula, Inside Out Fitness and the Berkeley Tennis Club.

Carie is very excited about moving her practice to Optimum Pilates and joining forces with all of the other talented trainers there.

Chrissy has been teaching health and fitness since she was fifteen. She's a jazz dancer who came to Pilates after a serious car accident.

She started rehab on Pilates equipment and realized that Pilates was the closest thing that could keep her feeling like she was in dance training. She decided to become a Pilates trainer in order to help other people gain a significant level of flexibility and health for themselves.

For the past six years, Chrissy worked in the Dancemedicine Department at St. Francis Memorial Hospital, so she has specific experience with rehabilitation.

Chrissy has worked as an aerobics instructor, including nine years directing an aerobics program for a swim and tennis club in Redwood City, as well as being a personal trainer in weights and cardio.

She danced and taught Pilates in NYC, where she worked with a number of Broadway performers — from the Lion King, Rockettes, Moving Out — as well as opera singers from the Met. In SF, she has taught at dance studios, including Rhythm and Motion, ODC, City Ballet, Jane Kellam's School of Dance, Marin Ballet Theatre, andStep One Dance Academy. In addition, she was an Oakland Raiderette and is still dancing with SRO — an R&B orchestra.

Avishag is a qualified physical therapist. She has been teaching movement and mind-body techniques for six years. 11 years ago, while traveling in India, she started to practice yoga and became aware of the significance of movement, body awareness and the connection between body and soul. Yoga practice inspired her to develop her knowledge further thru the study of physical therapy. In 2005 she completed her PT degree, magna cum laude, from Ben-Gurion University in Israel. During her PT studies she also qualified as a Pilates instructor, looking for a complimentary tool to help her patients’ rehabilitation. Implementing Pilates in her PT work gave her new ways to teach body awareness and movement.

Avishag has been working as PT and hydro-therapist with patients suffering from neurological and orthopedic pathologies in an out patients clinic and in rehabilitation hospital ward. During her work she designed and instructed exercise classes for women suffering from chronic muscular-skeletal pain and for adolescent suffering from scoliosis and other postural syndromes. Avishag is also a trained physical fitness advisor to patients diagnosed with cardiovascular disease and diabetes. Her work with patients who suffer from variable and sometime complex illnesses taught her that a person at any age in any physical fitness can always find the right exercise plan to help improve his or hers quality of life and well being- it’s never too late to start.

Avishag keeps herself updated in the most recent treatments and diagnosis techniques. She constantly acquires new skills in the art of teaching movement. Avishag loves to help people rediscover their natural body abilities and the joy of pain-free and fluent movement that allows them to roam the world gracefully.

Zoe became a Pilates trainer out of a passion for movement. Over her 20 year career as a dance and fitness instructor, Pilates trainer and sports massage therapist Zoe has gained extensive intuitive knowledge of the body and functional of anatomy. Zoe trained for her two Pilates certifications through PhysicalMind and Stott Pilates where she received advanced training in mat and equipment based teaching.

Zoe began her movement journey at the age of 13 with free karate classes for kids at the local police academy in Albuquerque NM. At 14 she discovered a dusty Hatha yoga book on her mother’s bookshelf and never looked back.

After struggled stubbornly through 4 years of classical ballet classes and the austerity of modern dance classes and performance groups before She the lively rhythms of Flamenco Zoe came home to Salsa dance in 1994 and has performed with groups and taught in salsa dance clubs, and studios in San Francisco and Southern CA.