BRITTANY LUSE, HOST:
Would you consider yourself a Pilates princess?
MADELINE LEUNG COLEMAN: Pilates princess, no. But Pilates appreciator, yes.
LUSE: Oh, I love that - Pilates appreciator. Yes. I loved it for a long time, and then I started going again after lockdown, and, like, the vibe was different. Maybe Pilates and I are on the outs right now, but I have enjoyed it very much in the past.
LEUNG COLEMAN: (Laughter).
LUSE: So for those who don't know, Pilates is a kind of low-impact exercise that uses resistance to stretch and strengthen muscles. You can do it on a yoga mat, or you can do it on a contraption called a reformer that kind of looks like a medieval torture device but is actually really nice to use. And Pilates has been around for a pretty long time. It's named after this guy called Joseph Pilates, who developed it about a century ago. But Pilates is experiencing a new surge in popularity. According to the Sports and Fitness Industry Association report from 2025, Pilates is the fastest-growing form of individual exercise in the United States. Participation jumped by nearly 40% since 2019. And if you're like me, you might be getting content about it all over your feed.
But there's something interesting happening with that content. I feel like it's less about the actual exercise and way more about what doing Pilates says about who you are as a woman. And, of course, anyone can do Pilates, but on social media, there is a strong emphasis on it being for girls and being for specific kinds of girls.
But why is some weird stuff getting attached to Pilates, which is, in my opinion, a very fun and beginner-friendly form of exercise, and why can't we be normal about exercise in general? To get into it, I'm joined by Madeline Leung Coleman, features writer at New York Magazine, who wrote a piece about why Pilates keeps getting people up in arms. Madeline, hi. Welcome to the show.
LEUNG COLEMAN: Thank you so much for having me.
(SOUNDBITE OF TAPE RECORDER)
LUSE: Hello, hello. I'm Brittany Luse, and you're listening to IT'S BEEN A MINUTE from NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
LUSE: Like I said, Pilates has been around a long time. I used to take classes, like - I don't know - seven, eight years ago, and it was like - it was mostly older women. My friends and I would be, like, the youngest people there. And I think there's a very different idea of who it's for and who does it now. Why do you think it came into vogue as things like cycling classes have kind of gone more out of style?
LEUNG COLEMAN: I had the same experience with Pilates. The first person who ever told me about it was my mother, who started doing it when I was in high school in the early 2000s. And I couldn't really understand what it was, nor was I interested, you know, in the way that teenagers are not.
LUSE: (Laughter).
LEUNG COLEMAN: She did bring me to a studio one time, and the vibe was very physical therapist's office - you know, dropped ceilings, maybe even fluorescent lighting, that weird, hard institutional carpet...
(LAUGHTER)
LEUNG COLEMAN: ...That's in spaces like that - basically, the opposite of what you would see on Instagram now. And I have a feeling that the rise of Pilates is something that a lot of people haven't even really registered. It just all of a sudden seemed like something that you should do if you wanted to be healthy.
LUSE: Yes.
LEUNG COLEMAN: A lot of people couldn't really tell me when they had first heard about it or started to feel that they should be doing it, but at the same time, I noticed anecdotally that whenever people were talking about exercise around me - especially women - Pilates started to seem like the default, as if it was the exercise that you were supposed to be doing, the most correct choice. And I started wondering why that was, and I think it's a combination of things. One is just that after the pandemic, there was, you know, as New York Magazine has written before, a vibe shift.
LUSE: Yes.
LEUNG COLEMAN: And so a lot of things that were popular in 2019 no longer seemed to make sense. We were on the other side of something. It was time for something new. Pilates is not new. As you mentioned, it's been around for a long time. It's about a hundred years old, but it had enough novelty compared to things like SoulCycle, for example, which suddenly seemed totally irrelevant. Like, why would we even be talking about that? But I think another part of it is that the rise of wellness culture that really metastasized during the pandemic lent itself to something like Pilates, and it just proved to be the perfect vehicle for all of these ideas, including some of the ideas that we would associate with what people now call MAHA.
LUSE: Wait. Say more about that.
LEUNG COLEMAN: I mean, some of the things that get rolled into this general wellness bucket are concerns about things like cortisol spikes, inflammation. Sometimes people point to diet or additives in foods as being the causes of these things. They're just sort of like a general, free-floating paranoia that, like many things in wellness culture, isn't totally unearned. There's truth to it. There's studies being done. But part of what has happened with Pilates culture is that some people online have found some studies about the benefits of low-impact exercise, meaning basically exercises where you're not really drastically raising your heart rate, you're not jumping up and down, you're not stressing your joints as much, and they have expanded that to mean that if you're doing those kinds of exercise, you might be actively harming yourself. For a lot of Pilates, you're lying down. That's the appeal for a lot of people, myself included.
