I Tried Pilates

An honest review from a former college athlete

As an outsider unfamiliar with the pilates cult world, it took years of exposure therapy before I finally signed up for a class.

My previous apartment building offered free pilates classes for residents. I didn’t take them.

Videos of pilates classes infiltrated my Instagram feed, uploaded by an acquaintance who opened up her own pilates studio. I swiped past them.

I couldn’t walk more than two blocks in my neighborhood without passing another pilates studio. I would stare through the window with a mix of horror and intrigue on my face.

Would I have to buy those sticky little socks? That machine does not look safe. What’s with all the wires? This looks like a circus practice. Okay but I don’t even own any matching Lululemon sets.

Even worse, no one seemed to be new to pilates. Everyone appeared to be quite comfortable in the torture device. I had no idea how to start.

All I wanted was to drink matcha lattes without the obligation of signing up for a pilates class.

I stalked the website of the studio closest to my apartment until I felt sure that I would not need the sticky little socks for their class. I also learned that the scary machine is called a reformer and that pilates can be with or without a reformer.

I showed up for my first mat pilates class cosplaying a matching Lululemon set with my Nike pro spandex and a black sports bra. The outfit was cute. The pilates class was not.

Two pound dumbbells are humbling.

I could bench press more than my body weight in college and was proud of having maintained most of that muscle mass in the years after.

Ten minutes of pilates erased all of that.

I looked around the room hoping to find consolation in someone else’s struggle, only to begin resenting the other girls in the class. Why was this easy for them?

By minute 25, the most offensive thing imaginable happened: the instructor made eye contact with me and announced to the class that “we” could drop down to the one pound dumbbells or remove the weight entirely as needed.

That is not something that happens to a six-time All American.

The class was challenging but it was also outright painful. The left side of my neck hurt for days after in a “should I get this checked out?” way, not a “I’m sore from such a great workout” way.

Turns out that pilates exposes old injuries and muscular imbalances in an excruciating way. Pilates isolates smaller stabilizing muscles, often one side at a time, with slow controlled movements that remove momentum from the equation. You can’t cheat your way through it.

Years of pole vaulting had trained a powerful anterior chain (chest, lats, and shoulders) to propel myself over the bar while neglecting the back muscles. Add a decade of asymmetric takeoffs and I had developed imbalances so embedded that my natural posture suffered.

Conventional gym work never found it. Two pound dumbbells did.

I imagine the unique imbalances created by other sports — golf swings, baseball pitches, volleyball spikes — waiting to be rudely exposed by an innocent, little pilates class.

I signed up for the next class with a new perspective: pilates as physical therapy, not exercise. I swallowed my pride and dropped the dumbbells during the shoulder exercises. I asked the instructor to correct my form so that it wouldn’t reinforce bad habits I had developed.

I was still convinced that pilates had the worst pain-to-gain ratio of anything I had tried. But I also knew that I needed to address the lasting damage from pole vaulting. All my research pointed to pilates as part of the solution. Plus it’s annoyingly convenient to have 500 pilates studios in a one-mile radius included in my gym pass.

So I kept trying.

After a year of consistently showing up for pilates 1–2 days per week, I can now confidently say that I tolerate it. My posture is improving. I’ve made my way up to the one pound dumbbells during the shoulder exercises. I eventually bought the socks and worked up the courage to try a few classes with the scary machine.

And when I look down at my Garmin to see that we’re only 17 minutes into the class, it no longer feels like the death sentence it once was.

This essay is part of my series “Everything I Tried In My 20s” where I write honestly about the things I attempted and who I became in the process. Thanks for reading!