Everyone in this industry is worried about the wrong thing.
The conversation right now is all about the studios popping up on every corner, the ones with a screen instead of a teacher, or an owner who has never taken a class in their life. And fair enough, it's a bit wild out there.
But that's not what actually annoys me.
What annoys me is the client who walks into my clinic already convinced their body is broken, because somebody with very good intentions told them their posture was wrong.
The budget studios are mostly fine
Let me get this out of the way, because I don't want to be the person moaning about cheap Pilates.
Move how you want. Go where you want. The best exercise is genuinely the exercise you'll actually do, in a place where you feel safe and capable doing it.
If someone's found a twenty four hour studio near their house and they're going three times a week and feeling great about it, who am I to poo-poo that? That person is moving. That's the whole game.
Do I think that model lasts? Probably not, but I'm happy to be wrong. My honest read is that as everything else in our lives gets more automated, people are going to want the opposite. They'll want a room with other humans in it, and an instructor whose name they know, and someone who notices when they don't turn up.
That's a business problem though. It isn't a harm problem.
This is the harm problem
Here's what does damage.
A healthy person walks in. Someone tells them their pelvis is tilted, or their shoulders are rounded, or they've got the wrong posture, and they need to be corrected.
That person now believes their body is faulty. And they will believe it for years, long after they've stopped going to that class, and it'll shape what they think they're allowed to do.
We've got decent evidence that posture is a pretty poor predictor of pain. People with textbook alignment get sore. People who look like a question mark are fine. And yet "you've got bad posture" is still one of the most commonly delivered messages in movement.
It's not delivered maliciously. It's delivered by people who were taught it as fact and never had reason to question it.
The right way and wrong way problem
This is the bit that really gets me. It's the idea that there's one correct way to do a movement, and everything else is a fault to be fixed.
You see it in the cueing. Hold this position. Keep this line. Don't let that knee do that. Tuck. Lengthen. Correct.
The trouble is that bodies vary enormously, and the research has moved a long way from the idea of a single optimal alignment. A lot of what still gets taught as gospel comes from a model of the body most of us don't really believe anymore.
When you cue like there's only one right answer, two things happen:
- The client stops experimenting, because experimenting feels risky
- They become dependent on you to tell them whether they did it correctly
Both of those make them worse off. You want someone who can get curious, try a variation, notice what changed, and sort themselves out. That's a robust human. The other thing is a person who needs you forever.
On regulation, honestly
People ask me whether clinical Pilates should be regulated and I genuinely don't have a good answer.
Right now it's the wild west. I could do a weekend course and call myself a clinical Pilates instructor. Or I could be a physio fifteen years in with a pile of postgraduate training behind me and call myself exactly the same thing. Same two words, wildly different thing being sold.
I don't know how you fix that. It's a bit like personal training in that sense, and I'm not convinced a new regulatory body is the answer.
What I can tell you is how we handle it at our end. When we teach clinical Pilates, we teach it clinical first. You're AHPRA registered, you're held to the standards of your profession, and what you're offering in a clinical space should look a lot more like therapy than like a class.
That's not a rule anyone imposed on us. It's just what the words should mean.
What I'd actually like
Not fewer studios. More clients who leave a session believing their body is capable.
If you teach movement, the single highest leverage change you can make this week costs nothing:
- Stop correcting posture that isn't causing a problem
- Swap "that's wrong" for "try this and see what changes"
- Give people two options and let them choose, every single time
- Talk about what their body can build, rather than what's out of line
You'll be amazed how differently people move when they stop bracing for criticism.
And the honest caveat
The proof of all this should be in the pudding. It really annoys me that we have to do work convincing people that clinical Pilates with a clinician is a different product, and I'd rather not have to say it at all.
So don't take my word for it. Go and watch how someone teaches before you send a client to them, or before you learn from them. You'll know within about ten minutes whether they're teaching people to move or teaching people to be careful.
If you've got questions about how we teach this, just yell out. The Clinical Collective is free to join if you want a look at how we work.
Let me know what you reckon, genuinely curious whether other clinicians are seeing the same thing.