TikTok user @succulentaddict8′s comments about pilates have not gone down well.

“If you’re 200lbs, you shouldn’t be in a pilates class,” she said in a recent (now-deleted) video, adding, “you shouldn’t be allowed to be a pilates instructor if you have a gut.”

Though the creator has since apologised for the cruel comments in a video she has also now deleted, some creators feel the damage is done.

Personal trainer Court responded, “There are so many people on this Earth who are so fearful of going into the gym and starting their fitness journey because of people like that.”

But it’s not the first controversy about who “should” go to pilates this year.

“SkinnyTok” influencer Toni Fine suggested Black women attending the classes are doing so to get “proximity to whiteness,” despite (among a million other problems people have raised with that statement) a Black woman, Kathy Stanford Grant, having essentially introduced the activity to America.

What is it about pilates in particular that seems to evoke such strong images of exclusivity, thinness, and wealth in some people’s minds (think the ‘Pilates Princess’ archetype)?

And how did we get here from Joseph Pilates’ original mission – to provide gentle, safe exercises for all?

The inventor of what were once 34 “official” moves started life with various ailments like asthma, rickets, and rheumatic fever.

He became inspired by disciplines like yoga and the poses of animals like cats to work on his exercises, with which he would rehabilitate injured prisoners of war interned with him and the rest of the circus troupe he’d been a part of on the Isle of Wight in World War I.

He was later asked to train the military police in Germany, but sensing the sinister potential of the request (this was in the late 1920s), Pilates went to America instead.

There, his Universal Reformer machine and exercises (originally called “contrology”) became a hit through his books and the help of pioneers like Kathy Stanford Grant.

Slate writes that until the early ’00s, pilates classes had been a slightly “grimy,” mid-price group activity, not particularly associated in the British or American mind with one group over another.

After some very conscious rebranding from various companies, Slate adds, pilates faced an “aesthetic gentrification” similar to yoga, whose gentle flow aspirational TikTokers are now more likely to praise as “hormone-balancing.”

After COVID, costs ballooned further; a Reformer class by me costs £60 a session, or £250 a month.

But it’s not just straight-up added expenses. Vogue Business also identified the “Pilates Princess” subgroup as a “growing consumer group of affluent women, willing to invest in athleisure, wellness and beauty.”

The hashtag #pinkpilatesprincess, which took off in 2023, is linked to pricey brands like Lululemon and Alo, they add. “Brands engaging them are winning big.”

But I can’t help but feel that image largely exists online (and possibly in the £600 studios neither I nor most of us would ever venture into anyway).

A #pinkpilatesprincess video with over a million views is filled with commenters envious of the creators’ highly curated home and unrealistically pretty lifestyle; none seemed to think it reflected their reality.

In turn, I don’t pay £600 for my pilates classes. I sweat in a group of about 30 other people in a dark, definitely Reformer machine-free room at my local PureGym.

Most people are not the “snobby mean Pilates girl” you may believe is common online. Every pilates instructor I reached out to about the 200lbs comment had some variation of “WTF?” to say about the statement.

The backlash to the TikToker who first posted it has been monumental, too.

And Pilates itself, in its truest form, isn’t about excluding, competing with, or making fun of, anyone, either – the sooner we remember that, the better.