Is Pilates Once A Week Enough?
Brooke Bowersock
April 7, 2024
We cram a lot into a 24-hour day. Between work, family, social life and general adult obligations and responsibilities, finding time to exercise can easily slide to the bottom of the to-do list. Because of this, clients often ask: how often should I be doing Pilates?
I get that. Time is precious. You don’t have enough of it, and you don’t want to waste it. During some seasons of our lives, we might have several hours a week to dedicate to keeping our bodies healthy. And during others, we might just have one or two, which leaves you wondering is doing Pilates once a week enough?
Before I answer that question, let’s talk about how often we should exercise in general, whether it’s Pilates or something else.
How often should you exercise?
The general guidelines for adults from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services are to engage in aerobic exercise for at least 150 minutes a week and strength training two days a week. Aerobic exercise is anything that elevates your heart rate to a moderate level such as power walking or cycling. If you engage in more vigorous aerobic activity such as running, 75 minutes is the weekly recommendation in addition to two strength training sessions.
Strength training, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, is anything that gets your muscles working harder than usual, such as lifting weights or bodyweight exercises like pushups and planks.
Any Pilates class would fall under the category of strength training because it uses resistance to train muscles, whether that’s on the mat with no equipment or using the reformer, light weights or other common Pilates equipment.
At ALIGN Pilates Studios, we offer classes that will also get your heart rate into the aerobic zone and beyond, such as our Burn, Jump and Bodhi Burn classes, so these classes fall under aerobic exercise and strength training.
According to these official guidelines, if Pilates is all you are doing for exercise, once a week isn’t ideal. You would need to add a few Pilates classes or other types of exercise to your routine to hit that target of 150 minutes plus strength training.
“To reap the full array of benefits that Pilates has to offer, two to three classes a week is ideal.”
Brooke Bowersock
Owner, Balanced Body Pilates Principal Educator
How often should you do Pilates?
The question of how often you should do Pilates depends on your fitness goals, but most people who ask me this question at our studio are wondering, how often can I do Pilates and reap all the benefits?
Those benefits are:
To reap the full array of benefits that Pilates has to offer (and there are many more than what I listed above!), two to three classes a week is ideal.
I suggest multiple times a week rather than just once a week because of the nature of Pilates. Pilates includes unique breath work and movement techniques. You can’t simply take one class and suddenly know how to do it perfectly. It takes time to build that type of muscle memory. The more often you take Pilates, the quicker that memory is built and the better it sticks, so you can ensure you’re doing Pilates correctly, staying safe while building strength.
While consistency is key in Pilates, you can and will see benefits relatively quickly. As Joseph Pilates famously said, “In 10 sessions, you feel better, 20 sessions you look better, 30 sessions you have a completely new body.”
So, if you’re new to Pilates, I suggest starting out with two classes per week. See how it feels and if Pilates feels like the right fitness modality for your body right now, then you can consider adding a class per week, maybe a different type of Pilates class to mix things up and keep things interesting. For example, at ALIGN, if you’ve been taking two Connect classes a week for a few months, consider adding a Flow or Burn class to work different muscle groups and experience Pilates in a new way.
After just a few weeks of taking Pilates consistently, you will see a difference in how you feel, in your posture, in your strength, in your sleep, in your energy. It’s amazing how quickly the benefits of Pilates start to show up, but doing classes consistently multiple times a week is key to reaping all these benefits and reaching your fitness goals.
If you’re in a particularly busy season of life where exercising more than once a week just isn’t feasible for you, that’s ok. That’s life. We all go through periods like this. In that case, do what you can and add a class here and there as time allows. As this fitness expert says, and I agree, “Some Pilates is better than no Pilates.”
ALIGN Pilates Studios West
ALIGN Pilates Studios East
ALIGN
