Client Testimonials

I came to Karen Carlson at the end of a 25 year professional dance career, hoping to extend my dance career for a few more years, both teaching and performing. I was particularly concerned about fluidity in the torso. Karen helped me gain insight into how I was restricting my own upper body movement. In the last few years she restructured my body with the result that I am moving better than ever before. The information she imparts is backed up by an ocean of supporting knowledge of many disciplines. Her passion lies in seeing her clients succeed.

Habiba, Middle Eastern Dance

I began working with Karen after suffering the effects of scoliosis and a depressed sternum throughout my life. Through careful evaluation and drawing on her vast knowledge of how the body works, Karen was able to design exercises specific to my needs. She afforded me movement, strength, and flexibility that I never thought was possible.

Karen uses much more than the Pilates technique in helping her students achieve their goals. She has a masterful knowledge of how the body works, and is able to draw on that expertise in creating a program specific to each person’s physiology; she is able to verbally communicate what one must feel internally, a rare talent.

Karen is able to puzzle out a solution to any problem presented to her. She is never confounded; she is excited to face any challenge presented to her, and does so with intelligence, support, and care. Her clients are always extremely impressed by capabilities.

Karen’s knowledge of the body and how it moves is incredible.  She has helped me overcome chronic injuries, improve posture and get stronger.  Each of her Pilates sessions is unique, creative and challenging.

Karen is a highly gifted Pilates teacher!  After a few steps into her studio she knows exactly what I need that lesson. She is extremely knowledgeable about the body as well as the technique and creative in her approach. Karen is a very special woman and I feel honored to have her as my teacher.

With her extraordinary expertise, patience and good humor, Karen Carlson has, for the past decade, led me step by step in the direction of a more functional, fluid, and graceful body. Gone are the back aches that plagued me for years—it is so much fun to be getting older and better. These days, I’m tickled when occasionally I am asked if I had been a dancer, which is not the case. Karen Carlson is a masterful teacher and I could myself one lucky gal to be studying with her.

I consider myself fortunate that Karen has been my Pilates instructor for the past twenty years. I sought her out when I needed help for an unusable left hand and arm and neck and spine problems after a highway traffic accident that the orthopedists and physical therapists couldn’t solve. Her unique knowledge set combined with being a pioneer in Pilates training (her teacher studied with Joseph Pilates) make her fluent in anatomy, biomechanics, and kinesiology including her use of “Butler techniques” for gentle un-entrapping of nerves, reducing pain and maintaining or increasing function.

Having been a modern dance performer earlier in her life, Karen understands the ways that dancers and musicians and artistic or emotional people in general need to use their bodies for expression and the subtleties and nuance involved when the body movement is involved in self-expression. This applies not only to dancers but to artists, musicians and other creative people as well. Consequently, with her background, movement intuition and Pilates training, she is able to take an approach to rehabilitation of injuries that addresses this very vibrant and expressive function of the body while addressing the reduction of pain, and increasing function.

When I met Karen I had little control over the fingers of my left hand, they hardly moved voluntarily and had tremors all the time, and thanks to my work with Karen, my hand is almost completely back to normal for most purposes. I remember how patiently she worked with me, explained all the exercises and stretches, and how watershed a moment it was when I was able to touch each fingertip to my thumb.

For anyone who wants to restore or maintain function and reduce pain to the highest degree possible, I cannot recommend Karen Carlson more highly. For anyone wanting to learn how to help people, especially artistic, musical and creative people to regain expressive and artistic body movement or expression playing of their instruments after an injury, or to maintain expressive bodily movement as we age, Karen is an encyclopedia of methods for helping you help others.