LUSE: (Laughter) Same.
LEUNG COLEMAN: (Laughter).
LUSE: OK, yeah, I've seen on social media there are a lot of people who were like, oh, my God, I was so inflamed and my cortisol levels were so high. And I was like, are all of you getting, like, a full workup every month or something? Like, how do you know it's the cortisol? And there's, like, no mention of a doctor, no mention of blood work. So it feels like this kind of, like, vague, you know, something is wrong or your body is out of alignment, which, I mean, you know, I think self-knowledge is important, right? But it also feels like sometimes inflammation or cortisol are kind of like stand-ins for something else or shorthands for something else.
LEUNG COLEMAN: That's a great way of putting it. The thing about the cortisol and the inflammation discussion is that those things are both real. Those are real things that happen in the body. The cortisol levels rise and fall throughout the day and throughout life at different times when you are stressed. And that could include after intense exercise. Sometimes your cortisol levels will be higher. But there's a big difference between these levels that rise and fall and people who have chronic conditions to the point where their cortisol levels are actually causing problems for them. I think something that should be said about the way these things get deployed on social media is that most of the time, what people are saying is that they just don't think they look thin enough. So one side effect of certain conditions involving cortisol can cause something called moon face.
LUSE: Oh, like Cushing's.
LEUNG COLEMAN: Yes, like Cushing's, for example. That is real. But people on TikTok and Instagram started self-diagnosing with moon face because they felt they looked puffy.
LUSE: I saw that. I mean, look; I've had a moon face since birth, OK? I've had a big ole head for a long time. And I saw people where I was like, I don't know, girl. Like, I don't know if it's the cortisol. I think you might just have a big head with a big face like me. I'm sorry, I don't know what to tell you.
LEUNG COLEMAN: And obviously, there's nothing good or bad. It's completely neutral about whatever the size of the face is.
LUSE: Very neutral.
LEUNG COLEMAN: So basically, a lot of these people who've become really obsessed with their cortisol levels or their inflammation or the idea of not doing high-impact exercise, it all is very coded language that they might not even realize they're engaging in sometimes that is really talking about appearance and aesthetics. They might have some kind of body dysmorphia. And whom among us, right? Like, everything in the culture is telling us that we should shrink. We should get smaller. We should get tauter, tighter, bonier. And I think a big difference with the Pilates body, quote-unquote, "aesthetic" is that that tiny, thin body also now needs to have visible muscle. And so that is where the exercise routine comes in.
LUSE: Yes. There's a term that a guest on one of our other episodes, Christiana Mbakwe Medina - her whole project is "Pop Syllabus," is what it's called. And I spoke with her recently about this idea that she calls - this sort of body ideal that she pinpointed called the sculpt, which is all about, like, being very, very thin but with a lot of visible muscle, maybe even the sinew. We can see, like, across a range of red carpets that that's, like, the look now for women in Hollywood.
LEUNG COLEMAN: There's nothing about Pilates that makes it inherently feminine or that makes it inherently something geared towards people who are thin or people who are rich or people who are good-looking, all of these associations that have grown up around the new culture of Pilates that has emerged since the pandemic, in part because of its association with celebrities like Lori Harvey or Miley Cyrus. They would get interviewed on the red carpet, and they would say, wow, you look incredible. What have you been doing? Oh, Pilates. And then later it comes out, in the case of Lori Harvey, for example, that she'd also been very severely calorie-restricting, working out multiple times a day. Pilates was not the full reason. But it was one thing that she was doing. And it started to be promoted as kind of a magic bullet.
LUSE: Definitely. But also, obviously, very famous, rich, wealthy women and what they do with their bodies and faces influences what the rest of us do with our bodies and faces and, you know, what standards we're supposed to adhere to. But there used to be, I feel like, much greater lag (laughter) for all of that. It felt to me like this go-round, like, it was like Lori Harvey was on a red carpet, and she said she did Pilates. And then all of a sudden, I felt like there was just social media content everywhere. Like, now it feels like it's a much shorter walk from, oh, a celebrity does this to I am now also doing this.
