The one thing AI can't do for you
AI can plan your program, answer your 2am questions, even wear my face. Here's the line it can't cross.
Some households argue about money. Ours argues about robots.
If you've been around HPY for a while you'll know that Reid runs everything behind the scenes here, and lately "everything" increasingly means AI. He uses it daily. Timetables, systems, the boring plumbing that keeps three studios running. He's excited about it in a way I find both endearing and slightly alarming.
Me? I spend my days in rooms with actual humans, putting a hand on someone's ribcage and asking them to breathe into it.
So you could not design two people better positioned to argue about this. And we do. This email is my attempt to sort out where I've actually landed, because I think there's something in the middle of that argument that matters for anyone who owns a body.
Fair warning: I'm conflicted, and I intend to stay conflicted.
The bits I have to concede
Let me be honest about the other side first, because pretending AI is useless would be rubbish and you'd see through it.
It's useful. Genuinely. When I disappear down one of my rabbit holes these days, I can ask a question at 9pm and get a summary of thirty years of research before I've finished my tea. It helps Reid do in an hour what used to eat his weekend. It can plan a training program, answer your questions about a sore hip at 2am, and explain what your physio meant by that word you didn't want to admit you didn't know.
If information is what you need, we are living in the best moment in human history to need it.
And now, a confession
Because if I'm going to write about AI, I can't leave this bit out.
If you scroll Facebook, there's a fair chance you've seen me in an ad lately, talking to camera about the studios. Here's the thing. Our most popular ad right now is AI generated. The face is built from a photo of me. The voice is a clone of mine. I never stood in front of that camera, because there was no camera.
I've watched it more times than I'll admit and I still can't settle on how I feel about it. It's me, saying words that never left my body. Reid is delighted with it. I'm somewhere between impressed and quietly unsettled, which you may notice is this entire email in miniature.
But sitting with that strange little video taught me something. The ad can be synthetic. What it points to can't be.
An AI version of me can invite you to a class. It cannot teach one. The moment you walk through a door at Hurstbridge, Diamond Creek or Eltham, every single thing that matters is human again. A real instructor, real hands, real people on the mats either side of you.
Which brings me to my first real objection.
Information was never the problem
Think about what you already know. Move more. Sit less. Strength matters as you age. Sleep. Breathe properly. Look after your bones.
You knew all of that before AI existed. Most of us have known it for decades.
AI makes information nearly free and nearly infinite. But I have never once met a person whose problem was a shortage of information. The gap was never between not knowing and knowing. It's between knowing and doing.
And doing doesn't happen in an app. It happens in a body, on a mat, at 9:15 on a Tuesday morning.
Nobody ever got stronger by reading about strength. You can't download a rep.
A camera can see you. It can't feel you.
Here's where it gets more interesting, because AI is coming for exercise too. There are apps now that watch you through your phone camera, count your reps, flag your form. Some of them are clever.
But a camera can only ever see what you look like. It has no access to what you feel like.
We built our studios without mirrors, deliberately. Because the skill we're actually teaching is not "make the shape that looks right." It's the ability to sense your own body from the inside. Where your weight is. What's gripping that shouldn't be. What the left side is doing while you're busy thinking about the right.
A form-checking app is, in the end, a mirror with opinions. It pulls your attention back out to how things look, which is exactly the direction we spend years training people away from.
And then there's the thing I'd put our whole studio on. When an instructor puts a hand on your shoulder blade and says "breathe here," something happens that no camera and no screen can replicate. Your nervous system gets a location. A place to send your attention. I've watched one touch fix something that three sentences of perfect instruction couldn't.
That's not nostalgia talking. Touch is a channel of information that machines simply do not have. The hands-on correction you get in a class of ten or twelve isn't a nice extra on top of the method. It's half the method.
The name gives it away
Joseph Pilates never called his method Pilates. He called it Contrology. The study of control.
His whole idea was that the exercises were never really the point. They were the practice ground for something bigger: the complete coordination of body, mind and spirit, run by you, from the inside.
I keep coming back to that word this year, because control is precisely what we're all busy handing over. Our directions, our recommendations, our writing, increasingly our thinking. Some of that trade is fine. I don't miss reading paper maps.
But your body is the one thing you cannot delegate. Nobody can breathe for you. No machine can do your hundred. However good the tools get, the rep is still yours, the breath is still yours, and so is everything they build.
A 45-minute Contrology class might be the most quietly countercultural thing you can do in 2026. Not one second of it can be outsourced, automated or done on your behalf. You, in charge of you.
So here's where I've landed
Use AI for the plumbing of your life. Let it draft the email and plan the trip and summarise the report. Take the hours back.
Then guard what you spend them on. Because the more of life gets automated, the more valuable the unautomatable hours become. And 45 minutes of slow, precise, coached movement in a room with other humans is about as unautomatable as it gets.
The machines can have the admin. They can't have the mat.
Speaking of things no machine can do
Two practitioners in one room. Human hands. Long yin holds, breath work, acupressure and acupuncture from Jessie while you're deep in the stretch, then yoga nidra to close. Our Spring Reset: Yin, Pin & Nidra sessions might be the least automatable two hours we run all year.
They run across Hurstbridge and Eltham, two hours each, ten mats per session, and the earlier editions sold out completely. If the dates below are still open when you're reading this, I'd grab a mat rather than circle back.
- Hurstbridge: Sunday 27 September, 2 to 4pm or 5 to 7pm
- Eltham: Sunday 4 October, 2 to 4pm or 5 to 7pm
Two hours, $85, ten mats per session.
See you in class,
Mel
P.S. Reid read a draft of this and pointed out, with some delight, that an AI could have written it faster. Probably true. It still can't do a single roll-up, so I'm calling it a draw.