Somewhere along the way, the fitness world decided Pilates and weight training had to compete. Can Pilates really build strength? Should women be lifting weights instead? Is Pilates enough on its own?

But Pilates isn’t weight training, and it was never trying to be. They’re two different systems of movement that happen to have some overlap. Both can make you stronger, but they get you there in very different ways. Honestly, that’s what I love about it. To me, that difference is the whole point.

And it’s why so many people fall in love with Pilates. They don’t wake up sore and stiff, they enjoy the balance of strength and mobility, and they’re less likely to get injured. There’s something quietly beautiful about that: you can start Pilates in your twenties and still be doing it in your eighties, and it’ll still be working for you. If you look back at what Joseph Pilates created, you can see he took inspiration from traditional gym equipment and turned it into an apparatus where the body moves freely and expansively. People feel strong, and just as importantly, they feel good in their body.

Pilates is often seen as just core work, but it’s so much more than that. The first exercises traditionally learnt on the reformer are leg and footwork on heavy springs, not core work. It was always designed as a whole-body system.

Whilst I love a great group reformer class, modern Pilates has added another layer of complexity with the idea that it’s all about light springs, endless reps and chasing the burn. Lighter resistance has its place, but on its own it won’t progress your strength. With athletes, I’ll set a spring load they can only manage six to eight reps of, to build strength in a targeted area. Lighter springs and higher reps then challenge the stabilisers and core and can really help take you into your end range which is amazing.

That’s why comparing them misses the point. Compared to Pilates, weight training is a fairly simple system, where as Pilates is far more complex. The full method isn’t just mat and reformer. It spans multiple pieces of apparatus, and it asks for a different skill set, a different level of coordination and a different mind-body rhythm, all guided by a set of principles weight training doesn’t have. That’s a huge part of why the two are so hard to compare, and why comparing them never made much sense to me.

The traditional repertoire is already full of strength work. Try a pistol squat on the reformer, pull-ups or the squirrel on the Cadillac, or loaded single-leg standing work. I built my pistol squat using Pilates equipment and exercises, and it’s still one of the strength movements I’m proudest of . If you load and progress the repertoire, you build a body that’s strong, capable and still moves with freedom.

Why is this debate so loud right now? I do believe it’s partly because Pilates and strength training are competing for the same client and the same wallet. They both build strength, just in different ways. And yes, Pilates has a ceiling. It won’t build the same maximal strength as heavy lifting, but it was never trying to. When will the people constantly calling out Pilates realise that’s the point? When spin was at its peak, no one pitted it against weights, because spin never claimed to build strength. Run clubs have boomed, yet running gets no pushback either, because it’s free. As consumers, we can’t be naive about the marketing, or the fact that Pilates has been one of the fastest-growing movement modalities of the last few years.

So if you’ve been holding back because you’re not sure Pilates will make you stronger, I can tell you it will. You’ll feel it in your muscles, in your posture and in how confident you feel in your body every day, and that’s a kind of strength no comparison chart could ever measure.