Reformer pilates is an expensive phenomenon – but it has a dark side

Time is meaningless here. There is no clock in the dark, industrial room. I’m lying on a medieval rack of chrome and black leather. My leg is suspended over my head by a series of straps and it’s spasming wildly. I lock eyes with the woman next to me. She looks how I feel – in pain. I watch as a bead of sweat drips from her forehead onto the rack, then close my eyes and listen to the sound of invariably the most beautiful Australian woman you’ve ever seen in your life count backwards from eight. Distantly, a sobering thought forms in my mind: I am paying for this experience.

More specifically, I am paying handsomely to be here. And what’s more, I fought off hundreds of women to get my space. I set an alarm on my phone and booked this experience the minute it was available, with the kind of speed and determination only reserved for getting tickets to Glastonbury. Because this is reformer pilates, and it has every woman in London in a chokehold.

Everyone, all of a sudden, is doing reformer pilates. While regular pilates is a kind of dynamic yoga, involving slow-paced exercises on a mat, reformer takes place on a special, rectangular bed-like device. Consisting of pulleys, springs and a moving carriage, it’s meant to add an extra element of frisson and resistance to your workout class. From One Rebel to Psycle, Frame to uber-bougie Third Space, the city has opened itself up to the girlies who wish to stretch and contort themselves into pretzels for about £30 a pop. In the queue for my most recent class – a lunchtime session in Victoria I got the last bed for by the skin of my teeth – I bumped into three people I knew outside. We are, quite simply, feral for these classes.

Last year there were 4,476 Pilates and yoga studios in the UK; cumulatively a market worth over £900m. It wouldn’t be surprising if that number doubled by the end of 2024. Momence, a tech company that provides the platforms for reformer studios, say that over 100 new locations launch with them every quarter. One of those studio chains, Core Ldn in Richmond, reported a 67 per cent uptick in visitors between November 2022 and the following February. Membership spiked post-pandemic and “hasn’t really stopped since”, the owner of one west London reformer empire – with neighbourhood outposts in Queen’s Park, Parson’s Green and Kensal Rise – told Elle. Demand is so high and waiting lists so intense that at-home options, like spending up to £5,000 on your own machine, have sprung up to fill the gap left by their suddenly less popular Peloton ancestors.

Where I live, in the arse end of south London, three pilates studios have opened in the past six months. As with all things in London, boom is its own demand. A highly feted pub will be unusable within weeks thanks to crowds. A new restaurant will be booked six months in advance. Everyone is wearing the same Adidas trainers as you, and everyone wants to do the same workout class. In a city powered totally by the force of cultural capital, it doesn’t matter if you really want to do something. The mere fact that everyone else is doing it is enough to drive you to drink the same pints, chew off the same small plates and fight for the same workout classes as everyone else. Where there are Guinness experts and celeriac purees and Sambas, so too there are reformer studios.And that’s specifically reformer pilates studios – where once yoga outstripped its newer, younger, bendier cousin, a survey conducted in 2023 reported that 70 per cent of fitness enthusiasts in the UK favoured pilates over yoga, in spite of the latter’s 5,000-year (approx) head start.

Because pilates, in spite of its sudden ubiquity and woo-girl affections, is not an ancient art form. It’s only about 100 years old, invented in the early 20th century by Joseph Pilates, a German PT who called his method “Contrology”. The son of a gymnast father and a naturopath mother, Joseph took inspiration for his method from the First World War, where he was held for four years at Knockaloe, an internment camp on the Isle of Wight. As a prisoner of war with little equipment or stimulation, Pilates – an early advocate for the now-accepted philosophy that physical and mental health are interlinked – invented Pilates to keep his mind and body active. He lifted techniques from Pehr Henrik Ling’s “medical gymnastics”, and believed his exercises could cure ill-health while “universally reforming the body”. Alongside his most popular creation, Joseph also invented a heap of contraptions and apparatus including the ominous-sounding “spine corrector” and “high eclectic chair”.

But it was the reformer that persevered, long after Joseph and his wife Clara moved to New York to open their first studio. The focus back then, as now, was on “core strength”. It’s something that’s resonated down the generations to the reformer girlies of today. As Joseph Pilates so famously said himself:“In 10 sessions you’ll feel the difference, in 20 sessions you’ll see the difference, and in 30 sessions you’ll have a whole new body.” And a heavily depleted bank account.

