Does Reformer Pilates Build Muscle After 40?

Nikkiey: I tried SolidCore for the first time. It's something that is very, very popular right now. Pilates is very popular right now. Throughout the entire class, the instructor was telling us that we were doing progressive overload, that we were doing heavy squats, that we were building muscle. As somebody who has studied body composition for years, who has competed in bodybuilding, who has coached thousands of women through real strength training, I was like, this is not accurate.

Just speaking to the woman that is doing these classes: this episode is not telling you guys to stop going, it's telling you to go with accurate information about what you are getting and what you will still need. If you love your reformer class, your Pilates studio, your low-impact fitness routine, then keep going, genuinely. The enjoyment, the consistency habit that you're building, the mobility work, the community, those are all real and worth protecting and keeping in your space. But please hear me clearly when I say this: do not let those classes be your only resistance training. Do not skip the weight room because you think that your spring resistance classes are covering it, because they're not.

What's going on, everybody? Hey, you guys, welcome back to another episode of The WarriorBabe Show, where on these podcasts I talk about mindset, methodologies and tactics that will help you lose body fat, build muscle, be strong and feel insanely confident. I am your host, Nikkiey Stott.

And guys, in today's episode, I literally just got back from the class that I'm going to talk about today. I had to immediately sit down and start recording this podcast because it's so fresh in my mind and I want to get out my thoughts. So today I tried SolidCore for the first time. It's the reformer-based fitness class, Pilates reformer, you know, the low-impact spring resistance, a lot of core work. It's something that is very, very popular right now. Pilates is very popular right now.

And let me tell you, I went in genuinely open-minded. I've been wanting to do a SolidCore class, heavily, for the last three months. And I wanted to do it with somebody that has never done it before. It turns out that one of my other really good friends had never done it before, because we're both just strength gurus. So we both did it together, and it was a great experience. But I genuinely was open-minded. I genuinely wanted to experience this, and I wanted to understand what is the hype and why are so many women doing this. Guys, I was talking to the woman that was working behind the desk afterwards, and women come in and do this four or five days a week and love it. So I'm like, what is the hype?

But here's what I didn't expect. During the class, the instructor was telling us that we were doing progressive overload, that we were doing heavy squats, that we were building muscle. And I just looked at my friend, and I'm like, what? Wow. As somebody who has studied body composition for years, who has competed in bodybuilding, who has coached thousands of women through real strength training, I was like, this is not accurate. And someone needs to say so clearly. So that is why I'm here. I'm racing home. I'm like, I've got to get behind that mic. I've got to have this conversation with my people. So that's what I'm going to talk about today.

And I'm not going to bash. This isn't a bash session. This isn't a takedown of an entire category of fitness. I just want to be honest, share my honest, personal experience, but also offer some science-backed conversation about what these classes actually do, what they do not do, and why I think the marketing language around them is misleading women about something that genuinely matters for their long-term health. That's why I'm so passionate about this. That's why I was like, I need to get behind the mic and talk about this right now, because you guys know that I'm very passionate about building muscle.

Like I've always said in previous episodes, some of the concepts and the marketing that have been pushed today are just repackaged ways of expressing the 90s and the 80s, getting women to believe that certain strategies are going to get them to their goals when they're not really the right strategies to get them to their goals. You guys know I'm really passionate about that.

Okay. So I want to start here, because I want to be completely fair before I get a little bit critical, because these classes do have real value. And I want women who love them to hear that before anything else. Reformer-based, low-impact studio classes are genuinely excellent for many reasons.

And I'll also put this in there: some of you guys know that I have done reformer-based Pilates. The way that I treated reformer-based Pilates is I would strength train four days a week and I would do one class of reformer-based Pilates. Not like the class I just did, but something that's a little bit slower and lower impact, where you really get into the tension of the muscle and also develop a skill set in specific movements that help give you mobility and flexibility. So that's where these classes do have real, real value.

