When creating her Pilates studio, Rebel Pilates Owner Nancy Burns said she didn’t want the space to be a place where women came just to work out. As a certified Pilates instructor, health coach and nutrition counselor, Burns said she wanted to create a wellness space where women can safely heal, whether that be mentally, physically or spiritually.

At Rebel Pilates, Burns offers Pilates classes, health coaching, lifestyle guidance and movement therapy, along with other nutrition-based services.

Burns said wellness is interconnected with different factors throughout the body, so one simple solution might not cure chronic pain. Instead, she said she treats a person holistically and creates customized plans for each of her clients.

“Everyone's unique, everything matters and everything is connected,” Burns said. “It’s looking at the person so closely and individually because you can have somebody that has the same symptoms ... and the root cause for each person is completely different.”

The backstory


While working in the health care industry in the 2000s, Burns began experiencing her own chronic pain and spent 13 years trying to heal. She said she spent hours every day researching what could be the issue, and instead found many different factors preventing her from healing.

Burns said her own journey with wellness helped shape her vision for Rebel Pilates.

“I was in pain for years, but through it all, I managed to come out of the valley ... when people tell you, you're not meant to do something, you're not good enough, you're never going to make it, don't ever, ever, ever listen to that,” Burns said.

A closer look


Burns said many of the clients who come to her are “sick and tired of being sick and tired.” She said patients who come to her for advice on migraines or insomnia don’t realize that the root of the problem often lies in digestive issues.

“I'm helping them connect the dots and get to the root causes,” Burns said.

She said her Pilates classes teach women how to feel light in their bodies and how to breathe in a deep, gentle way. Burns said some clients don’t realize that they have a certain pain in their body until they take her class, and Burns makes sure they aren’t over-muscling through the movements.

Additionally, a large portion of Burns’s work involves nutrition and intuitive eating, which is based on following hunger and fullness cues. In the future, she hopes to add cooking classes to her nutrition counseling services, as she believes the quality of the foods eaten is directly related to health and wellness.


“I'm guiding them, directing them [and] opening their eyes to give them freedom: movement freedom, food freedom, relationship with their body freedom [so] they can learn to love themselves,” Burns said.