A note from Mel
I'm going to do something in this email I don't usually do.
I'm going to tell you what we never put in our marketing.
Here it is.
After a few months of consistent Pilates, most people start to look different.
Their clothes fit differently.
The back of a top sits flatter, because the muscles between the shoulder blades have woken up.
A shirt or a dress hangs differently, because the rib cage isn't collapsed into the hips anymore.
Arms change shape, particularly through the back of the shoulder. The line down the side of the leg changes.
People stand taller, which on its own makes you look like you've lost weight whether you have or you haven't.
I notice this in members all the time.
I almost never mention it. Reid won't put it on the website. We don't run ads about it. None of our reels are about it.
There are three reasons.
Some people see the shape-change inside two months.
Some take a year.
Some don't really notice it themselves. But their partner does. Or someone in the family does at Christmas. Or they pull on a shirt they haven't worn in two summers and it sits on them completely differently, and that's the moment it lands.
The variables we can't account for are too many to count.
Age. Hormones. Sleep. What else is happening in your life. What your starting point looked like. Whether you eat enough protein. How much you walk during the week. Whether you actually move in class, or whether you brace and hold.
If I put a timeline on it, I'd be lying to a percentage of you.
So we don't put a timeline on it. We don't put it on anything.
The studios that promise visible change in eight weeks lose most of their members in week ten.
You can probably picture it.
Someone signs up for the eight-week challenge. They come in three or four times a week, harder than they probably should.
At the end of week eight they don't look like the person in the before-and-after photo, and they quietly stop coming.
The studio counts the revenue and runs another challenge.
The person walks away convinced their body is broken, when actually the only thing that was broken was the promise.
I don't want to run that studio. I don't think you want to be in that studio either.
So we leave the promise out, and we keep the door open for years instead of weeks.
This is the bit I find most interesting. It's the reason I'm writing this email at all.
The members at HPY whose shape has changed the most are almost always the ones who came in for something else.
They came in because their back hurt.
They came in because their knees were stiff after gardening.
They came in because Foundations was free and a friend talked them into it.
They came in because they wanted to feel less fragile in their own body.
They got stronger. They got more capable. They started moving with less effort.
And then somewhere around month four or month seven, they noticed a shirt was looser through the middle. Or the waistband wasn't digging in anymore. Or they didn't dread getting dressed for a wedding.
Honestly? The ones who come in chasing the shape-change tend to struggle more.
They count things. They get anxious when a week feels off. They compare themselves to other people in class.
And weirdly, their bodies seem to take longer to change. Possibly because they're so tense about it.
So when people ask me what Pilates will do to their body, I tell them honestly.
It will make you stronger.
It will give you better posture and easier movement.
It will probably, eventually, change how you look, in ways that are mostly good.
But I can't tell you when. And I won't tell you how much.
And the surest way I know to make it take longer is to want it too badly.
You're allowed to want to look good.
Half the reason any of us do anything is some version of wanting to feel decent in our own skin. That's normal. We're not above it. I'm not above it.
The point of this email isn't to tell you not to want that.
It's to tell you that we know it's a real outcome. We just don't think it's a useful thing to sell.
Selling it pressures you to measure yourself against a result you don't actually control on any predictable schedule.
Not selling it gives you space to come to class for reasons that are actually trainable, and to be pleasantly surprised by the side effects.
If you want a working summary, it would be this.
Train for what you can do. The way you look will sort itself out, mostly.
The people in our classes who look the best, in the clothes-fit-differently sense, are the ones who stopped putting a timeline on it about a year ago.
See you in class,
Mel