And I think part of the reason why that happened in this instance, like, there were so many other sort of ideas floating around the internet at that time, like the idea of living a soft life, doing things that aren't too hard on the body. And Pilates can be challenging, of course, and it can build muscle. But it's not as obviously physically taxing as, like, a more effortful sort of, like, high-intensity interval training workout. But also, like - I don't know. Like, I think that a lot of people have come to Pilates because it is very accessible from a body standpoint. Like, people do it to strengthen themselves after, you know, recovering from an injury, or you're an older person with sensitive joints. Or as many of us were, if you were a person who'd been kind of sheltering in place for a long time (laughter) and maybe hadn't seen the inside of a gym for a while, maybe laying down on this Pilates reformer machine felt a little bit more welcoming than, like, picking up, you know, like a set of weights that maybe you hadn't seen in 18 months. I don't know. It feels like Pilates hit at this moment where the culture was kind of ready for it. It doesn't really surprise me, I guess, that it kind of blew up the way that it did. But the speed of it really kind of shocked me, I think, to a certain degree.
LEUNG COLEMAN: It really did need a culture that was ready for it, when people were open to the idea of doing an exercise that didn't look so obviously difficult. And I also have to mention that a lot of the people I interviewed who do Pilates - not people who teach it or own studios, just, you know, punters like myself - said that part of the appeal of Pilates is that it was so different from the exercises that they associated with, you know, traumatic times in high school gym class. It didn't look like being forced to play basketball. It didn't look like being forced to run or, you know, even go to a gym, which, unfortunately, a lot of women still find really intimidating.
LUSE: Yeah.
LEUNG COLEMAN: And Pilates, by contrast, was just totally different. It was alien in a way that made it feel more possible. You don't have any memory or any trauma associated with it.
LUSE: (Laughter).
LEUNG COLEMAN: And it sounds, you know, maybe like I'm overstating things to say that people have trauma associated with being in a physical space, but they do. You know, for example, like...
LUSE: Yeah.
LEUNG COLEMAN: ...Someone who is maybe gender nonconforming or trans. Like, when you're doing sports when you're a kid, they are so gendered.
LUSE: Yes.
LEUNG COLEMAN: And so it's very exciting to be able to find something that you can do to move your body that doesn't depend on those scripts, that doesn't have the association of being in a gym class changing room that made you feel small. You know, I interviewed some women in their early 20s because I wanted to get a sense of how these very, you know, young adults were even getting into this exercise that I had grown up...
LUSE: Yeah.
LEUNG COLEMAN: ...Associating with, like, being older or being middle-aged.
LUSE: Me too. Yeah.
LEUNG COLEMAN: And what they said was basically what I'm telling you - that they never saw themselves as athletic, that they were kind of afraid of engaging or that they associated athletics with, like, not being good enough, and so Pilates to them actually felt like a safer space. There's a lot of levels to it. Like, on the one hand, no doubt, Pilates culture is making people feel bad about themselves, making them feel lesser than or there's this new ideal that they need to live up to. But for some people, they're finding that it's the only thing that feels comfortable. It's the only kind of exercise that's actually allowed them to engage without feeling like they're trying to live up to something that they can't.
LUSE: That is so real.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
LUSE: We're going to take a quick break. But first, if any of you are finding IT'S BEEN A MINUTE for the first time, welcome. I hope you're enjoying the show and that you come back every Monday, Wednesday and Friday morning for brand-new episodes and every Tuesday, a video episode. Tomorrow's video is a primer on the feminized labor and politics of desirability that built the internet. It's actually a pretty good partner for this conversation. You can find that video on Spotify or YouTube or just listen to the audio wherever you get your podcasts. Coming up after the break...
LEUNG COLEMAN: Matching Pilates Alo set as chastity belt is a turn that I never could've expected when I first started working on this.
LUSE: (Laughter).
LEUNG COLEMAN: The idea that it's safe for your girl to go to Pilates because she's not going to encounter another man is really something.
LUSE: Stick around.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
LUSE: You know, as we have been saying a bit, there is this kind of symbolic version of Pilates that's pinging around the internet. Culturally, what kind of ideas go along with Pilates right now? Like, what's associated with it now and why?
LEUNG COLEMAN: Some of the ideas that have been getting dumped into Pilates include the idea of being almost effortlessly thin, being wealthy or at least upwardly mobile, being attractive to men - very importantly, to men.
LUSE: Ah, yeah.
LEUNG COLEMAN: Part of why Pilates has really burst into pop culture consciousness recently is because it's been referenced on a couple of different big reality shows. So on "Love Is Blind"...
LUSE: Yes.
