Why Do so Many TikTok Influencers Want Us to Do Pilates?
The latest piece of fitness misinformation is spreading on TikTok, but I’ve seen it pop up elsewhere as well. Young women praise Pilates (sometimes along with the barre, yoga, and walking) saying it helped them lose weight and tone their muscles, which weight training failed to do. Something about cortisol. And I’m here to tell you, as a certified personal trainer, weightlifter, and someone who has taken a Pilates class once or twice: that’s bullshit.
Pilates will not make your muscles “longer”, “leaner” or “tighter”.
When you make your muscles stronger, you don’t give them more “muscle tone”. The tone will mean that you are bending all the time. You also don’t make your muscles “longer”. They’re so long, stupid goose, because they’re attached to your bones at each end.
And you don’t make them “leaner” because muscles are made of muscle, and “lean” means no body fat. You can lose fat during strength training, but the type of strength training does not really affect this .
What are the real differences between Pilates and weight lifting?
Pilates is a form of strength training that grew out of physical therapy rehabilitation programs for people with injuries. It focuses on core strength, controlled movement, and learning movement patterns—not just with the most weight or the most reps, but also with moving the body in the “correct” way. In this respect, it is very similar to certain types of “functional” training with kettlebells and foam rollers, but with a different set of movements.
Matt Pilates is done on the floor like yoga, with little to no equipment. There are many free Pilates videos available online that vary in quality. Some of them are just basic exercises you do while lying on your back, often combined with yoga moves, and serious Pilates people scoff at them. Others are more varied and deeper.
Then there are classes, often expensive ones, that come with equipment. Sometimes you use things like springs attached to a wall, but the most bizarre and trendy pursuits are with something called a reformer, a sliding track machine. We have a short guide on what to expect from your Pilates class here .
A good Pilates workout will work your muscles and help you get stronger over time. Pilates is generally not the best choice if your main goal is to lift a lot of weight or build muscle mass. People who switch from weightlifting to Pilates often report losing muscle mass.
Depending on the type of classes you take and whether or not you’re really trying to challenge yourself, you can get anything from an under-dosed, not-so-healthy routine to something that builds enough strength to keep you healthy. and feel more functional in everyday life. life. To be fair, the same goes for many activities and light strength training (barre, yoga, classes where you swing dumbbells). Your results depend on whether the class is good and whether you set yourself the right tasks.
Is cortisol preventing me from losing weight?
So let’s dig into the misinformation. The story you’ll hear from many TikTok talking heads is that they used to do weightlifting and/or high intensity interval training (HIIT) but couldn’t lose weight or were unhappy with their appearance. They may also report being tired, sick, or not enjoying their workouts. Then they switched to Pilates and walking, and the weight immediately came off.
The explanation that is given – and please remember that this is entirely fiction – is that weight lifting and HIIT increase the levels of a stress hormone in your body called cortisol. Cortisol tells your body to hold on to body fat. (Perhaps there will be some long biochemical details here.) Thus, doing simpler workouts will allow your body to lose weight.
Plus, you’ll see influencers talking about how cortisol makes you gain or keep weight during certain weeks of your menstrual cycle, which requires you to plan your workouts around your cycle; or that certain foods or lifestyles cause “imbalanced hormones” or make you gain weight, which they call a “cortisol belly.”
It’s true that cortisol levels are linked to stress, that stress is sometimes correlated with weight gain, and that medical conditions that affect cortisol can affect how your body uses fat and energy. But none of this applies to what you can expect from weight training in the gym.
Cortisol levels in the blood rise after high-intensity exercise but return to normal within an hour. We also adapt quite quickly to high-intensity exercise, as physiologist John Hough points out here : the work of his research team showed that after 11 days of high-intensity cycles, these short-term cortisol spikes became much lower. (Other research backs this up.) In other words, the more we exercise, the better we cope with physiological stress—any athlete or coach could tell you that.
The release of cortisol caused by exercise is simply not considered a significant factor in weight gain when you talk to real endocrinologists (hormone specialists) or scientists who study exercise or metabolism. Not to mention, neither Pilates nor strength training is new; if lifting weights caused people to accumulate body fat, it would be a long-understood phenomenon that athletes and coaches would already know how to plan for and work around, rather than a shocking new TikTok trend that the world is just now facing. .
If Pilates isn’t something special, why do all these women say it worked better for them?
There are many reasons why now is the perfect moment for this trend to become popular.
One of the main reasons is that this is a response to a trend that has been going on for many years, where a dense physique is in vogue, and weight lifting is widely advertised as a way to pump up the buttocks. (This trend also includes a lot of misinformation, including the idea that “sagging hips” is an aesthetic flaw and that it can be corrected by doing certain exercises ; both of these claims are complete nonsense.)
When an idea is popular, participating in the backlash against that idea can increase engagement. I browsed a lot of Pilates TikTok to write this article and this is clearly an opportunity many influencers are taking advantage of. One young woman in particular said she saw results from “two weeks of Pilates” that she hadn’t seen in years of strength training. (I don’t care what you do, nothing will change your body for two weeks.) This video was followed by a flurry of videos of disparaging reactions to people who did not believe her words. The algorithm clearly rewards her for this – one of her videos was among the top results in my Pilates searches – but she’s not an expert on exercise, health, or anything else. She has posted a video of her highly requested Pilates program and by her own admission, these are just a few basic exercises she picked up from free YouTube videos.
Having also posted about weight training trends on TikTok , I can guarantee that many of these people who claim that weightlifting “didn’t work” for them weren’t lifting weights or not properly. Air squats won’t build glutes, crunches won’t build abs, exercise won’t help you lose weight , and most strength training people use too light weights to make a difference . Scroll through the profiles of any of these Pilates enthusiasts and you’ll see their previous workouts. It’s educational.
Another thing to keep in mind is that when someone tells you what they are doing now (even assuming they are telling the truth), their body has pretty much been built on what they used to do. If someone has lifted heavy weights and recently switched to lower intensity exercises, they are still benefiting from the strength and muscle they built before.
And finally: the idea that these people enjoy their current routine more than their previous ones may well be true. If they forced themselves to do HIIT (or other types of grueling workouts labeled HIIT ), they certainly hated it. HIIT sucks, fake HIIT sucks, and if you’re only doing it because you believe it’s the best way to lose weight, you’ll resent the fact that it makes you suffer and doesn’t even work.
Something similar happens with weight lifting, to be honest: if you are always in the gym, lifting as much as you can, you get very tired. At first it will be easy to increase the weight every workout, but pretty soon you will reach a point where it no longer works. If you follow a well-designed strength training program , you will avoid friction and frustration, but most people don’t. So, again, switching to a different form of exercise can make you happier. This is not because weightlifting is destined to make you miserable, but because you got out of an unpleasant situation and switched to something that you liked.
There’s another aspect of Pilates’ fashion moment: Pilates classes are damn expensive . Small classes and private lessons are part of why it’s so much “better” than other types of learning. You get a lot of personal attention and learn to engage your muscles exactly the way you’re trying to, which can be very rewarding. But this comes at a cost. As well as specialized equipment (you won’t find Reformers at Planet Fitness) plus just the stamp of doing an exercise currently popular among wealthy white women. You pay for all this.
So, to recap: Pilates is considered better than sweating in the gym because it’s trendy and somewhat exclusive; it is easier and perhaps more fun than badly doing the exercises that were before; and it is also just a hot novelty for social media discussion. If you prefer Pilates and can afford it, enjoy! But if not, trust me, you won’t miss out.