Essay · A note from Mel

Women Are Not Small Men: Is Pilates Enough for Strength and Bone?

A fitness professional trained hard for a year and gained 100 grams of muscle. Here's the honest version, and exactly where Pilates fits, and where it doesn't.

I listened to a podcast on the weekend that I want to tell you about, because it lines up almost exactly with what I see in our studios, and the honest version of it might change how you spend your week.

It was the Healthy Her podcast, Amelia Phillips interviewing Dr Stacy Sims. (Thanks so much to our beautiful member Diane for recommending this excellent podcast.) Sims is an exercise physiologist who has spent more than twenty years researching how women's bodies actually respond to training. Not men's. Women's. And the episode opens with a story I haven't been able to shake.

Amelia is a fitness professional. She's 46. Last year she decided to get properly strong, trained hard for twelve months, and pulled a 100 kilo deadlift, close to double her own bodyweight. Every birthday she gets a DEXA scan, so she walked in expecting to see all this new muscle she'd built.

She'd gained 100 grams. Not 100 grams a month. 100 grams across a whole year of serious training.

I love that she told that story, because it's the truth nobody wants to say out loud. Building muscle in midlife is brutally hard. And here's the twist that matters: she was dramatically stronger anyway. Same muscle, far more strength. Which tells you that strength and muscle size are not the same thing, and that the work was absolutely not wasted.

That's the whole spirit of Sims' message, summed up in the line her career sits on: women are not small men.

Why that line matters

For decades, exercise science was done on men. The findings got handed to the rest of us as if we were just a smaller version of the same machine. Eat a bit less, lift a bit lighter, do more cardio.

I spent fifteen years as an osteopath before Pilates, with a lot of women on my table in their forties, fifties and sixties who had done everything they were told and were still losing strength and bone. Sims explains why. Our muscle fibres, the way we burn fuel, even the angle of our hips, are different from a man's, and the differences get louder through perimenopause when estrogen starts to drop. The advice didn't fail those women because they did it badly. It failed them because it was never built for them.

What she'd actually have you do

Amelia set her a scenario. A perimenopausal woman, intermediate, has gained some body fat, feels weaker, has four hours a week. What would you do with it?

Here is Sims' answer, and I'm giving it to you straight rather than bending it to suit me.

• One easy session outside. A walk, ride or run in green space. Not for calories, for your nervous system. Perimenopause runs "tired but wired," and slow outdoor time is what lets you actually sleep, which she calls the metric you can't move anything else without.
• One strength session, anywhere. Even resistance bands in the garage. Lunges, pulling, loaded bodyweight.
• Two focused gym sessions. One built around "knee-forward" work, front squats and split squats, because women are quad dominant and strong quads give you what she calls "bulletproof knees." The other around the back of the body, hip hinges and rows, because we sit all day and our glutes switch off. Both finish with a few minutes of jumping.

Two things run through all of it. First, protein, up to around 2 grams per kilo of bodyweight, which for most women means building every meal around 30 grams. Far more than we tend to eat.

Second, what she actually means by high intensity, which isn't what you think. Twenty to 30 seconds as hard as you can, then a full two minutes of recovery, three to five times. That's it. Not the 45-minute sweat-soaked bootcamp. She's blunt about it: if you finish absolutely smashed, it was the wrong session. Done properly you walk out lifted, not depleted.

The bit I have to be honest about: bones and Pilates

Now the part you'd expect a Pilates studio owner to skate around.

Right in the middle of the episode, Amelia asks her directly: does Pilates cut it for bone health?

I'll give you Sims' answer honestly, because you deserve it. For building bone density specifically, lifting helps, but it is not the whole answer, and Pilates on its own does not get you there.

Bone responds to a strong, sharp, multi-directional jolt. When you jump and land, the impact travels up through your whole skeleton and tells the bone to get denser. Strength training pulls on the bone and helps, the heavier the better, but on its own it doesn't create that ground reaction force. And Pilates, by design, is low-load and low-impact. It sits at the gentle end of the spectrum, not the heavy-load, feet-leaving-the-floor end that bone density actually asks for.

If anyone tells you Reformer Pilates will fix your bone density on its own, they're overselling it. The research, including Professor Belinda Beck's work here in Australia showing women in their seventies actually building bone, is built on heavy loading and impact. Not springs.

Where Pilates is the foundation, not the consolation prize

Here's why I'm not the least bit worried about telling you that.

Because almost everything Sims says you should be doing, you cannot safely do without the exact things Pilates trains.

She wants you doing knee-forward work for bulletproof knees. That's quad and glute control, which is most of what we drill. She wants the back of your body firing because your glutes have switched off from sitting. That's us. She wants you to jump for your bones, and then immediately adds the caveat that you have to phase it in slowly, and that for a lot of women the real barrier is a pelvic floor that, in her words, "has never been the same" since the kids. You do not jump confidently, or load heavily, on a midline and a pelvic floor that don't work yet. That foundation is exactly what we build, week after week.

And the half of her plan everyone forgets, the recovery, the parasympathetic, the coming down out of stress, is the thing a slow, quiet Pilates class does better than almost anything.

Pilates is not the heavy lifting. It's not the jumping. It's the thing that makes the heavy lifting and the jumping possible, and safe, and sustainable for the next thirty years.

The base of the pyramid, not the whole pyramid. Anyone who tells you it's the whole pyramid is selling you something.

So here's the honest takeaway

Two things are true at once.

If Pilates is all you do, take this episode as your nudge to add the other half. And that half is more accessible than the word "weights" makes it sound. The impact your bones want, you can start today, for free: step firmly off a stair instead of drifting down it, add a little skipping, drop a 30-second jog into the middle of your walk. Small, sharp, regular. Eat more protein than feels normal. Protect your sleep. Pilates is not a reason to avoid loading your body, and I'd be letting you down if I let you use it as one.

The proper loading is the part that tends to feel daunting, and it's what our strength and conditioning classes are for. They've quietly become some of our most popular Studio 2 sessions. I'll be straight with you: these aren't Pilates. They're a proper coached strength session, free weights and all, run mostly by Renee, with Mish too, and we're putting more of them on the timetable over the coming weeks. So when you're ready for real load, the strength half has been here all along, in a room you already trust, not just somewhere else.

And if a podcast like this one ever leaves you thinking Pilates is pointless, that's just as wrong. The strength work and the jumping only pay off on a body that can control itself, recover, and keep turning up for years without breaking. That's our half. It's the half most people skip, and it's the half the rest falls apart without.

This is exactly the woman Sims spends her life on. Forties through seventies, handed advice built for someone else's body. It's most of who walks through our doors. And the ones who actually change aren't the ones who train hardest for a month. They're the ones who build a base that lets them keep loading, keep moving, keep turning up for years without breaking down. That's not glamorous. It's just what works when the training finally fits the body it's for.