Get ready to be inspired by the dynamic force behind one of the most beloved fitness shows on television! Miranda Esmonde-White, the creator and host of Classical Stretch, has captivated audiences nationwide with her transformative exercise routines. Broadcasting on PBS stations like KLCS Public Media and Create TV, her program has become a staple for those seeking vitality and well-being. We had the exciting opportunity to chat with Miranda about the origins of her groundbreaking show, its journey to PBS, and her expert advice for viewers looking to regain strength and mobility, even after injuries. Dive into this energetic conversation and discover the secrets behind her fitness success.
Miranda, I have 34 episodes of Classical Stretch on my TiVo, but there’s always more to record because you keep coming up with more great shows. Do you get a lot of feedback about your show on PBS and how people engage with your programs?
We have our own Essentrics TV station; when you go on our website, people can then sign up for all 500 episodes, plus. There’s new shows every single day, live shows with teachers, besides me, you can do workouts with a huge a variety of teachers of all ages, with all body types. Plus, on our website we’ve been able to make it so that people can find the exact episodes that they need. If the need back pain, knee pain, if they’re 50, 40, 30, 80. They can get the workouts that they need; there’s workouts pretty much for everyone – breast cancer survivor, you name it. As you probably know, we’ve done a tone of fundraising for PBS. That’s the purpose of the pledges. I’d love to do another station visit.
This is the PBS station licensed to the LA School District.
They should take mine (pledge show) for the fundraising, because it does bring in a lot of money. I love working with the school systems too, I’ve gone to quite a few stations wit the school systems, because that’s where the students are. You want people to start understanding what their bodies are made of and how you can keep your body young. The sooner you take care of your body, the less likely it is for your body to age rapidly. Young people are not guided correctly; like everything else in our world. Like you go to a homeopathic dentist, they’re a whole different world from your regular dentist. And they basically saved my life, my homeopathic dentist.
I have an injury, I am doing your stretches and I feel like it’s helping me; I have a labral hip tear. I keep telling my Physical Therapist about your videos.
You do know that this is my specialty.
No, I’m just so grateful for you. I’m so grateful you haven’t retired. I do your videos. I know when I do your connective tissue and fascia, I feel better. Every time I have a new PT, I mention you. I’ve been proselytizing you.
It’s so funny, we have a huge viewing audience. Like I always tell everybody about fame, it’s not real. We do get a very good viewership on PBS, and right now we have a teacher training program, we have over 3,000 teachers round the world. They will eventually get university credits for this; we’ve got scientific studies in San Diego, at the veterans facility, and we’ve also got stuff at MIT, again on pain and posture. So we have tons of scientific studies now on our program and we’ve got all these teachers. I’ve got probably over a million people who actually know who I am (laughs), but it’s not very many when you think of Pilates or yoga, where every corner has a yoga teacher. But if you look back on yoga, it didn’t exist like 25 years ago and neither did Pilates. So as this program grows, it’s a healing program, but it’s also a fitness program. So that Classical Stretch on TV, what it is, it’s a full-body stretching, strengthening, and rebalancing program. We are the only program in the world that actually is full-body, because full-body includes every single aspect of your body. It includes your bones, that’s your skeletal system, your neurological system, your brain, it’s working on stimulating the brain consciously. Not just, “Oh, it happens to do that.” We do exercises specific for brain awareness, brain memory, brain stimulation. It’s working on the connective tissue system, on the circulatory system, on the glands and organs. We’re working on rebalancing all 360 joints in every workout, that’s a lot of joints! We’re working basically all 650 muscles. There’s lots of muscles in your body and we use them all. So, there’s a deliberate flow and there’s no stress on any joint.
