Leah Strauss Grant
Nationally Certified Pilates Teacher
Leah Grant is a Balanced Body Educator, Certified Pilates Instructor, and Integrative Movement Specialist with a decade of experience helping people move with strength, balance, and awareness. As a Balanced Body Educator, she teaches Pilates and modern movement principles grounded in biomechanics, designing safe, creative, and effective programing for all bodies.
Beyond her professional certifications, Leah’s insight as a teacher is shaped by her personal health journey, living with Type 1 diabetes and autonomic dysfunction. Through meticulous self-observation, she has developed a profound respect for the interconnectedness of body and mind, a perspective she infuses into her teaching with empathy and realism.
A lifelong learner and mover, Leah holds a BFA in Photography and once lived in Paris studying fine arts, her “true birthplace,” she likes to say. When not teaching, she enjoys traveling with her husband, visiting family in Chicago and Denver, and spending summers in Michigan. You’ll often find her with her nose in a book, savoring fresh eats, or with her two corgi puppies, who visit the studio on Thursdays (come say hi!).
Leah believes movement is education, and helping others to move well is one of life’s most generous acts.
How Exercise Boosts Creativity
Leah reminds us that every fitness professional has the capacity to think, move, teach, and problem-solve creatively. Like any physical skill, creativity grows through deliberate practice, repetition, curiosity, and imagination. For Pilates instructors, that creative practice shows up every day in technical Pilates cueing, innovative Pilates sequencing, adapting exercises for diverse body types, and empowering students to trust their own somatic voice.
Explore how letting someone else lead can open new pathways for professional inspiration, why setting structural boundaries is essential for reducing mental distraction, and how cultivating receptivity can help us access more creative freedom in both somatic movement instruction and everyday life.
This episode is powered by Balanced Body®.
About Leah
What do you feel is the most unique quality of Pilates as a mindful movement?
How you learn to live pain free! Movement is empowering and giving students the tools to be aware of their body's, how to move better, and release pain is Pilates greatest quality.
Currently, what is your favorite Pilates exercise, on any apparatus?
Swan - Push Through Bar on the Trap Table, or any apparatus too. Focused on strengthening the upper back and increasing shoulder mobility, this exercise helps so many of us!
What tickles you most about teaching Pilates?
Observing my students, clarifying a cue and seeing a ripple effect of movement as each student rediscovers the nuances of the exercise to perform it better! It's sweeter than dessert.