Also, they build body awareness. In those classes, you focus on controlled movement, you focus on alignment, you focus on that mind-muscle connection. And that is real and that is valuable, especially for women who are new to fitness or who are returning after they've been injured or hurt. Learning how to move intentionally is a legitimate skill.

And like I said, they also improve flexibility. They improve mobility: the range of motion, the stretching, the lengthening. I was in the middle of some exercises where there's a lot of tension on the muscle, and you're lengthening the belly heads of the muscle and really getting in there. So there are real benefits. Mobility is something that I've talked about as a very underrated piece of a complete fitness program, and I'm even saying this to myself. And I believe reformer Pilates classes, which I've done before, really do deliver it well.

Like I said, the way I've piggybacked it off of strength training in a week, it's a way of getting active recovery. I've talked about active recovery days, and this is a great way of doing that. For those of you who strength train the majority of the time like I do, it's a way to get low-impact movement and keep the blood flowing, which supports recovery without adding training stress.

Now, I trained legs yesterday, and I will never do SolidCore again after training legs, because that wasn't active recovery for me. That was a full-blown workout. I was shaking at some points, and I was actually a little bit hesitant. This is where instructors will push you to be on pace with the rest of the class. But at the same time, you've got to know your own level, and you've got to advocate for yourself in those moments. If you're going to push it too far, you are the person that knows your body the most. I'm saying this to myself right now too. There were moments in that class I had to stop because my hamstrings felt like they were ripping apart from doing legs yesterday.

But anyway, side note. On a low-impact kind of day, you're keeping the blood moving, and those classes fit that in well if you're using one as a day of active recovery. And they're enjoyable for a lot of women. I genuinely saw a lot of joy in the women that were doing the class, and that matters. Enjoyment matters. If you're inside of WarriorBabe and you're being coached by one of our coaches, and you love Pilates or you love running marathons or you love CrossFit, we're not going to take that away from you. We're going to find a way to work it into your programming while the majority of your workouts are strength training. Because if you enjoy it, that matters. A woman who goes to a class that she loves five days a week is doing more for her consistency habit than a woman who dreads the gym and only goes twice. So that's where a lot of this stuff has real value.

So I want to be clear that the classes are not worthless, and I don't want to bash them in this episode. They are not bad for you. The problem is not the classes themselves. It's what they're being marketed as. And what they're being marketed as is not what they really are. Being in there and hearing some of the terminology that was being used, it was kind of cringe to me, how things were being said. So what I want to talk through is some of the claims that I heard and why I believe that each one is misleading.

The first one I kept hearing is progressive overload: we're doing progressive overload here. Progressive overload is one of the most foundational principles in exercise science. It means progressively increasing the demand placed on your muscles over time, through more weight, more reps, more volume, more complexity, so that your muscles are consistently challenged beyond what they can currently handle, and therefore they're forced to adapt and grow. That is what progressive overload is.

In a reformer class, the resistance comes from springs. The springs have settings, yes, lighter and heavier. And in some classes, you move through different spring tensions. So that is described as progressive overload, I guess, in the sense of the Pilates realm, but it is not progressive overload in any meaningful sense of the term, is what I'm trying to say.

True progressive overload requires that the stimulus exceeds what your neuromuscular system can currently handle. To break this down a little bit more for you guys, it means creating enough mechanical tension on the muscle fiber to trigger the adaptation process. Spring resistance in a reformer class, for most women who are regularly active, does not even come close to that type of threshold. The load is simply not sufficient to create the mechanical tension required for the meaningful muscle breakdown that you get from a dumbbell, from a barbell, from loading them with plates. Progressive overload is adding 10 pounds to your squat over the course of a month.

The thing is, calling spring resistance progressive overload is a marketing term, because of what you're doing in each class, at least from when I've done Pilates reformer and what I expect SolidCore to be. Unless you are the one paying attention and writing down what spring resistance you had for each of those exercises... and that class goes ridiculously fast. I'm someone who learns by actively watching other people, not really by hearing, and by hearing I was extremely overwhelmed, because the instructors don't stop talking. They just keep going, literally the entire class.

