By Namrata Purohit
I didn’t discover Pilates because I was looking for a career.
I discovered it because I was injured.
At 15, I was an active, competitive teenager who loved sport, dancing and movement. I was riding horses when a fall resulted in a serious knee injury and surgery. Suddenly, the things that had always been a part of my life were things I had been told to step away from.
For someone who had always found freedom in movement, that was difficult to accept.
I began looking for ways to recover. I explored physiotherapy, strength training and different approaches to getting my body moving again. Around the same time, my father, Samir, was hosting a Pilates course in Mumbai.
I asked if I could join.
I was much younger than everyone else in the room, and most of the participants already had backgrounds in fitness. I knew I had a lot to learn, so I studied harder, practised more and spent extra time trying to understand what was being taught.
Something changed.
Pilates helped me reconnect with my body. I began to understand movement differently — not simply as something I did, but as something I could study, observe and understand.
At 16, I became the youngest trained STOTT PILATES instructor in the world. But the title itself was never the most important part of that moment.
What mattered was that I had found something that allowed me to move again.
When Pilates Became a Way of Thinking
My journey didn’t stop with certification.
In fact, that was where the real learning began.
Over the years, I have worked with athletes, performers, celebrities, people recovering from injuries, women during and after pregnancy, and people simply trying to feel stronger and more confident in their bodies.
I have also experienced injury myself.
An ACL injury made me a student again. Later, a shattered collarbone and surgery took me through another rehabilitation journey.
Each experience changed the way I looked at movement.
I learned that strength isn’t always about pushing harder. Sometimes, it is about slowing down enough to understand what the body is telling you.
I learned to pay closer attention to stability, balance, muscle activation, compensation and movement quality.
Most importantly, I learned that recovery is not linear.
From Practitioner to Educator
Over time, I realised that what I wanted to do was bigger than teaching individual sessions.
I wanted to share the way I had learned to think about movement.
Because I believe the best teachers never stop being students.
There is always another body to understand, another movement to explore and another question to ask.
That belief is at the heart of the Namrata Purohit Institute of Movement (NPIM).
NPIM is an extension of everything I have learned over the years — through certifications, teaching, sport, injuries, rehabilitation, clients and, most importantly, through constantly being willing to learn again.
I don’t want to create instructors who simply know what exercise comes next.
I want to help create teachers who understand why it comes next.
Teachers who can observe.
Teachers who can adapt.
Teachers who can communicate.
Teachers who can make movement feel safe, purposeful and empowering.
The Journey Continues
When I look back, it is interesting to think that an injury I once saw as a setback became the beginning of my life’s work.
It taught me that movement is not just about performance.
It is about understanding.
It is about resilience.
It is about confidence.
And it is about having the knowledge to help someone else experience all of those things too.
That is what I hope to pass forward through NPIM.
Because my journey began with learning how to move again.
Today, it is about helping others learn how to teach movement better.