Ugly Pilates: Get Used to It

“Ugly Pilates — get used to it. Dangerous Pilates — never.”

— Jay Grimes

There’s a quote I keep coming back to, from master teacher Jay Grimes — a direct student of Joseph Pilates who taught in Joe’s original 8th Avenue studio in New York.

Everyone Starts Somewhere

Nobody walks into their first Pilates class and looks like the manual. Nobody. The photographs in the classical texts show bodies that have been doing this work for years — sometimes decades. They are the result of the method, not the starting point.

But somewhere along the way, teachers can start using those images as a measuring stick for everyone. And when a beginner doesn’t measure up, there’s this creeping feeling that the session was somehow a failure. That the client isn’t getting it. That the work isn’t landing.

That is almost never true.

The method Is Working, Even When It Looks Like It Isn’t

A beginner doing the Hundred with a lifted head, a shaking core, and feet that won’t stay together? That person is working incredibly hard. Their body is encountering demands it has never felt before. Muscles are firing that have been dormant for years. Connections are being made.

It looks nothing like the book. It has enormous value.

The mistake is confusing aesthetic with effort. Just because a movement doesn’t look clean doesn’t mean it isn’t doing exactly what it’s supposed to do — challenge the body, build awareness, begin the long process of change.

Messy is often where the most learning happens.

The Urge to Fix Everything

As teachers, we are trained to see. We develop an eye for misalignment, compensation, asymmetry. That skill is genuinely useful. But it can also become a kind of compulsion — correcting, adjusting, cueing, reshaping — until the client feels like a problem to be solved rather than a person doing their best.

Not every imperfection needs a correction. Sometimes the most powerful thing a teacher can do is let someone work through something in their own body, in their own time, without interruption.

A session full of constant correction can leave a beginner feeling like they can’t do anything right. A session where they feel seen, encouraged, and capable? That’s what brings them back next week. And the week after. And that consistency — that showing up again and again — is what actually changes bodies.

Trust the Method

Joseph Pilates designed this work to meet people where they are. The exercises themselves do the teaching. When someone is new, the method is introducing the body to itself — waking things up, creating awareness, building a foundation. That process doesn’t look like an advanced practitioner. It looks like a beginner, because that’s exactly what it is.

Ugly, early Pilates is the method working. The body is responding. Patterns are beginning to shift, even if you can’t see it yet.

The teacher’s job at that stage isn’t to make it look right. It’s to make it feel worth coming back to.

What “Getting Used to It” Actually Means

When Jay Grimes said “get used to it”, I think he was talking about something deeper than aesthetics. He was talking about patience. About trusting that the work compounds over time. About knowing that the person in front of you on week three is going to look completely different on week thirty — not because you corrected them into shape, but because the method did its job.

Getting used to ugly Pilates means getting comfortable with beginnings. With process. With the fact that growth is rarely photogenic.

It means looking at a client who is struggling and seeing not what’s wrong, but what’s happening.

Something is always happening.

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Just because it doesn’t look like the book doesn’t mean it doesn’t have value. Often, it means the opposite.