Race to the Bottom: the Business of Pilates and Padel in Jakarta (and Surrounding Areas)

Everyone and their mothers are opening padel courts and pilates studios in Jakarta Metropolitan Area. Makes you think, is any of them actually making any money?

Photo by ROXANA POPOVICI on Unsplash

I have been an on-and-off pilates practitioner since 2017. I really enjoy pilates because it grows my strength, especially core strength, and also my flexibility. As a dancer, both things are very valuable to me. What I like about being in the studio is just to be able to listen to the instructor’s words and follow along without thinking about much. Brain empty, just vibes. But I do have phases where I am off pilates, like right now. Sometimes, I just get bored of it. Other times, I was off in university, or like right now, I don’t have a job so I don’t have any money. Pilates is not cheap.

As for padel, I have only played padel 3 times in my life thus far. I am not a fan of racquet sports, not a fan of sports in general. I’m the type of person that likes to exercise but doesn’t enjoy sports. I’m also really bad at them. So, I like pilates, yoga, dance, and weight lifting. But not sports. Anything but sports. To me, running around a court chasing a ball is the most boring thing that I can do. I prefer the flowing type of exercises. I don’t want the hassle of having to think about strategy, where I need to be running, where I need to be aiming the racket or the ball or whatever. Not interesting.

Over the years of practicing pilates, I have been loyal to one teacher. The first teacher I ever had and I still go to her. My mom is even more loyal because she never went off to university. She never stops, she is still doing pilates even now. So, there are people like us who got into pilates before it was the trendy thing to do. We genuinely enjoy doing it and it’s not for the status. We’ve seen the benefits to our bodies, and we know what a good pilates instructor is like.

It has been almost a decade since we started doing pilates. When we started, there was like 1 pilates studio in our area. Then, our teacher quit to make her own studio. And there were 2. Now, there are hundreds of pilates studios in my area alone, just within the same 20km radius. More are opening every month. There used to be very few good pilates instructors. Now, there are thousands of pilates instructors, quality is variable. There are girls graduating high school now who are not going to study in university because they just want to be pilates instructors. Anyone with money can seem to just get a certification and open their own studio.

Photo by Oliver Sjöström on Unsplash

As for padel, in the last 2 years alone, the growth has been exponential. My area went from having zero padel courts to hundreds, in the span of a year or so. It is truly ridiculous. Everyone I know went from not knowing what padel is to playing padel 3 times a week. Padel coaches are popping up everywhere. I don’t even know where they come from because pretty sure this was not a real sport before 2025 (this is a joke, but it feels that way). Anyone with money and a piece of land converted it to padel courts. We even have a joke here in Indonesia where in the future, we’ll talk about places like “This school used to be a padel court.”

The big question: is this sustainable?

When everyone with money, land or property is just turning them into padel courts or pilates studios, the market becomes so oversaturated. Yes, it is a trend. I believe there are still new people who have yet to try padel or pilates, and there will always be people who will continue to play padel or practice pilates even when the trend dies down. But I think we are soon reaching the climax, if we haven’t already, where it’s all going to trend down from now on.

In fact, some people are already selling their padel courts because nobody is booking their courts, and yet, there are still more courts that are currently being built and not even open yet. It seems ridiculous.

Pilates used to make tons of money for the instructors and studio owners because there were only a handful of studios. High demand, low supply. They were able to charge more for every class. Reformer pilates classes used to cost Rp.300k-400k per session. Now, there are studios offering below Rp.100k per session. Padel courts are on the same course. Courts used to cost Rp.300k per hour, now there are courts offering half that price. I recently visited a brand new padel court that is planning to charge Rp.300k an hour but who is going to pay for that when a few hundred meters away, I can find another one for Rp.150k an hour?

The competition is so fierce now that everyone is just racing to the bottom. Who can charge the least will attract the most customers. But how can that be sustainable? At what point do studios and courts are no longer making money?

People are so uncreative. Everyone just wants to jump on the bandwagon. Everyone wants to own their own pilates studio or padel court. But nobody stops to think who is going to be their customer? They are all fighting for the same pool of customers, who are just going to find the best deal they can get for themselves. I really believe eventually a lot of padel courts and pilates studios are going to close down. Only the studios and courts who can offer a good price while still making money, who managed to build a community of customers who are loyal to them will survive long term.

