The long con of Pilates culture
Want a "copy-paste" body? It'll cost ya.
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I wrote in 2022 about “she does Pilates” as cultural shorthand for “hot woman” that had shown up in television juggernauts Abbott Elementary and Love is Blind, not long after Lori Harvey credited Pilates for her “long, lean” muscles at the Met Gala.
This isn’t exactly new in pop culture — back in 2002, it appeared in Sex and the City, when Samantha attributed her “wow”-worthy bod to the practice. I’ve observed a spike in interest in Pilates over the past couple of years, in online content and among women I know1, and Google searches for “Pilates” nearly tripled from January 2022 to January 2024.
I remain miffed by this shorthand and the surging popularity of Pilates because the culture around it has the unique potential to hustle a lot of women 1). out of a great deal of money, and 2). away from the type of exercise that would better serve some of their goals and overall health.
To be clear: I’ve done Pilates plenty of times (including as recently as, like, two months ago) and think it’s a great exercise modality for core engagement, body awareness and control, and flexibility in particular. This post isn’t a takedown of Pilates Thee Exercise. It’s a critique of the commercial, social, and lifestyle aspects that have developed around Pilates that have potentially damaging implications for women’s ideas of what exercise is for and what it can do for them.
OK? We good? Are the Pilates girlies still with us? Brace your core, let’s get into it.
In the countless hand-wringing articles over the past few years about thinness being “back”2 — perhaps driven by and as a result of weight-loss drugs hitting the market — their authors point to the resurgence of early-2000s fashion, buccal fat removal and Brazilian Butt Lift reversals, and detox-style starvation diets masquerading as wellness as evidence of the return of thinness worship. What’s often missing from this conversation is that the renewed popularity of Pilates is of a piece with thinness being “back,” too.
The argument against this claim would be that Pilates devotees are healthier (in body composition, appearance, and behavior) than the emaciated-thin, “heroin chic”-ish types of the early aughts. Pilates adherents are “toned,” after all! They don’t want stick-insect arms, they want Miley Cyrus’ “Pilates arms”!
OK, fair. If you’re super into Pilates in 2024 you’re probably also into a lot of wellness-adjacent stuff that Kate Moss circa 2009 was maybe not. Still, I believe many women are choosing to do Pilates over other exercise modalities for reasons that are more regressive than we’d like to admit: We don’t want to look “fat” or “bulky” and are led to believe, by Pilates culture, that Pilates is the exclusive means to achieving the type of body that’s currently upheld as the gold standard for women — slender, yet “toned.”
I worked in the fitness industry for several years, so hear me now: This is fitness marketing fuckery at its finest.
In the article I linked about Miley’s arms, one Pilates instructor said that Pilates gives easily identifiable, “copy-paste body types” to those who stick with it. I’m harrowed by this as a selling point, not only because it’s inaccurate — for myriad reasons, two people who do the exact same workout might never look alike — but also because it evinces a spooky trend: Everyone’s trying to look exactly the same. Jia Tolentino wrote about it back in 2019 when she coined “Instagram Face,” a phenomenon now spreading among men, too.
Pilates, more so than most exercise modalities I can think of, relies on the ostensibly practice-specific resultant body as a marketing tactic. There is a culturally agreed-upon “Pilates body,” more than there is a “Spinning body,” or a “kickboxing body,” or an “Orangetheory body,” for example. That’s not because Pilates is necessarily the best at transforming the body, but thanks to the misleading fitness marketing language around “long, lean muscles.” I’ve already covered why this phrase is meaningless in my 2022 Pilates post3, but lately it’s also having the infuriating effect of making women assign themselves into Has a Pilates Body and Does Not Have a Pilates Body categories.
There are countless results for “Muscle Mommies vs. Pilates Princess” on TikTok. Women overlay text that says some variation of, “Being a Muscle Mommy is cool until I see a Pilates Princess walk past.” This implies that even the woman who primarily lifts weights knows her resultant body type is not ideal; it’s the Pilates girl who reigns supreme. It’s a false dichotomy that is as irritating as it is unsurprising at a time when social media trends encourage people to situate themselves into ultimately oppressive boxes, labels, and “aesthetics.” There’s an implicit belief here that being both a Muscle Mommy and a Pilates Princess would weaken one’s brand; you have to choose the kind of woman to be4, in the gym and everywhere else.
