Pilates is great for you. Will it make you like yourself?
By Leah Asmelash, CNN
(CNN) — There is something my Pilates teacher says when I’m on the brink of giving up.
My class will be in the middle of an inner thigh circuit, having done what feels like hundreds of micro squat “pulses.” My thighs ache. My calves are burning. A bead of sweat forms at my brow and drips down onto my mat. I’m craving the sweet release of death, or maybe just water.
“Stay in your body!” he’ll yell, over the blasting pop music.
Stay in my body, stay in my body, stay in my body, I’ll chant in my head, testing the physical limits of what I feel capable of after work on a weeknight.
I’ve been going to this same mat Pilates class at my gym for two years now. I love it, or that’s what I tell myself as I count the minutes until it’s over. But it was only recently that I learned of reformer Pilates, an earlier method that has come back to take the world — and my friend group — by storm.
Pilates provides improvements in core strength, flexibility and balance, even when done just once a week. It can help with stress relief, as well as anxiety and depression. Among those 60 years of age and older, Pilates has even been shown to slow the process of senescence.
Pilates was also treated as a sort of rich-girl, get-skinny-quick routine; a “yummy mummy” workout, as one expert quipped to me, meant more for the Margot Robbies of the world and less for me.
Even as a regular practitioner of Pilates, I was suspicious of the recent interest in the reformer. Amid rising use of GLP-1s for weight loss among healthy people, reports of skinny being “back” in vogue and the retreat of the body positivity movement, the Pilates fixation struck me not only as another sign of society’s changing female body standards, but also emblematic of our current political reality. It feels like a turn toward the past — a call to, quite literally, take up less space.
Those concerns were not discouraging people online and around me from embracing the reformer machine. What was I missing about the allure of the workout? Armed with my best leggings and a newly acquired pair of grippy socks, I decided to find out.
The sweaty politics of Pilates
The Daily Pilates studio, a smaller chain based in the South, advertises itself as a place where “Pilates, design and wellness unite.” The location I picked felt less like a gym and more like a spa: The weights were not the metal dumbbells I was used to, but pleasing peach-hued cylinders. Pampas grass in ceramic vases filled the space. A swirly, luminescent light fixture on the wall read: “Keep it peachy.”
My instructor for the hour was a thin woman with blonde hair, slicked into a top bun. Around me, my fellow Pilates-goers were something out of an Instagram athleisure ad: hot pink matching set, bright red matching set, navy set and so on. In my tee and leggings, I felt like a fat, sore thumb.
As we set up on the reformer — a moving faux-leather bench with springs attached to create resistance, appearing less like a piece of workout equipment and more like a torture device — I observed the woman next to me. I eyed her delicate gold jewelry, her Lululemon, her blonde updo. Later, when she glided into a split during a hamstring stretch, I decided she was my nemesis.
Body dysmorphia and Pilates go hand in hand, at least to me. I was first introduced to Pilates by Blogilates on YouTube, circa 2013. Cassey Ho, the instructor behind the channel, would post videos with titles like “Muffintop Massacre,” “Flat Belly Fat Burner” and “6 Min to a Sexy Little Waist!” Here, the reasons for Pilates felt clear.
As a teenager in a majority white suburb, I felt everything about my body was fair game for scrutiny, from my frizzy, Afro hair to the strip of tummy hanging over my low-rise jeans. I analyzed the size of my thighs — I didn’t dare wear shorts until well into college — and examined the fat on my upper arms. Looking back, I was not a chubby kid, and my size was likely average. But the facts didn’t matter. From the moment I conceptualized having a visible body, I knew it needed changing.
A military background and a celebrity endorsement
But Pilates hasn’t always been about weight loss. The exercise system was designed in the 1920s by Joseph Pilates, a German physical education instructor. He developed his ideas while training athletes and injured soldiers, and originally created the reformer machine to help those injured in WWI. Inspired by dance, meditation and breathwork, Pilates further developed his exercise regimen, known at the time as Contrology. Later, in the 1940s and 1950s, the exercises became a key part of dancer training, eventually becoming known as simply Pilates.
Today, the regimen is mainly divided into mat Pilates, done on the floor, and reformer Pilates, with the machine. The classes themselves can vary in intensity depending on the studio or instructor; some leave you baptized in sweat, while others lean more into slow, intentional movements.
