THE PILATES POLICE 🚔

The Pilates Police have been particularly active on Instagram this week.

The latest controversy began when a teacher posted a class sequence that didn't start with traditional footwork. It began with the client sitting sidesaddle on the carriage, legs criss-crossed, both hands extended outward holding the loop, and turning her torso toward the footbar and back to center. That’s it. That's the scandal.

Another teacher made a “stitch” (her little face in the corner, finger pointing to the original video) explaining why it was unsafe. Then several other teachers made rebuttal videos explaining why that teacher was wrong. The crowds went wild in the comments. Then one teacher (a critic of the critic) had to make an apology video for bullying the first (critical) teacher. It’s a lot to follow 😱

As somebody who owns a Pilates studio, teaches Pilates, and helps train Pilates teachers, I should probably have a stronger opinion about all of this than I do.

To be clear, I absolutely believe that good teaching matters. Safety is paramount. Anatomy matters. Experience matters. If you're teaching movement, you should understand what you're doing and why you're doing it, and above all, you should make your clients feel good in their bodies.

But I also find myself increasingly exhausted by the culture of fear that seems to be growing around movement in general and Pilates specifically. Fear-based gatekeeping is not the same thing as expertise.

Spend enough time on social media and you'll eventually conclude that every exercise is dangerous, every cue is problematic, every variation is wrong, and every teacher besides the person making the video should probably have their certification revoked immediately. Yes, it’s possible to get injured in Pilates, yoga, and other low-impact mobilities. But I’ve also hurt myself trying to fight my way out of a sports bra.

The thing that fascinates me is how often these conversations aren't actually about safety. They're about territory. Because Pilates is having a moment right now - more studios, more teachers, more online classes means more people discovering the practice than ever before. Whenever something grows, people start drawing lines in the sand.

Meanwhile, only about twenty percent of Americans regularly move their bodies.

The vast majority of people are not sitting around wondering whether a particular reformer variation is sufficiently authentic. They're trying to figure out how to work in exercise at all.

Bodies are unique to their owners. What feels incredible to one feels terrible to another. One person's favorite class is another's waking nightmare (as confirmed by the one and only spin class I attended in the year 2000). One person's life-changing teacher is someone else's “meh."

At a certain point, the argument is less important than the outcome.

Are they moving?

Do they feel stronger?

Do they have less pain?

More confidence?

More energy?

Do they enjoy it enough to come back next week?

Great!

Carry on :)

I wonder whether all this gatekeeping ends up hurting the very thing we're supposedly trying to protect. Because when movement becomes something that only the experts can do correctly, a lot of people stop trying altogether.

The older I get, the less interested I become in being the keeper of the one true method and the more interested I become in helping people build a sustainable relationship with movement.

That's what matters.

Not whether Joseph Pilates would approve of your warm-up sequence.

Although if he were somehow doomscrolling from the great beyond, I suspect he'd be amazed that humanity invented the internet and decided to use it to argue about footwork.