How Black women are making space in the world of Pilates – Annenberg Media

We all know how it feels to be out of place in a fitness space — whether it’s your first time at the gym for your New Year’s resolution, your athletic friend invites you on a “beginner’s” hike or you decide to get back into a workout class you used to breeze through, but now you’re huffing and puffing.

When Brandy Robinson tried a Reformer Pilates class for the first time, she felt out of place. She had gained weight during college and wanted to get into fitness after graduating. But her body was not the main thing that made her feel like a fish out of water — she was the only Black woman in the class.

The next studio she tried, she was the only Black woman again. And again.

And again.

Raised in South Los Angeles’ Windsor Hills neighborhood, where nearly three in four residents are Black, Robinson found that when trying to look for Reformer Pilates classes she always had to travel elsewhere, like Beverly Hills or the westside of Los Angeles, where many neighborhoods are predominately white.

Reformer Pilates is unique because it uses an apparatus — a reformer — where clients exercise atop, adding resistance, and moving what’s referred to as a carriage or bed, throughout the exercise.

“That’s a problem. We have to leave our communities and go to these other communities to have these experiences,” Robinson said.

Although Robinson wanted to get back into shape, the lack of Black representation in Pilates studios made her feel unwelcomed. “I was like, I can’t come back here…I don’t know if it was intentional or not, but it was one of those feelings where, ‘this is not for you,’ whether because you’re a Black woman or because of your size.”

Robinson is not the only Black woman who has felt out of place or overlooked in Pilates. Aleeah Sutton, who has done Pilates for seven years, said she experienced moments of feeling unwelcomed too.

“Everyone in there has their nose up and they’re posturing. It’s like, ‘Do you know what you’re doing? If not, why are you in here?’” Sutton said.

People often hold a stereotype about who does Pilates — white, affluent, thin women.

But, John Howard Steel, a former student of Joseph Pilates, the founder of the exercise, shared that Pilates was meant to be inclusive and that Joseph Pilates did not care what you looked like.

“He was totally focused on you and how you moved and how you did everything, but he didn’t care about anything else in your life. Didn’t care if you were happy or unhappy, whether you had children or didn’t have children, whether you were brown, yellow, blue. It mattered not at all to him,” Steel said.

Steel wrote a book in 2020 about Joseph Pilates called “Caged Lion: Joseph Pilates and His Legacy.”

The high cost of reformer classes in boutique studios also makes the workout a lot less affordable.

A single Reformer Pilates class is typically $35 to $40 with many studios having a deal of $25 for first-timers. This is not too different from other fitness classes like cycling or kickboxing. Ten class bundles for Reformer Pilates can cost between $200 and $400.

While someone could buy a machine and watch at-home reformer Pilates videos, machines range from $1,000 up to $10,000 for studio-grade.

These machine and boutique studio classes make reformer Pilates a lot less accessible to people of varying economic backgrounds than Mat Pilates, which only requires an exercise mat. You can find these classes at a YMCA or most gyms. There are also many YouTube videos with Mat Pilates exercises. Casey Ho, a Pilates instructor who has been uploading at-home Pilates videos since 2009 on her channel @Blogilates, has 10 million followers on YouTube and has accumulated four billion views.

By just looking on Google Maps, one can see the proliferation of Reformer Pilates studios in Los Angeles’ predominantly white neighborhoods like Studio City, Beverly Hills and Santa Monica. But, in Los Angeles’ predominantly Black neighborhoods like Inglewood and Ladera Heights — Reformer Pilates studios are almost non-existent.

One of the few Pilates studios in South LA is Hills and Heights Pilates, a Black-owned Reformer Pilates studio that opened in 2023.

Hills and Heights Pilates

After a few negative experiences in Pilates, everything changed for Brandy Robinson when she went to a Black-owned studio in Culver City.

“That was the first time I was like, ‘Okay, I found my home. This is where I’ll continue to take classes,’” she said.

Sweat Pilates, which is no longer in business, was where Robinson was taught by a Black instructor for the first time and where she noticed a diverse class.

Her love for Pilates and experiences as a Black woman in Pilates is what ultimately led her to create one of Los Angeles’ only Black-owned Pilates studios, Hills and Heights Pilates in West Adams.