It’s unsurprising that Pilates is rising in popularity for another reason besides thinness. Consider how adherents are deemed “princesses” and “girlies,” while women who lift weights are “mommies” — Pilates culture suggests that its participants are not only “long and lean” (read: thin) but also ultra-feminine and, most crucially, youthful. Our culture’s obsession with youth and womanhood-turned-girlhood has played out at max volume over the last couple of years. Observe it in the skin care industry as a whole (post by ); in the coquette trend and in Sabrina Carpenter’s “sexy baby” (post by ) mien; in everything from “girl dinner” to “girl math”; in The Eras Tour and in the market for cartoonish charms for your Stanley.
I don’t intend to condemn any grown woman who calls herself a girl (I understand that for most of us it’s Not That Serious; I say I’m going out with “the girls” and things like that) or buys “girly” products, but I assume that the Pilates Industrial Complex is happy to take advantage of a cultural moment in which the construct of a certain type of femininity is on trend and a certain type of exercise is considered the best way to embody it.
This gets expensive. Single Club Pilates reformer classes can run up to $49 per class, and a class at the “mysterious5, exclusive” Forma Pilates in L.A. offers 55-minute classes for an astonishing $75 per. I’ve written for the Washington Post about the consumers who pay top-dollar for gym memberships, fitness classes, and personal training, and feel the same way as those who told me they fork over serious cash because they see exercise as an investment in their overall health. It’s not that exercise can be expensive that scandalizes me, it’s that Pilates culture capitalizes on many women’s desire to look like they work out (but not too much!!!) by suggesting they spend hundreds per month on an exercise modality that is lacking in a few key ways:
1). It’s not the most effective or efficient exercise to do to contribute to fat loss, if that’s the goal.
2). Ergo, it’s not the only or the best exercise to do to look “toned,” which just means cutting fat and building/maintaining muscle.
3). It’s also not the most effective or efficient way to build and maintain the muscle mass that is protective (in terms of bone density, cardiovascular health, conducting activities of daily living without injury6, etc.) as the body ages.
Progressive overload via dedicated, focused, structured weight training in a gym — the very thing women have for generations been conditioned to believe is for men and not them, is too hard, is too scary — is how to best achieve these results7.
(A visual aside: There are professional bodybuilders8 who have the same “long, lean” look as top Pilates influencers, and their entire lives revolve around lifting weights. Even if you think they look too muscular, you’d have to lift the same way they do [hours a day, every day, while adhering to strict nutrition/recovery/supplementation protocols] to come close; a standard normal-person lifting routine ain’t gonna do it.)
It’s fine if you do Pilates, but you also need to be lifting weights, and if you had to choose only one kind of exercise to do9, it should be lifting weights, not Pilates. (But read that 9th footnote!) This is the hill on which I shall perish. I’ve got a grave guy carving the message on my tombstone as we speak.
It’s not just Pilates that falls short. It’s Orangetheory and Burn Boot Camp and indoor cycling classes that have you pointlessly pump little hand weights while you’re on the bike, which is also incredibly unsafe and I curse any fellow Spinning instructor who does it. These classes are great for various things but do not offer the opportunity for serious strength progression. You’re running around doing too much shit too quickly within the space of an hour. As the linked article states, it’s “essentially cardio with weights.” With one hand on my American Council on Exercise Group Fitness Instructor certification, I declare: A lot of group fitness classes are worth a wet fart in hell when it comes to getting you the body composition (more muscle, less fat) results you may be seeking. You need to seriously lift!
Why am I all fired up about Pilates again, anyway? Well, the latest in Ozempic news, courtesy of ’s post in got me thinking about it (click to read my full Note):
I’m compelled to peel the skin from my face when I think that women who want to lose, like, 15 pounds are being even remotely tempted by these drugs when strength training is right there. I understand, though, I really do, why the drugs or Pilates seem like better options than throwing weights around at Average Joe’s Gym. It’s much less intimidating to go to a class filled with mostly other women where someone tells you what to do than it is to figure out how to go lift on your own without killing yourself, and it’s a hell of a lot easier to take medication than it is to exercise, full-stop.