So unless you're really paying attention to the resistance that you're on, and then you remember what you did last time in that exercise... but then each class is different. So while I can understand there may be potential for progressive overload, progressive overload in the science of strength training, knowing the mechanical stress that your body needs with resistance over time, you're going to get from strength training. You're progressively adding more weight over the course of time, or you're going from three sets of eight to three sets of 10 with the same weight. It's increasing the demand in a measurable, tracked way that consistently challenges the muscle beyond its current capacity.

From what I'm understanding from being a part of it, spring settings on a reformer do not do that. What was the number she was saying? Like 25, 50 and 100, if I remember that correctly. They were white, gray and black, and that was the weight. But that's it. You're confined to a certain kind of weight, is what I'm trying to say. So you're not doing progressive overload. Calling spring resistance progressive overload is just a marketing term. Them saying that is just a marketing term.

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The second thing that was driving me nuts: you're setting the spring resistance on a reformer, you're standing on top of the reformer and you're doing bodyweight squats, but they were saying you're doing heavy squats. Guys, a heavy squat is a loaded squat. It's a loaded squat with a barbell, a dumbbell or a loaded machine, where the external resistance significantly exceeds what your body weight alone creates. So a bodyweight squat on a reformer, assisted or resisted by springs, is not a heavy squat.

It may be a challenging movement for someone new to exercise, don't get me wrong, and it may require coordination and control, but it is not heavy in any physiological sense of the word. And that was driving me nuts, so I just needed to get it off my chest.

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The language of heavy exists in fitness for a reason. It signals to the nervous system and to the muscle that a significant load is being managed. So describing spring-resisted bodyweight movements as heavy squats conflates two completely different stimuli and creates a false impression of what the body is actually experiencing. Even the instructor was adding in pulses, like come up for one and down for two, come up for three and down for one. You're pulsing, yes, but that's still your body weight, and it's not a heavy squat. So claim number two: not real.

And then the last thing is that it builds muscle. This is a big claim, and the one that I want to spend a little bit more time on, because women are making significant decisions about their fitness based on this type of belief. They're doing these classes five days a week thinking that they're doing their resistance training, thinking that they are building the muscle that protects their metabolism, that protects their bone density, that protects their hormonal health, and that protects their long-term functional capacity as they grow older.

So I need to be direct with this one. Spring-based, low-load reformer classes do not produce the same muscle-building stimulus as progressive resistance training with external load does. The science is massive on this. And this is where I want to spend a little bit more time with you guys, because I want to drill this one in. Thinking that you're building muscle on a low-resistance, spring-based reformer is so far from the truth, and I'm here to be the source of truth.

I think if I break it down in science terms, and also at a level that you guys can understand, then once you understand what actually has to happen for muscle to grow, the distinction between reformer classes and true resistance training becomes impossible to ignore.

So, muscle growth, or hypertrophy, however you want to say it, requires three primary stimuli, and all three require adequate mechanical tension on the muscle fiber.

So mechanical tension, let me talk about that. This is the most important driver of muscle growth. It is the force placed on the muscle fiber during a contraction against a significant external load. When you perform a heavy squat, the mechanical tension is on your quads, it's on your glutes, it's on your hamstrings. And that is enough to break down the muscle and cause the micro trauma to the muscle fiber that triggers the repair and growth response. You guys have heard me say this a million times if you've been listening to this podcast for years: you do not build muscle inside of the gym. You break it down. And that is what mechanical tension is doing. The building is the 24 to 48 hours after, and what you eat to fuel the growth and repair process, aka your nutrition. That's why they go so hand in hand.

