Empowering Your Mind, Body & Spirit

At Life Pilates Vancouver, our goal is to help you become more in touch with your body and to develop the skills to use it to its fullest potential.

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Personalized Pilates classes in Vancouver WA
Pilates instructor in Vancouver WA

Katie Atkins-Castillo

Choreographer/Dancer/Certified Pilates trainer. A native of Arizona, Katie’s career began on the West Coast. She danced professionally in San Francisco before she graduated from NYU’s Tisch School of performing arts with her MFA in 2000. While at Tisch, Katie studied with Pilates Elder Kathleen Stanford Grant. In October of 2001 Katie moved to Boulder CO. to be the artistic Director of Bolder Moves Dance Center. While running Bolder Moves she also received her Pilates teacher certification from the most rigorous training program in the nation, The Pilates Center, Boulder. With over 980 hours of required training the Pilates Center Boulder is considered the Harvard of Pilates teacher training schools.

Katie opened Life Pilates in 2008. Life Pilates is a full service Pilates studio specializing in traditional Pilates for everyone from extreme athletes to those in need of injury rehabilitation. Life Pilates gives Katie the opportunity to use her deep knowledge of the body. This comes from many years of dance performance, over 20 years of accredited training, and her love of teaching. Katie’s students learn to live without unnecessary pain by being empowered to know, love, and ultimately respect their body’s unique challenges and gifts.

Recently Katie completed the Heritage training with Cara Reeser. Bringing the full body of Kathleen Stanford Grants’ work into the fold. This graduate level training enriches and refines Katies’ ability to apply Bio mechanics and structural understanding. Allowing her to even more deeply understand the fundamentals of healthy movement and applying this knowledge to facilitate the practice of Pilates.

Katie and Lydia both plan to deepen their knowledge base by continuing their education. In 2022, we plan to move forward with Cara Reeser and Jeremy Lavender in the Movement Science made Simple continuing education platform for pilates professionals.

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Pilates Instructor in Vancouver WA

Lydia Lunsford

Lydia was first introduced to Pilates in 2005 and instantly fell in love. The movements, combining both flexibility and strength, felt like a perfect fit for her body. Soon after, she was blessed to learn that she was pregnant with her son and was lucky enough to have found the method to keep her body healthy, strong and mobile throughout pregnancy, through birth and even post-natal. Not only was Pilates the key to her fitness and success with pre-and post-natal, it was also the exercise method that felt the most right to her body and soul.

In 2006 she was certified in Mat and Standing Pilates through The PhysicalMindInstitute while apprenticing on all the apparatus with a mentor. In 2014 she completed the Comprehensive Pilates program with Polestar Pilates and soon became a certified member of the Pilates Method Alliance (PMA). In 2016 she completed the BASI (Body Arts and Science) bridge program with Rael Isacowitz to add to her Pilates teaching and personal practice.

To compliment and add variety to the essential Pilates foundations, Lydia also instructs the very popular Barre fitness classes, attaining certifications in both the BootyBarre methods and BarreConnect. Lydia continues to attend Continuing Educations Courses, where she is able to learn to treat specific populations with pathologies through Pilates such as people with osteoporosis, scoliosis, joint replacements, back pain and neurological disorders. Along with ailments, Lydia loves the challenge of enhancing sports activities such as golf, tennis, weight lifting, and both summer and winter sports with the Pilates repertoire. Her excitement to learn and grow with all that Pilates has to offer never ceases.

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