Obliques. Please, no, not the obliques. Dear god, I hate those obliques.
Tom Parker Bowles
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Because only 12 months back, I was utterly unaware that these damned muscles – which straddle each side of the abdomen like grim, unsmiling sentinels – even existed. Yet here I am once again, in a neon-lit studio off Kensington High Street, attempting a ‘side plank’, while balanced on a machine that wouldn’t look out of place in a medieval torture chamber. And as I sweat and curse, desperately trying to hold my creaking body aloft on one elbow, I realise I’m not just the oldest in the room (by at least a couple of decades), but the only man, too.
I’m certainly not alone in my love of pilates. And it is reformer pilates – conducted on a platform with a sliding carriage, adjustable straps and a foot bar – that continues to rise and stretch to new heights (the whizzy equipment has come a long way from the adjustable wooden bed frames that Joseph Pilates, a German boxer, was using a century ago). Thanks to its small class sizes and high-profile followers its popularity has surged: Adele supposedly ‘transformed her body’ through reformer pilates, Harry Styles was spotted on a reformer bed in North London’s Primrose Hill, and even Jeremy Clarkson has joined the likes of the Kardashians, Margot Robbie and David Beckham in swearing by it.
In 2024 there were 5,227 pilates and yoga studios countrywide, up from 4,476 in 2023. The market is currently worth £1 billion, up £100 million since last year when it was the most popular class type on the fitness platform ClassPass. Scroll through TikTok, where there are over 164,000 videos about reformer pilates that attract millions of views, and you may conclude that it is as much a lifestyle as an exercise. Beckham, aged 49, has said it has given him the best body of his life.
My aims are rather more modest – the only way I’d get a Beckham body is with the aid of an industrial dose of Photoshop – but it’s a miracle I’m here at all. Exercise was once an abstract concept to me, something to be sneered at and swerved away from, as I ate and drank with joyous abandon. But as I caroused towards early middle age, and the outline of my stomach moved, inexorably, from concave to convex, my jawline began to dissolve and my cholesterol levels crept slowly northwards, my long-suffering GP suggested some gentle exercise.
Then came pilates. I’d barely given it the time of day, seeing it as yet another of those vapid, wishy-washy, hippie-dippy fads practised by bored Cotswolds housewives between lunch at Estelle Manor and a ‘session’ with their tennis instructor to, ahem, ‘improve their stroke’. Anyway, it’s hardly manly. You can’t imagine Richard Harris doing pilates. Or Sean Connery. Or Roger Moore. Well, maybe old Rog, come to think of it. He always embraced his more feminine side… But seriously, shouldn’t I be pumping iron with my juiced-up bros, grunting in a suitably simian fashion? Not lying on a mat, thrusting my hips in the air over and over again, like a witless extra in a 1980s Jane Fonda workout.
Still, I’d been told again and again how miraculous reformer pilates was, as much meditation as exercise, a way of toning both muscles and mind. And so I took the plunge at 1Rebel, a small but excellent upmarket gym chain a ten-minute stroll from my house (three sessions for £49 for newbies). It sure wasn’t pretty, at least to start. You sit, stand or lie on a platform with a sliding carriage.
It’s all about ‘time under tension’, squats, tricep and bicep curls, leg presses, lunges, planks and, yes, those damned side planks. Sometimes with no resistance (for balance), sometimes a whole lot more (for strength).
And while all my fellow reformer devotees are mainly lithe young women, clad in Lululemon, Bamford activewear and Alo Yoga, I shamble about in an old pair of sweat shorts and fraying Tabasco T-shirt. That’s the joy. The only thing you need buy is a pair of ‘grippy’ socks. No one so much as blinks at my presence, let alone views me with disdain. Or so I hope. Far from being some West London version of Mean Girls, I’m neither ostracised nor ridiculed for my Y-chromosome. We’re all in this together, peace, love and pilates. And while some of the class arrive in pairs, it’s hardly a pick-up joint with extra springs. The very last thing I want to do is make new friends or hang about afterwards, leering lasciviously like some ghastly old goat. Even decrepit fellas in less than the prime of their life are very welcome.
Things have gradually become rather more easy. I’ve discovered muscles I never knew existed, I’ve improved my balance and posture and I creak a whole lot less. Sure, the occasional grunt and rather more than occasional expletive may escape. Men do like others to know they’re in pain.
But progress is tangible and I emerge, clear-headed, calm and ready for the day ahead. Yes, it takes time, like any discipline. And patience, something with which I’m not naturally blessed.
But where once I sneered, I now bow down. In a slow, controlled way, of course. Each instructor has their own style, pace and programme. Some play bouncy, happy house, others banging hard trance. Darkness is key. No one wants to see a red-faced 50-year-old doing the splits at nine in the morning. Sometimes, I’ll end up drenched in sweat. At others, barely a bead troubles my brow. There’s no doubt I’m hooked. Reformer pilates is a revelation, a salve and salvation. I may be a hippopotamus in a world of gazelles, but I’m a long way from being the elephant in the room.