When Faye Linda Wachs, a sports sociologist at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, has attended Pilates classes with friends, the clearly stated goal has been “lean, toned muscles,” with which the practice has become synonymous, she said. That sort of body type — not stick-thin, per se, but thin and muscular — is most usually found in white, northern European women, Wachs said.
While there can be a wide range of body types in any ethnicity, there’s both a racialized and social class component embedded in that “long and lean” body type, Wachs said, the very body type Pilates (incorrectly) purports to create. (In any case, a pack of two classes a week for a single month at The Daily would run you $224, almost quadruple my regular gym membership.)
It’s not that every Pilates class is consciously trying to idealize thinness, whiteness or wealth, as the ultimate human goal. But the “long and lean” ideal carries these connotations, even if people aren’t actively thinking about them.
“We have a history that carries weight in terms of our understanding of culture and cultural meanings,” Wachs said.
Those cultural implications are readily seen. TikTok is replete with “Pink Pilates Princess” archetypes mirroring the aesthetic of a woman wearing a $150 sports bra and leggings set. Tyra Banks touts the benefits of the exercise for making her thick booty “tight.” In Season 4 of “Sex and the City,” when a character accidentally sees Samantha naked but compliments her body, she chuckles and shrugs: “Pilates.”
Pilates has lots of real benefits. Yet somehow, it always comes back to the way it makes you look.
Like clothing, body styles go in and out of vogue. See the stick-thin, heroin chic look of the 1990s, and the more recent Coca-Cola bottle bodies epitomized by Black women and Black women wannabes like the Kardashians. As the cycle turns, here we are again, firmly back chasing tiny waists and jutting hip bones, exhibited in the rise of GPL-1s and increasing requests for a “ballet body” from plastic surgeons — a toned yet natural physique.
Pilates, known less for muscle building and more for muscle sculpting, neatly aligns with today’s body trends. That reformer Pilates is seeing a revival now, at this moment, absolutely tracks.
Exercise for women has always complicated health and appearance. In the 19th century, Victorian ideas of femininity dominated in the West, but there was a growing acceptance of physical activity among women, said Louise Mansfield, professor of sport, health and social sciences at Brunel University of London. Still, there were limits: these activities had to be appropriately “feminine” — think tennis, where one could still wear a long skirt, or biking. And thinness was still prized: just imagine the tightly wound corsets popular at the time, a precursor to Spanx or the insidious rib removal surgeries of today.
“The status of small and thinness has always been there,” Mansfield said. “And women seek to get there in different ways.”
In the US, Pilates has shape-shifted through the years, its premises absorbed by the larger fitness culture. In the 1980s, “Jane Fonda’s Workout” videos borrowed heavily from Pilates, encouraging a new generation of women to “feel the burn,” all in a plainly stated effort to improve the way they look. (Fonda has also since revealed a decades-long battle with bulimia.) More recently, we have instructors like Tracy Anderson, whose eponymous method is not specifically inspired by Pilates, although it looks similar and purports to do the same thing.
Almost every trendy workout, on some level, is about reaching an idealized, society-approved body — see the numerous fat-burning spin classes or CrossFit’s “functional aesthetic.” But the conversation around Pilates takes that pursuit beyond the physical and into the political. The classes themselves, with their elegant movements and light weights, are descendants of those acceptable feminine exercises of yore — think of the long tennis skirt swapped for leggings and a cute sports bra. Pilates is perfect for this politically conservative moment, with a president and administration fixated on returning the US to a glamorized prior era, when we kept our women thin, feminine and acceptable.
The machine is your friend
Club Pilates is the Starbucks of Pilates studios: widely available and relatively affordable.
Nestled in a strip mall by a nail salon and a Whole Foods, this specific Club Pilates studio eschewed the spa vibes in favor of a traditional fitness room. Multiple mirrors lined the walls alongside the reformers, with each machine accompanied by a mat and a Bosu ball, while a weight rack sat in a corner, no dumbbell heavier than 10 pounds.
Regulars streamed in, greeting each other by name and with enthusiastic hellos. I was instructed to put away my phone, for “mindfulness.” April West, a 53-year-old woman in an “Eat, Sleep, Pilates” tank top asked me whether this was my first time — was it that obvious? — and gave me a lay of the land. Reformer Pilates is much easier than mat, she said. The machine “is your friend! It’s there to help you!” she said; I was less certain.
