About Marcia
Marcia Brenner discovered Pilates after a stress fracture sidelined her running, and it was love at first class. Having taught Creative Writing in academia for fifteen years, she found Pilates to be both fundamental to brain and body development, and was curious about learning it from a teaching perspective. She completed a comprehensive 650 hour training program with all mat and apparatus in early 2009 with Randi Whitman, and completed her Pre/Postnatal Specialist Certificate with Carolyne Anthony through The Center For Women’s Fitness in 2010. Over the next seven years Marcia found more of her teaching hours happening in a pilates studio, and in 2017 she became a fulltime Pilates and fitness instructor.
In 2015 she was hit by a car while biking from work one morning, resulting in three weeks in hospitals, three surgeries, and months of physical therapy; in 2018 she underwent a hysterectomy and removal of a large fibroid tumor; Marcia appreciates the real-life ‘continuing education’ her own body challenges have brought her, and believes that her pilates training was instrumental in her recoveries.
Marcia has supported clients through almost five hundred births and postnatal recoveries—many through multiple births—and is passionate about educating clients on their every-changing bodies and supporting them to achieve their fitness goals. Marcia has a wealth of experience with diastasis recti; c-section; hysterectomy; pelvic floor dysfunction; partial and radical mastectomy; breast reconstruction and augmentation recovery; hypermobility syndromes; spinal stenosis; osteoporosis; rheumatoid arthritis; spondylitis; she has worked with clients with a history of miscarriage, and with clients undergoing chemotherapy. She is a recommended service provider by Shirley Ryan Ability Lab, Northwestern Hospital’s Women’s Health Physical Therapy Group, and many other Chicagoland area physical therapists. Marcia’s teaching style is warm and humorous, and she is adept at using verbal, visual, aural and tactile cueing to help clients connect more deeply with their bodies. An avid commuter cyclist, she lives with her husband and two black cats in Albany Park.
What People Are Saying
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If you are in Chicago, and are willing to try anything to improve your relationship with your body before, during, and after having a baby, then I have a suggestion based entirely on personal experience. Get in your car, on the train, bus, or by foot to pilates class with Marcia Brenner. She melds exercise with therapy by slowly and gently helping women find access to their bodies in ways that respect emotional and physical pain barriers. Rather than pushing through, she welcomes women to sink into their sensations, noticing what happens and how the body wants to repair itself. Using guided imagery and irreverent humor, it becomes safe to feel curious about what's happening on the inside.
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— MADIGAN
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If you are lucky enough to take a class with Marcia, I promise you will be hooked. She is hilarious, smart and very witty, and she knows more about your pelvic floor and fascia than you will ever want to know. She's the reason I have not strained my back in about a year despite long plane rides and continuous treadmill running. Pilates has become my new therapy.
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— NICOLE
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“Prenatal classes with Marcia are the best... it's hard to find informed and sensitive trainers who will still push you a bit while you're pregnant. Marcia nails it. Both my babies were easy births and I credit a lot of that to my "pelvic floor"!”
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— ERIN
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Marcia also regularly educated the group on women's health specialist physical therapists, referring at-risk clients when she thought they could benefit from more in-depth assessments or treatments than she could provide (as a PT myself, this is one of the things I admire most).
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— MIRIAM