But the key word is significant. Significant external load, significant mechanical tension that is enough to trigger hypertrophy. I can never say this word. It requires a load that brings the muscle close to its maximum. What I mean by that, and this is explained in research, is approximately hitting 60 to 85 percent of your one-rep max. That is what is required of you to stimulate this process and also to stimulate muscle protein synthesis. For most women, spring resistance on a reformer falls well beyond that threshold. As you heard me say earlier, it's falling way beyond someone's ability and threshold. Not to mention, what was it, a five-pound, eight-pound dumbbell that you pick up to do some shoulder raises? Granted, if you're starting out or new to fitness, yes. But for long-term progressive overload, you're not going to get progressive overload from a five-pound or eight-pound dumbbell.

The other stimulus that I want to talk about, and I touched on this a little bit earlier when I threw out this word, is metabolic stress. The burning, the fatigue, that sensation you get from high-rep training, the pump, the burn, contributes to hypertrophy over time, but as a secondary driver. Reformer classes produce that metabolic stress, but metabolic stress without adequate mechanical tension, which was that first stimulus I just talked about, produces limited and temporary muscular adaptation. It's not the progressive, structural muscle development that changes your body composition and your metabolic rate over time.

So yes, what I noticed was you're holding positions for a really long time, you're doing multiple reps of the same exercise for a long period of time, then you're doing more reps. You're getting those slow-twitch fibers or fast-twitch fibers in there. But it doesn't add the mechanical tension that is needed for these processes to happen, to build muscle and change your body composition.

Also, there's muscle damage: controlled micro trauma to the muscle fibers, which triggers an inflammatory repair response that results in muscle growth. Heavy resistance training produces this. Low spring resistance training, generally, is not going to do the type of damage to the muscle fiber that you need, at least not at a meaningful level for women who are already somewhat conditioned. Again, like I said earlier, for people who are just new to fitness, it's great. It serves its purpose. But for me, going into this type of class, I'm going to make sure it's just a supplement on top of my strength training. It's not going to get me the results that I'm looking for, but it will help with mobility and flexibility.

So here's a practical way of putting all of the science I just threw at you guys. Those are the stimuli that are needed, and you need all three of them to create that process. Doing reformer classes like this is not going to give you all three of them.

So breaking it down like this: say a woman is doing reformer classes five days a week. She's moving. She's building some muscular endurance. She's maintaining mobility. She's creating metabolic stress, as I talked about, by doing high repetitions. But she's not building the kind of progressive muscle mass that drives your metabolism, that protects your bones, that balances your hormones, that produces the body composition change that I know a lot of women want and are striving for. When a lot of women say they want to build muscle, the concepts, the theories, the methodologies, the science I'm putting out to you is what's necessary to do that.

And this is where it can get tricky, because this world is marketing that you're building muscle. If the class is telling her that she is, then she's making training decisions based on false information. She could be skipping the weight room entirely because she thinks her reformer sessions are covering that. And that gap between what she thinks she is doing and what she is actually doing shows up in her results over months and over years. So women go to these classes and they're not seeing the results that they expected after six months or a year of doing it, whereas a year of doing strength training, you're going to see some type of difference.

This is why it can be misleading, and also frustrating and confusing, because people think they're working towards these goals because it's being marketed that way, but they're not. It's not showing up for her.

So really quick, just speaking to the woman that is doing these classes, because again, I don't want to bash this: this episode is not telling you guys to stop going. It's telling you to go with accurate information about what you are getting and what you will still need. If you love your reformer class, your Pilates studio, your low-impact fitness routine, then keep going, genuinely. The enjoyment, the consistency habit that you're building, the mobility work, the community, those are all real and worth protecting and keeping in your space and a part of your team. But please hear me clearly when I say this: do not let those classes be your only resistance training. Do not skip the weight room because you think that your spring resistance classes are covering it, because they're not.

A complete program for a woman who wants a real body composition change, who wants long-term physical capacity and capability, and who wants to make sure her metabolic health is in check, is three to four days of progressive strength training with external load. What I mean by that is dumbbells, barbells, cable machines, loaded machines, compound movements, progressive overload tracked over time. This is a non-negotiable foundation.