Other programs that are slow don’t fully rebalance the body, they’re working on specifically different body parts. They say arms or legs, but the leg or your arm, the range of motion, the number of muscles involved in connective tissue, ligaments and tendons, they all have to be moved and rebalanced at the same time, or you’re wasting time. You’re only as strong and as flexible as your muscle. And we’re working on liberating the joints, not contracting the muscles so that the joints squeeze together and cause pain, like you have – the labrum tear. The labrum tear, I can tell you I’ve worked with many people, prima ballerinas and Olympic skiers who have had a labrum tear in their hips and have healed it through this program. It’s not necessarily surgery that you need.
A lot of people like to push surgery.
There’s a lot of money in the medical system, and there’s not much money on the Essentrics system (laughs) But that doesn’t matter, we’re still doing it, we’re still pushing it forward. There’s thousands of people that do it and it has healed them.
I don’t have mobility and I used to be hypermobile. Yoga seems to help as well. I’m so not flexible like I used to be.
Yoga has created an entire physical therapy department for carpal tunnel, stress in the back, back pain, shoulder pain, wrist pain. So that’s not a healing program. Yoga is designed by Westerners, not by the original Hindu Indians who did it as a form of spiritual alignment with the brain. So it never was intended as a fitness program, it’s very dangerous for the body and the results are those injuries. Pilates was created by Joseph Pilates between the two wars and he’s a genius and I love that guy. I’ve met some of his actual followers who trained with him in New York City, there’s a whole bunch of them, 8 or 10 came to my Teacher Trainings and they said that he and I would probably have been collaborators and best friends. But the problem with Pilates is he did not trademark it, and I’ve trademarked so people can’t use the name Essentrics. So, if you go to a Pilates teacher it’s a hit or miss whether you get a good program or not and it might have nothing to do with what [Joseph] created. So Pilates, again, has created an entire physical therapy department because of stress on the joints. Essentrics is way ahead of the rest of the world in terms of fitness. If you think of fitness, think about a large fitness center. They’ve got the weight machines, the running machines and aerobics and spinning. And then usually, somewhere in there there’s a physiotherapy department. You have to ask yourself, “Why is there a physiotherapy department in a fitness center?” It’s because the fitness programs unbalances the joints, unbalances the muscles, unbalances the connective tissue and cause injury and pain. And when you’ve compressed your muscles for enough years doing weights, they’re going to be in excruciating pain, maybe even after 10 years. The average runner, I think male is 38 and female is 36 and you ask yourself “Why?” That’s because it’s not good for you after that. The average ballet dancer, I was a professional, but I broke my foot; most of them quit in their 20’s. Everyone quits in their late 30’s, you can’t go beyond your late 30’s, your body is shot. I work with tons of professional athletes, you name it; a lot of Olympians. Their bodies are shot in their teens, same with football players and all these kids.
Oh, Miranda, can I hire you for just one session?
In one week I’m 75. So once I created Classical Stretch and Essentrics, same thing, and I started to realize what I created, then I did a better job of creating it. First of all I didn’t want to do anything about healing because I thought that was the job of doctors and I thought I would be sued. But people kept telling me they were healed. So I had to figure out why. Why was my program a healing program and if it was, how could I make it an actual healing program? How could I eliminate anything that caused injury and put in only things that helps us stay young, that maintained our youth. I’ve lived a magical life where I’ve met some of the leading scientists literally in the world.
This program is meant to be, and I know this program is going to be the program over the next decades. I’m building it. It’ll be there for all the next generations, and they won’t have to get injured, they won’t have to get old. They’ll learn young not to destroy their bodies. Why? Parents encourage these kids to do these crazy things because it’s showing off and it’s not necessary. Like, me, I’m in zero pain. I can do anything I want. But people who’ve been doing my program like 20, 25 years and they do it religiously, it’s 22 minutes everyday. If you do it everyday, if you do three in a row, you’ll get rid of [the pain]. You have to do three in a row.
I’ve got to focus.
