What the Chair Tells Us About How the Industry Understands Pilates

Something interesting is happening… Studios that have built their model around the Reformer are beginning to add the Chair — whether that’s a Wunda Chair, Stability Chair, or Combo Chair — to their timetables. New classes, new equipment, a broadening offer.

It’s worth pausing on this, because the choice of what to add — and what not to add — reveals something about how Pilates is being understood at scale.

What isn’t being added, in most cases, is Mat.

A note on Reformer studios

Before going further: this isn’t a critique of Reformer-based practice. The Reformer is a sophisticated piece of apparatus, and in the right teaching environment it is demanding, precise, and genuinely transformative. Many excellent studios have built their entire offer around it and do so with complete integrity.

The question here isn’t about the Reformer. It’s about what happens when a studio positions itself as offering the full breadth of Pilates — and then chooses which parts of the system to include.

Why the Chair makes sense as an addition

The Chair is a natural next step for a Reformer-first studio looking to expand. It’s visually compelling, it photographs well, and it introduces a different movement vocabulary that feels genuinely new to a Reformer-trained client. Adding Chair classes extends the offer without disrupting the existing model.

The Chair is also, genuinely, a remarkable piece of apparatus. The Wunda Chair has extraordinary range and, in experienced hands, represents a complete system in itself. Its inclusion is not the issue.

Why Mat is the more revealing omission

Mat occupies a different position in the Pilates system — not because it should come first, or because everyone needs to train on it, but because it removes the apparatus entirely. It is the body and the floor, and whatever understanding the client has built. Nothing else mediates the movement.

That makes Mat a different kind of teaching challenge. It also makes it a different kind of commitment for a studio. Offering Mat well requires teachers who understand the work independently of the equipment — and that depth of understanding then flows back into everything they teach on apparatus.

Mat also raises a question that the Chair doesn’t: what has the client actually learned? Not which exercises they’ve done, but what movement capacity they’ve developed. It’s a question that any studio serious about client outcomes should want to be able to answer.

Breadth versus completeness

In a complete system, the Chair sits alongside Mat, Reformer, Cadillac, and Barrels — each piece of apparatus connected to the others, each serving the same underlying work. You don’t have to offer all of them. But a studio that presents itself as a Pilates studio, rather than a Reformer studio or a Chair studio, is implicitly claiming the whole.

Adding the Chair extends the apparatus list. It doesn’t complete it. And the consistent absence of Mat — across a growing number of larger studios — suggests that the system is being understood primarily as a collection of equipment rather than as a method with a coherent body of work at its centre.

What to look for when choosing a studio

If you are looking for Pilates in the fullest sense — a method rather than a fitness format — Mat on the timetable is one of the more reliable indicators that a studio is engaging with the whole system. Not because Mat is better than apparatus work, but because its presence suggests that the studio has thought carefully about what Pilates is, and not just what it looks like.

A studio that teaches Mat well understands the work independent of the equipment. That understanding tends to show up in every apparatus class they offer.

It’s a simple question worth asking: do you offer Mat? The answer — and the reasoning behind it — can tell you a great deal.

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This is part of The Transparency Project — EQ Pilates’ commitment to honest, no-nonsense information about what Pilates is, what it isn’t, and how to find the real thing.