Everything else, like reformer classes, Pilates, yoga, cardio, walking, fills in around that foundation. Think about it as active recovery, mobility work, your cardiovascular health and enjoyment. Because all of it has value, and I want to make sure you guys know that. But none of it replaces the foundation. The reformer class is a great Thursday thing, but it's a terrible substitute if you focus on it five days a week and ignore your squat day or your leg day or your back day.

And if you are somebody who has been doing these classes and wondering why your body composition isn't changing like you thought it would, despite five days of putting in consistent effort, this is your answer. You're moving, you're doing the exercises, but you're not building. And building is the piece that changes everything.

So let me also zoom out for a second here and talk about the broader marketing problem, because misleading language in these types of classes is not an isolated problem. It is part of a broader problem in the entire women's fitness industry that I think deserves to be named. The industry has known for decades that women are afraid of getting bulky from lifting heavy. It has known that women respond better to language like tone, tighten, sculpt, lean and defined rather than heavy, load and progressive overload, which sound so masculine. And it has built these entire business categories around that fear, selling low-impact fitness classes to women using the language of strength training without the reality of it.

In my opinion, this is not accidental. It is strategic. And it keeps women spending significant money and significant time on fitness modalities that feel productive, because let me tell you, getting out of that class, I surely felt productive. But they do not produce the physiological outcomes that you are after. And the consequence is not just a waste of time and money, though it is that. The consequence is that women are not building the muscle that they need for metabolic health, for bone density, for hormones.

And you guys know I'm very passionate about this. That's why I will die on the hill of strength training. I will die on the hill of progressive overload. I will die on the hill of heavy and load and all of these terms that sound so masculine, but they're not. You're not going to get bulky from strength training. But that fear has been sitting with people.

So the consequence is that women are not building muscle for metabolic health, for functional longevity. They're spending their fitness hours feeling challenged without getting the specific stimulus that their body actually needs. And as a result, in the absence of that, you get blamed, or your diet gets blamed, or your genetics get blamed for not getting the results that you want. And then it feels like it's your fault. But it's the fact that you've been sold a product that does not do what it claimed.

So I just want to give you validation. If you are somebody that has experienced this, thinking that you're going to get some type of result by doing just Pilates, and you haven't, it's because you've been sold a product that does not do what it claimed. And I'm just going to be direct and straightforward with you, because you guys know I'm no BS around this kind of stuff.

Okay. So overall, the bottom line is that low-impact, reformer, Pilates-style classes have real value, don't get me wrong: for mobility, for active recovery, for body awareness, for learning controlled movement, for coming off an injury, and for enjoyment. If you enjoy them, amazing. They belong in a complete fitness program. But they do not belong at the centerpiece of it. That is progressive overload.

Progressive overload requires progressive load. Muscle building requires mechanical tension, mechanical stress, the ability to break down muscle fibers. Heavy squats require external weight. These are not options. They are literally exercise science fundamentals. And when a fitness class tells you that it's delivering these things through spring resistance and body weight, that is a marketing claim, not a physiological one.

You deserve accurate information, guys, about the time and the money that you are spending, about what your training is and is not doing for you and your body. Because information is what allows you to make choices that actually serve your long-term health. So please, pick up those weights. Add these classes to your strength training. If you love them, add them in, but build the foundation around strength training.

All right. What a class that was. I was just like, what is happening here? Mainly over the claims. But I can see why people love it, and I can see why it is a challenge. You're really getting into small muscle fibers that haven't been worked in a while. So I can see why people enjoy it and leave feeling sore. But just know, progressive overload is what is going to build muscle and get you to where you want to be long term. So think about time spent, and make sure your time is going towards the actual truth of what's going to get you the result that you want. Okay. All right, y'all. I love y'all, and I'll see you in the next episode.

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