Robinson said she chose the location so it could be accessible for the surrounding predominantly Black communities such as Ladera Heights and Baldwin Hills, inspiring the name Hills and Heights.

“I wanted to really be intentional and strategic. Why do you have to drive to the West Side or the South Bay when I’m here?” Robinson said. “That was the intention behind it for sure and to make sure that everyone knew they were welcome. We don’t care what you look like, what size you are, none of those things matter. And I think so far, it’s been successful.”

Sutton is an instructor at Hills and Heights. Although she is a former track athlete and felt up to the physical challenge of Pilates, she could not help but notice the same thing Robinson did when first trying Pilates.

“There weren’t a lot of black people, there weren’t a lot of people that look like me,” Sutton said.

After falling in love with the exercise, she became an instructor, which she says has been incredibly meaningful for her.

“I think that every time I encounter someone who looks like me, or a family member that decides to take the [Pilates] journey, it’s a reminder of my purpose.”

Black Girl Pilates™

In 2017, Sonja R. Price Herbert created a group for Black female instructors called Black Girl Pilates, which Herbert recently trademarked. Herbert is based in Atlanta and has been doing Pilates for over 15 years.

For Herbert, Black Girl Pilates is meant to be a space where Black female instructors can network, learn further about Pilates and share their experiences — including instances of feeling unwelcome. Black Girl Pilates has its own certification program for Black women who want to be Pilates instructors.

Herbert said her favorite part of running the group is seeing the growth in confidence among members. Clarissa Shepherd, a member of Black Girl Pilates, published a children’s book this year featuring a young Black girl doing Pilates, called “Sage Does Pilates.” In 2017, Zola Williams, another member of the group, became the first Black woman on the cover of Pilates Style Magazine.

Herbert said she feels there needs to be more representation in the Pilates world because people are used to only seeing white Pilates instructors and clients.

“In all the pictures, that’s all you see,” Herbert said, describing the imagery typically shown around Pilates.

Diversifying Pilates

The Pilates Method Alliance (PMA), an international association for Pilates instructors, launched a photo contest in December 2020 called “Diversify Pilates,” asking instructors of color to share pictures of themselves for a chance to win a free ticket to the PMA conference.

The contest led to online backlash, with many questioning the intentions of PMA and calling the effort “tokenism.” One Instagram user commented, “Your solution to racism is profiting off people’s art so you can symbolically look not-racist??”

Many users called on the PMA to take down the post. “9 days this racist, tokenizing post has been up. End the contest and apologize” another commented. As of December 2024, the Instagram post remains up.

The contest came at a time when, after the murder of George Floyd, conversations about anti-Black racism appeared in all sorts of sectors — healthcare, the fashion industry and fitness.

This inspired Herbert, founder of Black Girl Pilates, to create a webinar for anti-racism within Pilates. After her first webinar, Herbert noticed there was a high demand, so she kept hosting more webinars. But Herbert said the energy to make a change in 2020 didn’t last.

“Not too long after that things died down because [white people] are like, ‘okay, we did our little thing, whatever.’”

Herbert continues to lead her anti-racism webinars and also consults Pilates studios, just not as frequently.

One month after the PMA photo contest, all four Black board members of the PMA resigned. One of them was Tabatha Russell, owner of tabPilates in Chicago.

Russell shared that some of the anti-racism efforts by Pilates studios and organizations felt performative. “At the time, all of these studios were welcoming [Black people] into them, as well as giving us scholarships for their training programs, but they weren’t making adjustments to their policies or to their teaching practices so that when we get there we actually feel comfortable,” Russell said.

But Black women like Robinson, Russell and Herbert are making their own spaces for Black women in Pilates.

Robinson says she hopes her studio is not only inclusive in terms of race but gender as well. In the same way she was intentional about the location to be accessible to Black Angelenos, she also wants it to be welcoming for all genders.

“Our colors are not pink or purple. They’re orange and blue. And that was intentional. And we want all people to be comfortable in our space,” Robinson said.

To Robinson, Russell, Herbert and Steel, who trained under Joseph Pilates himself, Pilates is meant for all.