Hi, I'm Gina Soberanis

I’m a comprehensively certified Classical Pilates instructor, born and raised in San Francisco.

Hi, my name is Gina and I’m so glad you’re here! :)

I’m a comprehensively certified Classical Pilates instructor and long-distance runner, born and raised in San Francisco.

I completed my comprehensive certification through Metropolitan Authentic Pilates, training under Master Trainer Dorothee VandeWalle with the mentorship of Stella Sandoval at UPPilates Burlingame. My training was rigorous, technical, and deeply rooted in the original method—and that standard continues to shape the way I teach today.

I believe good instruction should teach you more than how to perform an exercise. It should teach you how to understand your body.

That belief began long before I found Pilates.

I grew up in San Francisco, attended Mercy Burlingame, and later studied Economics and Sociology at Gonzaga University. I've always had a restless mind, and for much of my life, exercise was simply how I regulated it: go to the gym, get the wiggles out, get back to work. Movement was a means to an end.

Then Gonzaga offered a one-credit yoga course through a local studio called Shala Living, and it ruined me for anything ordinary ever again.

This wasn't gym yoga. The instruction was precise, intentional, and deeply rooted in the practice. For the first time, movement asked something of my mind, not just my body. I wasn't exercising to get through a workout anymore. I was paying attention. I was learning. I wanted to go deeper.

I've been chasing that standard of instruction ever since.

“I believe good instruction should teach you more than how to perform an exercise. It should teach you how to understand your body.”

— Gina Soberanis

During 2020, I began running long distances and gave myself more time than ever to study and explore movement. Somewhere along the way, I stopped simply going for runs and started becoming a runner. Movement became less about what I could make my body do and more about how deeply I could understand it.

Then, in 2022, I found Classical Pilates—and realized how much I still didn't know.

After years of yoga and consistent exercise, I genuinely believed I had excellent body awareness. Pilates showed me otherwise. My alignment was inconsistent. I didn't understand how to organize movement from my center. I jokingly describe my former self as a floating body with arms and legs and nothing connecting them together.

Classical Pilates gave me that connection.

Suddenly, things I had spent years trying to understand about posture, strength, mobility, and movement began clicking into place. I became completely obsessed. I couldn't stop practicing it, studying it, or talking about the Powerhouse and spinal articulation to anyone willing to listen. My friends started calling me the “Posture Police.”

The writing was on the wall.

“For the first time, movement asked something of my mind, not just my body.”

– Gina Soberanis

What began as a personal practice eventually became something much bigger: a method through which I learned to observe, organize, and understand my body with a level of precision I hadn't experienced before. It changed my relationship with movement—and ultimately, the direction of my life.

Today, that is what I want to give my clients.

I work with active, curious people who don't just want to be put through a workout. They want to understand what they're doing, why they're doing it, and how the strength they build in the studio can change the way they move through everything else they love to do.

I don't teach a watered-down version of Pilates. I teach the method I fell in love with: technical, intelligent, demanding, and deeply rewarding.

If you're ready to learn what your body is actually capable of, I'd love to teach you.

The Work

Joseph Pilates was obsessed with the human body

— what it's capable of, what gets in its way, and how to restore strength, control, and function when those things are lost.

Long before “functional fitness” existed as a concept, he was studying movement, developing apparatuses, and building a method around a deceptively simple idea: the mind should lead the body — precisely, deliberately, always.

He called his method Contrology.

That's what I teach.

Not a trend. Not a modification of something else. A complete system, taught through a lineage of teachers committed to preserving the integrity of the original method.

Classical Pilates works because it's complete. Every exercise has a purpose. Every sequence builds on the last. The apparatuses — the Reformer, Cadillac, Wunda Chair, and more — aren't props or novelties. They're tools designed to teach the body how to organize itself from the inside out.

And when you begin to understand that system, the work compounds.

Your posture changes. Your strength deepens. Your movement becomes more connected. The things you already love to do — run, lift, hike, play, move through the world — have a stronger body underneath them.

I live for the moment that lands on a client's face when something finally clicks — when the Powerhouse engages, when the spine lengthens, when the body does something it didn't know it could do.

That ah-ha moment is what I'm after in every session.

My teaching is precise, encouraging, and direct. Kind, but firm — because the work deserves your attention, and you're capable of giving it.

If you're ready to find out what your body is actually capable of, you've come to the right place.