Is Pilates Strength Training? (And Why the Question Itself Might Be Getting in the Way)

A reader of Spinal Intelligence sent me a message shortly after the book came out. She’s a Pilates instructor, and a question keeps coming up from her students: “Is Pilates strength training?”

She already knows what her students are gaining. Stronger, easier movement through their days, better coordination, a clearer sense of where their bodies are in space. But without progressive overload and without the language of strength training, she wasn’t sure how to answer.

It’s a great question. And I think the confusion around it says something important, not just about Pilates, but about how we tend to think about movement in general.

What Strength Training Actually Does (Physiologically)

Let’s start here, because I think this is where a lot of the confusion lives.

For an exercise to create a physiological change in muscular strength, there needs to be a load heavy enough to create meaningful tension in the tissue. When that happens, the muscles, tendons, and ligaments adapt, which means they remodel and become structurally stronger. This is what progressive overload is designed to accomplish: a systematic increase in demand that keeps the tissue adapting over time.

Load can look a lot of different ways. It doesn’t have to be a barbell. But the principle remains the same: without sufficient mechanical tension, you’re not driving the structural changes that define strength training.

Here’s what’s interesting, though. When you first start any new exercise program, whether it’s strength training, Pilates, yoga, martial arts, javelin throwing, it feels hard. And the reason it feels hard isn’t just because your muscles are working. It’s because your brain is figuring out something new. Which joints to coordinate. How much effort to recruit. When to stabilize and when to move.

That initial difficulty is largely neurological. Your nervous system is learning.

Activities like Pilates require a tremendous amount of that neurological work. The emphasis of the practice is on coordination, concentration, fine-tuned awareness of position and effort. This means you develop neuromuscular efficiency: the brain-body communication that makes complex movement feel less effortful and more precise. Research supports a distinction between these two adaptation pathways—the structural changes that come from resistance training and the neural adaptations that come from skill-based movement practice. Both are real. Both matter. They’re just different things.

Why Pilates Doesn’t Need to Be Strength Training

When I shared this with the instructor who wrote to me, she was relieved. There’s a trend right now in the Pilates world where people are trying to make Pilates also be strength training by adding weighted springs, calisthenics sequences, and language borrowed from the gym.

I understand the impulse. Strength training has a lot of cultural momentum right now, and for good reason. The research on it is compelling. But the attempt to make Pilates do double duty might actually be undermining what makes Pilates worth doing in the first place.

The same is true of yoga. I stopped attending yoga classes a decade ago for exactly this reason—they kept folding in calisthenics-type movements. I already had a strength practice and a yoga sequence doesn’t lend itself to helping someone successfully achieve a pistol squat. I was going to yoga for something else entirely, and so I just stopped going.

Modalities like yoga and Pilates offer something different: a slower, more internally focused kind of attention. Time to feel. Time to shift into a different part of your brain. That’s not a consolation prize for people who don’t lift weights. That’s a real and distinct benefit.

What Strength Training Offers That Pilates Doesn’t

None of this is to diminish what Pilates does. It’s to say clearly what it doesn’t do, and why that matters.

Strength is what supports your bones and your structure. It’s what makes you feel less physically vulnerable, both physiologically and psychologically. That sense of capacity — of being able to carry things, catch yourself, move through the world with less effort, comes from having built actual tissue-level strength.

I have said this before, but it’s worth mentioning again: at some point, you don’t need to keep chasing strength. Once you have built enough strength capacity for your life and your goals, you can switch to maintenance mode. Maintenance mode is kind of like cruise control—it requires less effort and lets you work with what you already have until something shifts (and something, eventually, always does). It’s so much easier than constantly pushing heavier numbers. It’s a very sustainable place to be.

But you do need to get there first. And Pilates, as wonderful as it is, won’t get you there on its own.

The Case for Letting Each Practice Be Itself

What I’ve seen in my work is that these practices genuinely complement each other, especially when they’re allowed to be themselves.

I’ve had clients who were primarily strength training add one day a week of Pilates or yoga. The change is often striking. Not just in how they move, but in how they feel in their bodies. Something quieter and more connected comes online.

And I’ve seen committed Pilates practitioners add one day of strength work and suddenly find that skills they’d been working on for months become easier. The physical capacity fills in something the neurological work couldn’t do alone.

Neither one is better. They’re doing different things. And both are worth having.

The question “is Pilates strength training?” is really a question about value. People want to know if what they’re doing counts. It counts. It just counts for different things. And maybe that’s actually more useful to understand than whether it fits a particular label.

Want to go deeper on how the nervous system shapes movement and recovery? Check out Spinal Intelligence, available at jennpilotti.com or on Amazon.

References

Mikkola, J., et al. (2018). Neuromuscular and hormonal adaptations during strength and endurance training. Frontiers in Physiology. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5983157/

Human Kinetics. Neuromuscular adaptations to strength training. https://us.humankinetics.com/blogs/excerpt/neuromuscular-adaptations-to-strength-training