Miranda Esmonde-White (born May 9, 1949) is a Canadian fitness trainer, former ballerina with the National Ballet of Canada, and author of books on aging, health and fitness. She created the dynamic stretching and strengthening workout, Essentrics, and the PBS fitness TV show, Classical Stretch, based on Essentrics.
Her study of the benefits of eccentric stretch training has also been the basis of the pledge documentaries Aging Backwards and Forever Painless airing on PBS public television.
Early life and family
A self-described army brat born in Edmonton to Lt.-Col. Laurence Esmonde-White, she moved with her family to Calgary, and eventually to Montreal. Her mother, Anstace Esmonde-White, and father Larry were the hosts of From A Country Garden, a public television series produced by WPBS-TV that ran on PBS for seventeen years beginning in 1986. Her daughter, Sahra Esmonde-White, took over her grandparents' gardens and added an apothecary. Producer of many of her mother's television shows, Sahra is a co-owner of EWH Productions and hosts the Essentrics Workout Series.
Ballet
Esmonde-White began her career studying to become a ballerina at Canada's National Ballet School co-founded in 1959 by Celia Franca and Betty Oliphant in Toronto, Ontario. A photo in Dance Collection Danse shows her classmates and a young Esmonde-White smiling up at the violinist Yehudi Menuhin after his concert at Massey Hall. After her training, she worked around the world with the National Ballet of Canada at the same time that the company danced with Margot Fonteyn, Rudolf Nureyev, and other very well-known dancers such as Karen Kain and Robert Joffrey. Unfortunately, she broke a foot, and the injury ended her ballet career in her early twenties.
Montreal studio
Esmonde-White's next effort, her own company making homemade rag dolls, led to her becoming an executive at the toymaker Hasbro, but business trips kept her away from her child, who was then five years old. Separating from the corporate world and searching for the means to support herself, she started to teach fitness classes in a nearby church and soon had almost five classes per day. She opened a dance and fitness studio in Montreal, where she became a flexibility trainer and developed her own technique. Esmonde-White claims she was able to alleviate her persistent back pain using her own exercise program. As her classes became popular, she then had to train more teachers. She spent much of the next ten years researching and perfecting instructor training manuals.
Classical Stretch
Esmonde-White combined her own movements and elements of ballet, tai chi, and physiotherapy. Classical Stretch was designed to relieve pain, increase athletes' speed, and lengthen the muscles of the full body. The technique is continuous movement, usually standing. Barre work can be done using a chair or counter top. Floor work requires a yoga mat and optionally a resistance band and/or a yoga block. Esmonde-White's technique includes no weight-bearing exercises that can stress the wrist like yoga. Her movements are easy to do, unlike Pilates where people try for technically correct moves. She realized that her technique emphasized essentric movement, something that was known to sports medicine but had been sometimes considered wasted effort. It took a while for the idea of strengthening the muscular system by lengthening muscles to catch on in fitness circles, but eventually she prevailed, asking her students to exercise for about 22 minutes every day.
She approached PBS with a series idea in 1999, and her technique has been a successful television program ever since. Classical Stretch is presented on more than one hundred stations across the U.S., and has more than three hundred episodes as of 2014. The program reaches approximately 60 percent of the U.S. market.
The product of three iterations, Esmonde-White completed her textbook as manuals in levels one to four, Classical Stretch: The Esmonde Technique. She also hosts a suite of Classical Stretch DVDs.