There’s a ballerina called, Anik Bissonnette, she’s now the head of Quebec National Ballet School. When she was 40, she was the top ballerina with Le Grands Ballets Canadiens, the Quebec ballet company, and she was dancing with the Bolshoi Ballet and the Paris Opera. She was really good and she had a labrum tear. She was performing full time, this was the age of 40, and she was ready to retire that year. There as a physiotherapist and a masseur on staff that took care of her, because the pain was so great. Then she took two weeks off to go to Mexico and rehearse and then film four half hour DVDs for Essentrics. She was touring, a professional ballet dancer and took two weeks off. She thought that she would be out of shape when she got back to the company. She was in better shape than when she left. And the pain and the tear was healing. You need to do our full body workout.
How did this show come about and on PBS?
The show’s been on for 25 years, 28 years ago I submitted a really bad tape and you have to have four stations accept you to be national, and they did, and then we filmed and it just started and it just grew. So it blossomed, from 25 years ago until now, it’s on pretty much every station.
Your show is most prevalent on PBS and Create TV for exercise. What was your aim when you created this show, to help people heal?
My aim, this is back 30-something years ago when I created it, because I had to create it before I filmed it; so I created maybe, time flies, 30-33 years ago. I owned a fitness center and the students, they’d been with me for 15 years for aerobics and their bodies were getting bulky and they were getting arthritic pain in their knees and hips. All at age 38, 39, 40, when your body starts changing and they wanted a gentler program. At that point, yoga and Pilates didn’t exist, so there were no options. I was a former ballerina, I know how to create things, so I just created it, right there and then, almost within three weeks. Everybody continued doing their aerobics classes, but they just added this class and they lost 20 inches. Not pounds, but inches. Their pants size went down, their skirts size went down. People think strengthening will suck your muscles in but it doesn’t, it bulks your muscles out. In the ballet world, you eat very little and you don’t lose any weight. It’s like 600 calories to burn, you can’t run yourself on 600 calories, you just can’t. So weight loss is about food. It’s so complicated between all the different hormones and what’s in the food today that’s causing the food to not metabolize. But it’s not exercise. Exercise helps tone your body but it won’t really burn calories, it does but it’s not a weight loss thing. Weight loss is – not eating sugar, flour, white food, potatoes. It’s eating vegetables and fruits and healthy stuff. So that’s what happens when people lose weight, when they cut down the calorie count. But nobody believed that a stretching programing could help you lose weight, even tough we have people talking about the inches they lost. Not necessarily weight, but inches, pant size within three weeks if you do it everyday.
Talking to you is giving me encouragement that I should keep doing these.
There’s a scientific reason why. If you became a teacher, which I recommend you do, then you would learn the science, because it’s a very scientific program. We work on how the muscle fibers, the spindles of the muscles, how to lengthen and strengthen them and to work on the connective tissue to get rid of scar tissue. And you don’t want to tear that scar tissue, you want to get rid of it and the way to get rid of it is slowly, like sandpaper. When you slowly sand down something you don’t rip two pieces of wood apart, you do it very gently until you loosen them. If you rip them you might cause damage. You’ve heard of athletes when the tendon pulls away from the bone, it rips the bone out. That shows the strength of the tendon, to rip a bone? Have you tried cutting a bone with a knife? But if a tendon can pull a piece of bone off, like in an accident, that shows the power of the tendon. You think a tendon is not strong, but it’s stronger than a bone. Ounce by ounce, it’s stronger than steel. We work with the connective tissue, we rebalance the ligaments and tendons which become gummed up and hard and deformed. But we also work with rebuilding the fascia, the sheets of fascia that have become glued together and there’s no fluid flowing between them so that your muscles don’t move underneath them. – it’s like a vise that’s holding them down. When you slowly work it, we work it so that you don’t injur yourself doing my program. Other programs move your body quickly where you can’t control them so that you might tear something. We don’t ever tear anything. We’ve been on air for 25 years in almost every market in the United States.
We’ve had less than a handful of complaints. We don’t have a physiotherapy department built around us. People get healed, not injured, doing our program.
If people had just a few minutes, what’s the most important movement they can do?