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Thanks to its small class sizes and high profile followers – Margot Robbie; the Kardashians; Adele supposedly “transformed her body” thanks to reformer; Harry Styles was spotted on a reformer bed in Primrose Hill – high demand means high prices. Reformer pilates has become not just a workout class or a philosophy, but a means of communicating elitism. Classes average £30, but packs and memberships can be much higher. Bodyism in Notting Hill (a pilates hotspot) is £300 a month, while Karve (Kensington, same idea) offers a pack of 100 classes over 12 months for the bargain price of two and a half grand.

The most exclusive enclaves of the city have specialised the reformer craze even further. “Pilates in the clouds”, also in Notting Hill, offers Kim Kardashian’s favourite “suspension pilates” – a twist on reformer which sees you suspended above the board and not strapped to it – with just three people max per class. And last year Nobu launched their own pilates sessions in Marylebone – their “stretch and sushi package” offers a class with sashimi afterwards and a non-alcoholic cocktail. Ninety quid, if you were wondering. This is peak microtrend culture, but rather than fashion, it’s fitness.

As with all microtrends, it has its online component too. TikTok, where crazes go to live and die, currently hosts around 85,000 reformer pilates-themed videos, with cumulatively millions of views. The majority of these videos are the classic fodder of the “For You” page, filled with platitudes about “romanticising your life” with a particular activity. Some, bizarrely, espouse redpill-ified misogyny about how pilates women are “green flags” for men because they embody some sort of tradwife-style wholesomeness. But most of the others follow a specific, equally bleak pattern, the algorithm encouraging you to watch “one-month body transformations”. Because reformer’s popularity is not just an expression of elitism; our interest is a reflection of our renewed interest in the culture of thinness that rears its ugly head every generation or so.

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Is pilates only for skinny people? Mumsnet wants to know. “When I search for reformer pilates I only see slim people,” reads one comment on Reddit. On the site’s pilates community forum, posts appeal for those pairing the classes with their weekly semaglutide injections. One post on X/Twitter celebrates the end of their first class by announcing “Ozempic body loading!” The rise of pilates is inextricably linked with the simultaneous rise of Ozempic, the oft-abused weight loss drug du jour.

I don’t think this link is conscious. But just because it’s unconscious doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. When the body type we coveted from celebrities was all about curves, strength and BBLs, we lived in an era of weightlifting. There were endless listicles about the importance of being strong; fitness influencers taught us about the correct way to do a deadlift. Then celebrities dropped weight fast, semaglitude sold out worldwide, and pilates stepped into the gap that weightlifting culture had left behind. Where once “strong” was the buzzword that could get our money and engagement, now “long and lean” has replaced it.

The body positivity movement has come a long way since the last time “leanness” was prized (namely, the early 2000s). But the shift in our wellness consciousness reveals that in spite of this, we can always be influenced to want a certain type of body, at a certain time. And if we can’t get it through flying to Turkey with reference pictures of Khloe Kardashian, then we can get it online with off-label drugs and pilates classes. Although there have always been trends and crazes in fitness – barre, Barry’s, running clubs – they live and die based on their promises, and our beliefs, that they’ll give us the bodies we want. And our culture has not since the Noughties glorified thinness as much as it currently does.

Most interestingly, it’s the men who have been drawn to the reformer craze who are most at risk of disordered eating behaviours. One study reports that men participating in both yoga and pilates were nearly a fifth more likely to use extreme weight control behaviours, binge eating and similarly unhealthy habits. It would be naive to ignore that on some level at least, the appeal of reformer is not just thanks to its promises about reducing back pain and increasing mental clarity, it’s the prospect of the amorphous dream sold to its clients: a long, lean, “pilates body”.

Joseph Pilates was not a long, lean, Ozempic-ified man. Nor was his invention intended for that purpose. A circus performer, boxer and bodybuilder, he used pilates in its infancy for the rehabilitation of his fellow interred veterans. It was only after it became considered trendy in New York, after he emigrated, that ballerinas and then society ladies embraced it for another purpose. Joseph saw Pilates as a sort of early mindfulness, not a summer body trend. “Physical fitness”, he once said, could not be achieved by “outright purchase”. But that isn’t necessarily stopping us from outright purchasing blocks of hour-long internee cosplay.

Reformer is in its boom, but soon, like barre, Barry’s, CrossFit and BoxFit before it, it’ll go through if not a bust then at least a lull. It will become easier to get into the classes and something newer and bougier and more expensive will come along to replace it – I’m talking of course about SoulCycle, the buzzy, hig- energy classes that take place in basements with smiley instructors, and cost just as much – and then you and I and the rest of the women and men of London who for some reason enjoy sitting in a dark room swinging around like an adult on a see-saw will move on. Perhaps we’re due a Zumba renaissance. It would at least require of me less stretching.