Halfway through class — lying supine on the reformer, legs in the air and feet hooked in leather pulleys for a circuit of leg lifts — I decided I was right. Still unused to the reformer machine, my body felt the movements as not necessarily difficult but definitely awkward. Each up and down motion of my legs was punctuated with a noticeable BANG as my bench slid forward, while longtimers controlled their movements toward a gentle landing. And unlike in the mat classes I was used to, I couldn’t just glance around to check what other people were doing when I got confused. The reformer got in the way. That meant that more than once, the instructor had to help me specifically. I was mortified.
Maybe because of its suburban location, or maybe just the cheaper price tag, the clientele at Club Pilates surprised me. At this particular weekday 9 a.m. class, the group skewed older. There was a man. There were no bright matching workout sets.
Later, I was surprised when West said she wasn’t familiar with the stereotypes around Pilates at all. A children’s book author, West was first introduced to Pilates after reading about it in Arthritis Today, a magazine by the Arthritis Foundation. She thought the class would be mainly stretching — she didn’t realize Pilates was an actual workout. If she had known, she probably wouldn’t have gone, she said — “I am not a fan of exercising AT ALL.”
Seven years after that first day, West still attends classes. She enjoys the community, she said, and the practice is more about feeling like she’s connecting with her body and staying strong as she ages.
I asked West if she ever feels uncomfortable when people bring up weight loss or appearance when working out — a feeling I’ve noticed in myself. But despite my questioning — and my probe for some acknowledgement of Pilates’ inherent issues — West laughed me off.
“I’m probably twice your age,” she said. “So if someone said that about me losing weight, I’d have been like ‘Oh, yes!’”
Others I spoke to felt similarly. Rae Townsen, a 31-year-old film props assistant, first started doing Pilates at the height of Covid-19 through YouTube videos. As restrictions lifted, she began going to classes in person. Townsen has nerve damage from an autoimmune disorder, and she appreciated that the workouts accommodated physical differences, never making her feel self-conscious for adjusting certain moves to her body. As a whole, the classes feel “less like a chore and a little more fun.”
“In most of the classes that I’ve taken, there hasn’t really been any emphasis on burning calories or anything to that effect,” she said. “I’ve just been really fortunate to be in classes that have all kinds of different people and different body types in them.”
Is it possible to divorce exercise from the connotations we’ve heaped upon it? Was this a both/and scenario, where contradictory ideas could stand side by side?
Whenever someone asked how I stayed so dedicated to the gym, I’d make direct eye contact and crack a half-hearted joke: “Internalized fatphobia.”
No one ever laughed. But it’s the truth. I enjoy the benefits: the flexibility, the routine, the ability to open tight jars without help. I sometimes even find it alarmingly fun. But I would be lying if I said it was just for those reasons, and not also for the way exercise makes me look.
It is not every day I spill my guts to a professor, but I poured all this out to Mansfield.
It’s true that two groups seem to be gravitating toward the exercise, she said: older people looking to retain their strength, and younger women seeking that long and lean look.
That tension between the two, even within oneself, is natural. We all have a relationship with our bodies, Mansfield said. That includes, along with how it feels and how healthy it is, how it looks.
“You try not to do it, but you do,” she said. “Even the innocuous things you think about some of the people you know, and some of the friends that you know, and the narrative that comes with them. ‘Oh, I’m going to see Jo, we’re doing this,’ and someone goes ‘Oh, Jo, who does all the Pilates, she just got her teaching qualification, and oh, my God, she looks amazing.’”
Even as the language around Pilates shifts, our fixation on thinness and all it represents is still ingrained. Success is still based on appearance — wanting to look a certain way or stay a certain shape. We connect our value as humans to our penchant for exercise and maintaining a bodily ideal. No one celebrates lowering their resting heart rate, but they might smile when their jeans fit a little looser.
“People talk a lot about body positivity, but the imagery we see in our larger culture still very heavily tells us what the physical ideal is,” Wachs said. “It’s very clear to all of us.”
Back in my regular Pilates class, away from the stickiness of the reformer, I hear my instructor once again say his catchphrase: “Stay in your body.” That’s all we can do, for better or for worse.
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