That’s like – here’s a glass of water, how much should I drink of it? One sip, two sips? You need the full glass of water. One workout which is 22 minutes is designed to go through every single joint, every single muscle from your fingers to your toes, twisting, turning, moving. Some of them focus on your hips, some of the focus on your back, some of them focus on more strengthening than stretching, but they all do the full body. Just do the 22-minute workout, it doesn’t take that long, 22 minutes is awfully fast. And when people start to do it, they usually get hooked, because if you do it the right time of day when you’re not rushing. A lot of people do it first thing in the morning, you do it before your first cup of coffee.
I do it before bed.
So the next thing you do is jump in bed. Find a time when there’s nothing calling you. Find a time when you’ll do it and you’ll do it every single day. You will see results really, really quickly, even though it takes us a long time to age. But the reason you’ll see results quickly, is what I call the miracle of the human body. The body itself, nothing to do with you, but if you look at the actual entity of the body itself, it is so anxious to feel good. It wants to feel good. It has everything in it to feel healthy. The moment you do something that seems to help it, it responds so quickly. The strengthening, regaining mobility, getting rid of pain, stopping the contract of your joints so they can move-free. The body wants to do it, it’ll give you this reward and it’ll change. The muscles will change. Muscles are deigned to change in one day. One day. Connective tissue is designed to change over weeks, months and years. But muscles, one day. You get results right away. So you can be sitting around for five years getting sloppy and weak, you name it. In one day you’ll start seeing the change, you don’t need more than that. You’ll start immediately. Your body’s prepared to start to change immediately, depending on the mess. (laughs) But one day, you’ll see change.
I love your fascia and connective tissue workouts. After one time, I did feel better. And you give encouragement that one day we’ll be able to walk with a spring in our step. Do you really do those daily like you said?
I do it daily. I do all the fascia stuff daily. What you need for your labrum is, also, some of the strengthening where you’re lying down, the side leg lifts.
I can’t lift my leg, I have been trying to hold it up like a level.
Take a TheraBand to help pull your leg towards you. Or a towel, a pair of nylon stockings, even better, to wrap around our leg and pull it towards you. Your hips are so tight. You’re not going to get looser if you don’t do it. You have to do this stuff.
I can hold it for 30 seconds.
We do no holding. Do not hold. Holding is causing more problems. I never say hold.
Holding is other programs, holding is what is causing the compression of your hip joint; it is creating more pain. Do not hold anything ever. Keep moving. You will see, we don’t hold, when you lie on your back, you’ll pull your leg towards you and then you’re going to release it. And then you’ll pull it again and you’re going to release it. It’s a rhythmic thing like the ocean. It’s slowly in and out. Be gentle, just pull and release. You don’t have to bring it to your nose. Just get the movement wherever the hip is tight, you’re just trying to loosen it up.
When you have us lift our legs standing, do people sometimes say their legs are heavy and can’t lift them as high?
Oh, yeah, you need to come to one of my retreats. It’s because they’re doing it wrong. The leg is heavy because you’re using the wrong muscles. You’re using your psoas muscle, you’re psoas muscle is part of your problem with your labrum. You’re not using your quadriceps, so you try to lift that heavy leg, our legs are heavy, all the bone in there, you’ve got a femur bone, right through to your tibia, your feet. That’s a lot of weight. And you’re lifting it from some tiny little muscle in your lower back. It should be a dead weight and it should collapse to the ground like you say. If you do it properly – you isolate your hip and you just lift the leg, you’ll slowly use the correct muscle and you’ll be able to do it. It doesn’t take long to learn how to use your leg correctly. We have teachers across the state.
I’m just building strength.
You can’t build strength if you’re using the wrong muscle. The muscle that you are using is going to get damaged and you’re not going to get any strength from what you’re looking for, because its not designed to lift your leg.
I am dealing with an injury and appreciate how you talk about The importance of our feet and the type of shoes we choose to wear. I’ve noticed that the side on which I am injured, my feet are not as flexible. On my other foot, the weight is more evenly distributed.
