Essay · A note from Mel

The internet is laughing at men in Pilates. They’ve got it backwards.

A video of muscular men shaking and nearly crying on a Reformer has been watched fourteen million times. Everyone thinks the joke is that the strong guy turned out to be weak. That’s not the story.

Someone sent me a video this week. I’m not on social media much, so the internet often reaches me secondhand, usually through a member or one of the girls at the studio holding up their phone going “Mel, you have to see this.”

It was a Reformer class full of men. Not soft blokes either. Big, properly muscular, the kind who clearly live in a gym. And they were falling apart. Shaking. Wincing. One of them looked close to tears. The carriage was barely moving and these men were fighting for their lives. One version of this has been watched nearly fourteen million times, and the comments are full of women absolutely delighted, finally watching the strongest guy in the room get humbled.

@jess_casa The amount of dirty looks and groans 🤣🤣🤣🤣 i promise that they actually loved it, despite being extremely challenged. If anyone tells you “pilates is easy” its only because they haven’t found the right teacher yet (& clearly havent done pilates with me yet 🤣😉). Watch until the end for some sweat puddles & sound on loud to hear men cry ❤️‍🔥💧 if you wanna see what all the hype is about: join me at DRYP in Dubai Marina (shout out to @GG for powering through) ❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥 #pilates #reformer #pilatesreformer #reformerpilates #lol #gymbro #gymbros #gymfail #pilatesgirl #dubai #pilatesworkout #dubaipilates #fypdubai #dubaimarina ♬ original sound - Jess | pilates + wellness

I laughed too. It’s funny. But the joke everyone’s making is the wrong one, and as someone who spent fifteen years with bodies on a table before I started teaching on a Reformer, the wrong joke actually bothers me a little.

Everyone thinks the joke is “the strong guy is weak”

That’s the read. Big muscles, no substance, what a fraud. Ha.

It’s lazy, and it’s not true. Those men aren’t weak. They can almost certainly out-lift, out-push and out-squat me and most people reading this. What the video actually shows isn’t weakness. It’s a blind spot. A very specific, very common one, and it’s the most interesting thing about the whole clip.

What’s really happening on that carriage

Here’s what years of training the way most men train actually builds.

Strength in straight lines. Push, pull, squat, curl, press. Powerful, useful, and almost entirely in one plane, forwards and back, up and down. What that style of training barely touches is rotation, side-to-side stability, slow control, and the deep endurance of the muscles that hold you together rather than move you around.

So you put a man like that on a Reformer, where the floor literally moves under him and the whole game is controlling a load slowly instead of overpowering it, and the wheels come off. Not because he’s weak. Because you’ve asked him to use the half of his body he’s never trained. The half that stops the back going. The half that keeps the hips honest. The half that decides whether, at sixty, he can still get off the floor without a plan.

A man can bench his bodyweight and still tweak his back reaching into the back seat for a shopping bag. That gap is the whole story, and the video just made it funny.

That gap doesn’t show up at twenty when everything’s forgiving. It shows up later, as the sore back that never quite leaves, the hip that complains on the stairs, the “I just bent down funny” that takes three weeks to settle. The men laughing hardest at that video are often the ones walking straight into it.

And I don’t even need the video

A couple of weeks ago we were up in Sydney for the weekend, me for some Pilates training, my husband Reid just along for the ride. To fill a morning, he booked himself into a Lagree class in Double Bay. For the uninitiated, Lagree is Pilates’ meaner cousin, slow and relentless on a reformer-like machine that gives you nowhere to hide. The room was full of well-heeled Sydney types and a couple of female TV personalities, all making it look effortless.

Reid’s no athlete, but for someone about to turn forty-four he’s doing alright. Yoga a couple of times a week, a Pilates class when he can fit one in, a few bike rides, a walk or a run. Active, healthy, nothing to prove. He got humbled in that class so completely that, a fortnight on, he is still not walking properly. He’ll tell you it was the calves. It was not just the calves.

