The scales were always the wrong measure

A set of scales measures gravitational pull on your body. That is the entirety of the information it gives you. It cannot measure strength. It cannot measure stamina, stability, or coordination. It has no way of knowing whether you can carry your grandchildren without your back complaining, whether you can sit through a long day at work and still think clearly at the end of it, or whether your body is recovering from your sport faster than it used to.

It measures one thing. And for what Pilates was actually designed to do, it is entirely the wrong measure.

Pilates was never about weight loss. It was never about being skinny, small, or light. And it was certainly never about being ‘long and lean’ — a phrase that has been attached to Pilates marketing for years and has almost nothing to do with what the work actually is.

Let’s be direct about that last one. Pilates does not change the length of your muscles. Muscles attach where they attach — that is anatomy, not something any exercise method can alter. The ‘long and lean’ myth grew from Pilates’ association with dancers and got weaponised by an industry looking for a sellable image. It created a stereotype of what a ‘Pilates body’ should look like. It is diet culture in different language, still selling smallness, still telling people their body needs to look a certain way to be doing it right.

Joseph Pilates designed this work for everyone — office workers, boxers, dancers, people recovering from injury. The full range of human bodies, doing the full range of human things. The goal was always function. Always capability. Always a body that works.

Somewhere along the way, the fitness industry decided otherwise. A number on a scale, a particular body shape, a specific size — these became the headline, the selling point, the thing you were supposed to want. Pilates got pulled into that conversation along with everything else — repackaged, rebranded, and pointed at goals it was never designed to serve.

We’ve never bought into that at EQ. Here’s what we’re actually building towards.

What the work actually builds

Pilates — done properly, across the full system — builds a body that functions well. Not a body that looks a certain way. A body that does what you need it to do, reliably, without you having to think about it.

Strength that transfers. The kind that means you can lift, carry, push, and pull through real life without bracing for it. Not strength for its own sake — strength that is available to you when your day requires it.

A body that recovers. Whether you play sport, have a physically demanding job, or simply live a full life, recovery matters. The work builds resilience in the connective tissue, restores range of motion, and reduces the accumulated tension that grinds people down over time.

Stability under pressure. Long meetings, long drives, long days on your feet. A body with genuine stability doesn’t just perform in the studio — it holds up when life is demanding. That’s not a side effect of the work. It’s the point of it.

The ability to show up. For your family, your work, your sport, your life. This is what consistent Pilates practice builds towards — a body that doesn’t get in the way of the things you care about.

Why we measure progress differently

We get asked about it. And the honest answer is: we’re not interested in it as a goal, because it’s the wrong question.

When someone tells us they want to lose weight, what they usually mean is that they want to feel better in their body — more capable, more comfortable, more themselves. We can help with that. The scales are not involved.

The fitness industry has spent decades equating progress with a number going down. We’ve never believed that. Progress is being able to do something this month that you couldn’t do last month. Progress is a client in their eighties moving through the apparatus with more confidence than they had at sixty. Progress is the footballer who stopped getting injured, the desk worker who stopped losing their weekends to back pain, the new parent who found that their body had reserves they didn’t know were there.

None of that shows on a scale. All of it is the actual point.

— EQ Pilates, Sutton Coldfield