Go on to our website, I gave a full workout for feet. Just feet. It’s a 15 minute workshop on feet and how to stand correctly, it’s all about feet. And your feet sound dangerously bad from what you’re saying. I would be worried about you. It wont take long but you need to have somebody [demonstrate] how to do it properly. My company is not designed to suck the money out of people; that’s not what we do. We train you, you go on your own happy way. If you want a teacher to stick with you, they will, but they will give you the basics and then you can use the workouts. You can workout with a professional once a month and then do daily workouts on what they corrected you on. It’s not that I’m trying to get you to spend money, nobody does, because that’s one of our philosophies. This is about healing people. End of story. Healing people, that’s what we do.
I love the Classical Music in your programs, it makes me feel I’m in ballet class. I love how your movements are like a blend of ballet and Tai chi, was that deliberate?
I am a ballerina and I did study tai chi and I adore Tai chi. And I used fake Tai chi of course (laughs), but I use the feeling of Tai chi. I love the fluidity of Tai chi, I think Tai chi’s brilliant, but Tai chi is not a full body workout, it’s a self defense workout. I’m passionate about Tai chi. There’s no ballet in this program, zero, none. But you can’t escape the fact that I’m a ballet dancer. There’s a lot of teachers, and I think only a handful are actual ballet dancers. And they look like ballet dancers because this program lengthens and strengthen your muscles. And that is what ballet does, lengthens; it gives you mobility, it gives you flexibility. The same type of strength that ballet dancers have, which is ounce by ounce stronger than weightlifters. People think weight lifting develops strong muscles, ballet develops strong muscles. But we train the muscles in the long way because we’re doing all these huge moves. It takes a lot of strength to do a big move, but they’re long. So the teachers all look like ballet dancers. They’re all elegant because their movements are slow and slow movements look elegant; hard, sharp movements don’t. So there’s no ballet in this program, it’s all medical, it’s all about the physical body. Every single muscle being used. So if you’re doing an exercise where you’re twisting your arm and sweeping your arm across and lifting it up. (showing that move) That’s not ballet, that’s muscles. You’re moving your muscles. It just happens to be a ballet look-alike. It’s working every single muscle in the joint. Ballet happens to use the full body; that’s one thing ballet does. There’s not one muscle that gets left out. Even your baby finger. (laughs)
I have some of the early DVDs of the show and I remember thinking it’s always the same moves like wiping the mirror, yet you’ve come up with so many episodes with different variations and it is the full-body, sweeping your hands. No one really stretches the upper body the way your workouts have.
Ballet, or any fitness thing, has an alphabet. In ballet you do plié, kicks, there’s an alphabet. Then you go and do Swan Lake; they take that alphabet and they turn it into choreography. So basically Essentrics has an alphabet and we take that alphabet and we make it into an interesting, but full-body work out. So it’s never the same, but it’s using the same alphabet.
Are you ever afraid you’ll run out of workouts and do you ever want to retire? You could if you wanted to, you’re about to turn 75?
Well, I was about to retire, but then a lot of people got really mad at me and said I’m not allowed to retire. The fans said, “No.” They don’t care if I’m this little fat 89-year-old, they still want to see me on. So they accept me aging. I’m not skinny anymore. If they’ll accept me the way I am, I’ll do it. So I’ll do it as long as I don’t have the pressure of looking like I did when I was 50. But I’m working on projects. The teachers in this program have all said that since starting to teach this program, they’ve felt like they’re getting smarter. They’ve felt becoming a teacher has made them smarter because it requires so much of your brain. So instead of your brain slowing down as you age, your brain is picking up. I love the brain part of this program. I’m just constantly working; I don’t know if you can see my office right now but it’s packed full of papers. Its all over my floor, I’ve got this huge project that I’m delivering.
Classical Stretch airs weekdays at 5:30 AM on KLCS Public Media, visit our website for more details and a full schedule. Learn more about Miranda and Essentrics on online: essentrics.com Or keep up with them on social media: Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest or YouTube.