I tell you that not to embarrass him, although I am enjoying it, but because it’s the cleanest proof I’ve got. Active and healthy is not the same as prepared for what that room asked for. He moves more than most men his age, and he still had no answer for slow, controlled load in directions he never trains. That’s the gap, demonstrated in my own kitchen, by a man who really should have known better.

Pilates was built by a man, for men

This is the part the “Pilates is girly” crowd never seems to know. The whole method was invented by Joseph Pilates, a boxer and gymnast, originally to rebuild the bodies of injured men and to make athletes and soldiers more resilient. It was strength and control training for hard-used male bodies long before it was anything else.

Somewhere along the way it got marketed into a women’s workout, all soft lighting and matching sets. The exercises didn’t change. The advertising did. What’s actually on that Reformer is the missing half of how most men train, and the men in that viral video felt exactly that, on camera, in front of fourteen million people.

A word on the weird corner of the internet

While I was reading about all this, I fell down a rabbit hole I wish I hadn’t. There’s a strange online subculture that’s turned “the Pilates girl” into a fantasy. Men in the “trad wife” world, the ones romanticising some 1950s housewife ideal, talking about wanting a partner who does Pilates every single day because it fits the aesthetic they’re after. There was even a reality TV contestant who dumped his fiancee partly because she wasn’t a Pilates type. As if it’s a personality you can order in.

I want to be clear, because it matters. That has absolutely nothing to do with what happens in our rooms. Pilates isn’t a costume or a lifestyle filter or something you perform for someone else. It’s training. It’s hard, it’s honest, and the only person you’re doing it for is the you who still wants to move well now and in thirty years. Anyone who’s turned it into an aesthetic has missed the entire point, the same way the men laughing at the video have.

The two things actually stopping men walking in

I talk to a lot of women who would love to get their husband or their dad or their mate through the door and can’t. And when I talk to the men themselves, it’s almost always the same two fears, and they sit right on top of each other.

The first is “I’ll be the only bloke in the room.” For a long time that was close to true, and I won’t pretend otherwise. It isn’t anymore. We’ve got more men coming through every week, and our yoga classes in Studio 2 have quietly filled up with them too. You will not be the lone man surrounded by a sea of women. That story is out of date.

The second fear is quieter and almost nobody says it out loud. It’s “I don’t want to be the creepy older guy in a room full of women.” Here’s the truth about that one. If you’re worried about it, you’re almost certainly not him. The men who actually make a room uncomfortable never spend one second wondering whether they do. The fact that the thought even crossed your mind is the proof you’re a decent bloke who’ll be completely welcome.

And practically, nobody is looking at you anyway. We have no mirrors in the studio, on purpose. The classes are small. Everyone in that room is working too hard, and concentrating too much on not falling off their own carriage, to give a single thought to anyone else. It is genuinely the least self-conscious room you’ll walk into all week. The video proves it. Those men weren’t being judged. They were being respected for turning up to something hard.

So here’s the actual invitation

Two invitations, really, because two different people are reading this.

If you’re the one who’s been trying to convince a man in your life, stop using words. You will not argue him into it, and the more you sell it the more he’ll resist. Just book him a free Foundations class and let the Reformer do the talking. Forty-five minutes, no cost, no card, no commitment. He’ll grumble for the first twenty minutes and be quietly hooked by the second week, the same as the men in that video who, by the end, wanted to come back. If you’d both like to make a proper go of it together, our Family Lite membership is built for exactly that, two of you in the same household sharing classes across all three studios for $79 a week.

And if you’re the man reading this, sceptical, arms folded, half-insulted that I’ve clearly got your number: good. Come and find out what humbles you. Foundations is free, it’s forty-five minutes, and there’s nothing to lose but the assumption that you’ve already got this covered. You almost certainly haven’t. None of us do until we train the half we’ve been skipping.

The internet got the joke wrong. The strong men in that video weren’t the punchline. They were the smartest people in it.

They showed up to the one thing that exposed exactly what all their training had been missing. That’s not embarrassing. That’s the whole point.