LEUNG COLEMAN: ...And in an interview with someone who was on "The Secret Lives Of Mormon Wives," women have either on camera been told by the man that they're with that they should be doing Pilates every day or that they only want to be with the kind of person who does Pilates every day. And that is hilarious to hear coming out of the mouths of these guys because you know that if these guys saw a bunch of different videos of workouts, they could not pick Pilates out of a lineup. They have no idea what it is.
LUSE: For those of you who haven't seen the specific examples that Madeline's talking about, there was this guy on "Love Is Blind" - latest season. And my husband and I watched this. Like, we were baffled. He was breaking up with his fiancée - of course, his fiancée of, like - I don't know - a couple of weeks. And she was very cute and sweet doctor. She had a gorgeous home. She had it going on, but she also didn't have time for, like, a lot of back-and-forth. She's like - she was, like, an infectious diseases doctor. She had serious stuff to do. And he told her that she wasn't the right one for him and that he wanted a woman who did Pilates every day.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "LOVE IS BLIND")
CHRIS FUSCO: Somebody who, like, works out all the time and...
JESSICA BARRETT: OK.
FUSCO: ...Like, has, like, a different type of - I don't know.
BARRETT: A different type of, like, body?
FUSCO: It's just, like, somebody who does [expletive] like Pilates every day or, like, someone who's, like, working out every day.
LUSE: And she was as baffled as you might imagine. And also, as you mentioned, Jessi Draper from "The Secret Lives Of Mormon Wives," you know, also claimed her husband, who she's getting a divorce from, allegedly told her she needed to do Pilates every single day. There's so much wrapped up in - like you mentioned, like, it's very possible that these men would not know how to pick a Pilates move out of a lineup. However, they have a very strong idea that it seems like they're calling upon of sort of like how we're thinking about Pilates now, which, like you said, is this effortlessly thin woman who's attractive to men and wearing the matching Alo workout set and perhaps, you know, has the money to be taking these classes 'cause Pilates has never been cheap. There are places you can go, of course, that might cost a little bit less, but still, it's quite an expensive activity. It feels like it's kind of tied to this idea of, like, this ideal woman or, like, this idea of, like, the perfect stay-at-home wife or a type of tradwife. I don't know. It's like - it's almost like she's the ultimate trophy wife, someone who does Pilates in this way.
LEUNG COLEMAN: Yes, Pilates has become the exercise for women who want to show to strangers online that they are well-kept by a rich man. When I was working on my story for New York Magazine about Pilates, I was really, honestly taken aback to discover how much content had been made by adult women of their own free will talking about how they were staying hot for their husbands by doing Pilates every day. There are so many variations on the meme of my husband works four jobs or my husband's on calls all day, and this is me at the office, and it's, you know, a woman on a Pilates reformer...
LUSE: Oh.
LEUNG COLEMAN: ...Which is one of the pieces of equipment that use - you use in Pilates, or just, you know, them saying that they're looking for a man who can afford to pay for their Pilates classes, or, you know, alternately, that the reason they're working out so much is because they need to look hot at their wedding, or even things like, it's my job to make sure that my husband is the one who's known around the office as the guy with the hot wife - this kind of thing. I was like, you are choosing your one, beautiful, free life to put this message out there? I am upset to find out how many people are doing this.
LUSE: Yeah.
LEUNG COLEMAN: But men on the internet noticed how much engagement women influencers were getting with Pilates content and decided to piggyback on that by somehow making it about how men, themselves, should be looking for women who do Pilates or that it's a green...
LUSE: Yeah.
LEUNG COLEMAN: ...Flag for a girl to do Pilates. And so it really crossed over from being in this very feminized zone of the internet that was really more about women making content for other women - whether we think that content is healthy and supportive or not, we could argue over that - but it moved into the zone where men were making content about the women who were doing Pilates.
LUSE: There's one guy on Instagram - I think I've seen this sound also used on TikTok before - but he said...
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
CHRISTIAN BONNIER: Pilates is the biggest green flag ever for a girl. I don't know what it is, but Pilates is one of the most wholesome things ever. If your girl goes to Pilates, she's probably staying in on the weekends so she can get up early and go to a Solidcore or Bodyrok class. And she's going to come back from the Pilates class in a great mood because she went with her friends, didn't get hit on by any creepy guys and got a great workout in.
LUSE: Obviously, there's a lot going on there (laughter). And men do Pilates, too. But a great article in The 19th pointed out that there's this idea this ideal Pilates woman is, like, just never going to encounter men at all while she's exercising. But also, it's like, in order to get up early to exercise to maintain her figure for this man in question that she's dating or married to, she also will be, like, not potentially at a bar or club where she might come across any other men or other men may - might lay eyes on her. Like, there's this idea that, like, a woman who does Pilates is, like, completely sequestered for men, almost like a nun. And there's, like, no competition for a man who wants to date her or be with her.