The only people who have made their money back are probably the ones who got into it very early, who watched the trends from other countries and somehow managed to predict that the same will happen in Indonesia, and built the first padel court or pilates studio. It honestly sounds like a crypto coin scam.

The funny thing is I know for a fact that there is a very high demand for tennis courts in my area but there are very few tennis courts here. Yet, nobody is cashing in on that. Everyone’s just building padel courts. If I had the money and the land, I would build a tennis court. Because tennis courts are always sold out. Tennis is also a more evergreen sport. It’s been around way longer, and the people who have been playing for a long time are loyal to it. Badminton is also a more evergreen sport. It’s probably Indonesia’s best sport like we love badminton so much here. Truthfully, there was a badminton trend at one point and there was a point where everyone was building badminton courts but the trend didn’t get out of hand as much as padel is right now. And at the end of the day, we are Indonesians. When the padel trend dies down, we are all going to go back to badminton anyway.

I don’t know how long the padel trend can hold. I don’t know how long the pilates trend can hold. Once the trend dies down, the only people will be left are like me and my mom, who just love pilates from the start, while the clout-chasers are going to move on to the next big thing. My prediction is that it’s Hyrox. And no, I’m not particularly interested in Hyrox either. I know what I love and I will keep doing what I love.

With oversaturation also comes quality drop. I see this with pilates studios and instructors. Full tea, full shade. The cheap classes come at a cost. There are a lot of mass market pilates apparatus now that are built for cheap and are low quality. Rickety reformers, barrels that crack, etc. The original pilates studios bought them from Balanced Body or Merrithew, etc. But nowadays, I can find much cheaper pilates apparatus on e-commerce sites.

The quality of pilates instructors also really varies. There are genuinely good pilates instructors out there who took their training seriously and are continuously developing their knowledge, experience and skills. But there are also really dodgy pilates instructors out there. I have experienced one such teacher and I eventually realised the error of my ways and left. Truly, when you’ve experienced the good one is when you’ll be able to recognise the bad ones. Dubious credentials, chasing “poses for the pics”, inventing new, weird, unnecessarily dangerous “pilates moves”. There was a pilates studio who was exposed for stealing pilates teaching training materials from an internationally accredited pilates academy and just relabelling copyrighted material and training their teachers in-house. There are so-called pilates instructors out there who never even went through training. They just went to a lot of pilates classes and their teacher thought, “You’re good enough to teach now.” This is dangerous. Even as someone who has been practicing for almost 10 years, I wouldn’t dare to try and teach pilates. I don’t want to be liable if something bad happens. I don’t have the anatomy knowledge. A lot of people who claim to teach pilates are not even teaching real pilates.

There is also the pyramid-scheme-like problem of the teacher trainings. A lot of pilates instructors are feeling the earnings dwindling because of cheaper classes and more teachers being in the market. So, they keep taking more trainings and certifications, sinking more money into this profession in the hopes that they will be considered a senior enough teacher to be worth paying more. The trainings and certification bodies are cashing in, too, by increasing the price of training. Those who have made enough money from teaching also eventually venture into starting their own studios, with the hopes that their clients are faithful enough to follow them wherever they go. But is the investment going to be worth it? I guess we’ll wait and see. Because more teachers means more competition, more studios means more competition, and clients will just find the best deal. Again, the ones cashing in are those who went into it very early in the game. You have to provide a more unique proposition than the rest to stand out.

Conclusion?

So, no. I don’t think any of this is sustainable at all. Eventually, it’s gonna bust. And I wonder what the fallout will be like and what the next trend will be. It is also concerning because of the dangers of questionable instructors and apparatus. Aside from tennis courts, if I was graduating high school today and wondering what I should study, I would study to become a physiotherapist. Because Lord knows, a lot of people need physios these days, from dangerous pilates moves, playing padel with no training, pushing your body too hard in Hyrox. Ultimately, it is, at the very least, good that the trend is for exercise and sports. At least, when done right, it is good for people’s health. But also, if you want to make money in this economy, I think you need to be more creative than just jumping on the bandwagon, or else you’ll just get burned when it all goes bust.