That’s why it’s the culture I’m critiquing, not individuals who make choices for myriad and complex reasons. I think it’s important, though, that individuals ask themselves why they do things and consider what their values are. If you’re entirely cognizant and comfortable with your exercise values, why you do Pilates, your results, great. If you like it I love it. But consider whether you’re jumping on the Pilates bandwagon now because you saw some girl on TikTok post about her ~ Pilates transformation ~ that was achieved not because of Pilates’ unique alchemy, but because she was in a calorie deficit as she did a form of resistance training. That’s all Pilates is, but it does not have the holistic benefits that a safe, sane, progressive overload-focused strength training routine does.
As I wrote this, I wondered: Do I have beef with Pilates in part because I feel … left out, or something? As a woman whose genetically predetermined physique is more akin to a construction barrel than a ballerina, am I envious of the Pilates girlies’ bodies? Why, abso-fuckin-lutely, sometimes, thanks in large part to the millennial body image curse!
That I feel this way proves my point, though: Pilates culture in its current form can be extraordinarily elitist and exclusionary. It uplifts a certain look as a standard, suggests your body isn’t right if you don’t attain it (Pilates done right results in a “copy-paste” body, remember), and charges a premium to gain entrée. That makes a lot of women feel lacking and in turn earns businesses and industries a lot of money. Same as it ever was.
I got my start lifting weights at a Planet Fitness for $10 a month. I learned how on YouTube and from reading a $20 book. I’ve never paid a trainer, and I’ve never had a serious weight lifting-related injury, not even when I was training for a powerlifting competition and deadlifting close to 350 pounds. It’s helped me lose a lot of body fat. It’s helped me develop a mind-muscle connection, stability, mobility, and core strength. It’s helped me feel more comfortable in any male-dominated space I’ve stepped foot in since.
It’s never once made me feel like I had to be or look like a certain type of woman to keep up with it.
In fact, it helped me relinquish the idea that I must constantly strive to look a certain way at all.
If Pilates isn’t doing that for you, I think you should save your money, your body image, and your sanity.
One of the storytellers in the live show I produced this summer talked about getting into Pilates specifically because she heard Lori Harvey praising it.
Per usual I direct you to the first sentence of this article.
You cannot change the length of your muscles; there is no difference between “lean muscle” and any other imagined kind because all muscle is lean; a “long, lean” appearance simply means “less body fat and more musculature,” etc.
There are only five options for things an It Girl might do on her Saturday, and one is Pilates. One of the five options for what the It Girl is doing on a Tuesday afternoon: Teaching Pilates.
This is a hilarious, Eyes Wide Shut-ass term for an exercise class.
“Strength training also improves cardiovascular health. Muscle absorbs more glucose than other tissue, so building more reduces risk for Type 2 diabetes, said Stuart Phillips, a kinesiology professor at McMaster University. Resistance training also appears to improve blood vessel function, reducing blood pressure by about the same amount as aerobic training, but in fewer sessions per week.”
What you eat is a huge part of this, of course, but I’m not getting into this here. Assume your diet is perfectly aligned with whatever your goals are.
In what’s known as the “Bikini” category of women’s professional bodybuilding, in which competitors are generally the smallest of all the categories; it’s about shape and definition, not being as big as possible.
The thing is, you don’t have to! If you join a regular ol’ Big Box Gym, you can lift and do cardio and stretch and probably go to fitness classes there, too — all for less than a membership at a studio where you can only do one thing!
I would hazard to say that most "pilates bodies" are "dancer bodies". A huge amount of trained dancers also do pilates, and many become certified to teach pilates as a way to supplement their almost non-existent dancer income. So, if you're talking about people who have seriously trained in ballet and/or contemporary dance for 20+ years and they are performing at a certain level, a lot of them are going to have this "long, lean" body. (ugh, I hate that phrase) These are the same people that you are seeing in pilates classes and teaching pilates classes, and they did not get those bodies by doing pilates exclusively. I think pilates can be great for core strength and balance, and any type of exercise that someone can commit to regularly and makes them feel good about themselves, fantastic. But it is foolish to think that doing pilates alone will create that result. Same goes for barre class. It makes me die a little inside every time I see a barre class marketed as a way to get a "ballerina body". It's a con.
There’s a big difference between contemporary Pilates and classic Pilates. The former has hijacked what was always meant to be a supplementary practice. All the classic Pilates instructors I follow lift and encourage it.
But as you’ve aptly suggested, there’s money to be made from “many women’s desire to look like they work out (but not too much!!!).” So that means positioning Pilates as the one and only thing women need to be healthy and strong-ish.