LEUNG COLEMAN: Yeah, matching Pilates Alo set as chastity belt is a turn that I never could've expected when I first started working on this.
LUSE: (Laughter).
LEUNG COLEMAN: The idea that it's safe for your girl to go to Pilates because she's not going to encounter another man is really something. It's very possessive, and it is - it's fascinating how much internalized misogyny has motivated some women to buy into this. But a really funny aspect of the fallout from the "Love Is Blind" thing that you mentioned, where, as you said, it was this guy, Chris, telling his fiancée that he only wanted to date women who do Pilates every day, is that a lot of women Pilates influencers started making videos of themselves, like, hiding under the Pilates equipment with the caption, hiding from Chris.
LUSE: (Laughter) That's funny (laughter). But I don't know. All of this points to just, like, how weird people are being about Pilates and exercise in general. Why can't we be normal about exercise and about this one in particular?
LEUNG COLEMAN: I mean, I think a lot of the way that we talk about wellness in general is all downriver of the fact that we live in a country that has such a busted health care system, where people are very rightfully skeptical of the care that they receive and how much they have to pay to receive it. Part of the reason why some people turn to Pilates is because, you know, they might actually need physical therapy, but their insurance doesn't really cover it. So they're like, oh...
LUSE: I've been there. I've been there.
LEUNG COLEMAN: Listen; a lot of people told me that that's why they do it, and it's like - they're like, OK, let me turn to YouTube, or like, oh, this is right on the corner, and I could go for, like, 30 bucks. That seems cheaper, you know? So I think there's a lot of things happening at the same time. Part of why we can never be normal about wellness, in general, but especially in the United States, is because this country has been designed, on one hand, to keep us unwell because we literally cannot afford to stay well. And so we can't be casual about it.
I think that part of why Pilates is so upsetting for so many women is that it has acquired such a gendered connotation that really is about what the right way is to live your life and to take care of your body as a woman that can make you feel as if you are failing if you're not doing that or if it doesn't work for you or if you can't afford it, you can't access it or it doesn't appeal to you. In some ways, you're falling short. Maybe now is the time to admit that reporting on Pilates slightly red-pilled me.
LUSE: Ooh.
LEUNG COLEMAN: And that I almost immediately after publishing the piece started trying to learn how to lift weights, which is...
LUSE: Wow.
LEUNG COLEMAN: ...Something that I'd always been intimidated by. So I'm on my journey of learning...
LUSE: Wow.
LEUNG COLEMAN: ...How to lift heavier. And also, I should be clear. I'm still doing Pilates.
(LAUGHTER)
LEUNG COLEMAN: But it made me - it really made me question, you know, why I was placing any value on going to places that had, you know, like, a more sleek aesthetic to them or that offered these experiences when the really good feeling that I wanted to have was the feeling that I was having inside of my body. I was like, how many bells and whistles do I really need, you know? Or could I just, like...
LUSE: Yeah.
LEUNG COLEMAN: ...Roll out my mat on my living room floor and do a video, and would that make me feel just as good?
LUSE: Wow, I love that. I'm really glad that we discussed this today. You actually made me be like, you know what? I'm not going to get back on that reformer.
LEUNG COLEMAN: I actually have some great suggestions for you (laughter). I'll send them to you later.
LUSE: Oh, please do. Madeline, I really appreciate this conversation. Thank you so much for coming in and talking with me about this.
LEUNG COLEMAN: Oh, thank you, Brittany.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
LUSE: That was Madeline Leung Coleman, features writer for New York Magazine.
This episode of IT'S BEEN A MINUTE was produced by...
LIAM MCBAIN, BYLINE: Liam McBain.
LUSE: This episode was edited by...
NEENA PATHAK, BYLINE: Neena Pathak.
LUSE: Our supervising producer is...
BARTON GIRDWOOD, BYLINE: Barton Girdwood.
LUSE: Our VP of programming is...
YOLANDA SANGWENI, BYLINE: Yolanda Sangweni.
LUSE: All right. That's all for this episode of IT'S BEEN A MINUTE from NPR. I'm Brittany Luse. Talk soon.
Copyright © 2026 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
Accuracy and availability of NPR transcripts may vary. Transcript text may be revised to correct errors or match updates to audio. Audio on npr.org may be edited after its original broadcast or publication. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
