What Makes a Great Pilates Class? (Part 1)

Over the last several years, I’ve continually asked myself “What makes a good Pilates class?”  What I’ve come to believe is the answer is a combination of two things: The essence of Pilates (aka Pilates Principles) and meeting the student’s goals.  When those elements mesh well, I’d consider it “A Great Class!”

So how do you design and measure whether A Great Class was delivered?  Let’s imagine we’re in charge of teaching an intermediate group Pilates class on reformers and use the graphs from my Class Design Report worksheet.

Pilates Principles

Yes, I know that the Pilates “capital P” Principles are Concentration, Control, Centering, Breath, Precision, and Flow.  I want to change perspective a little, though, to put these principles into 3 categories that we can measure.

1. The class includes movement in all planes of motion

2. The body positions students work in flow smoothly together, minimizing the total number of changes in the class

3. There is balanced development across muscle groups

As my tools are still in development, I expect this blog to get updated over time.  For now, here is where my head is at in each category.  

Planes of Motion

First, A Great Class includes movement in all planes of motion: Rotation, side bending, extension, and flexion.  Specifically spinal movement, but for now we’ll keep it broad.  Depending on the goals of the class and students, the breakdown of each component may vary.

There are two ways to visualize this.  First, a simple pie chart will show the breakdown of movement in each plane across the whole class.  It’s an easy graphic for our brains to interpret.

While it’s very clear what the outcome of the class was, how do you know what the goal was and how the class compares to the goal? To answer that question, I far prefer a radar chart because it’s easier to overlay the target spread with the actual results.  In the graph below it’s very clear to see that the actual class design was close to the goal, but lacked enough extension-based movements to really make A Great Class.  This is assuming a target distribution of 50% Flexion, 25% Extension, 12% Rotation, and 13% Side Bending.

Body Positions

A manager of a nation-wide Pilates program within a gym-system told me something really interesting: The best instructors have their students moving for more total minutes in a class than newer teachers.  What does that tell me?  One, they probably have more efficient cueing techniques.  And two, they probably also have a more efficient flow of class.  The time it takes to stop an exercise, get up, change equipment settings, and get back into position for the next thing adds up over time, so making things flow together to maximize the movement time during class is important.

For this metric, I’ve broken down the possible body positions in the Class Design Report and each exercise gets its own classification.  Visualizing this with standard excel-based tools hasn’t been straightforward, though, because it should be in chronological order and I want to also visually see body position… to be continued...  What I’ve done so far is to make rudimentary diagrams that visually represent each body position so that the body position map can be viewed at a glance.

Here’s a visualization of a recent flow class I took. 

For a 50-minute class I’d consider this to be on the higher side of # of body position changes, though it wasn’t obnoxious during the workout.  One of the reasons it probably felt smoother than it looks is because we repeated a pattern on two sides.  

Normally, the fact that there are 4 separate “Seated Facing Side” transitions might be a red flag.  Why not combine the seated facing side exercises into one flow?  Because we’re doing two sides (as is often the case with sideways facing exercises) multiple instances of this body position in the class is reasonable.

Next, you may wonder whether the two instances of Seated Facing Side in each “Set” could be combined to look like this:

That change may enable longer time spent moving (as opposed to listening or transitioning) in class, which would be beneficial for the students.

I’m not sold on this visual representation yet, but I believe it’s a vital component of being able to quickly evaluate a class design, and perhaps facilitate nuanced discussions if desired.

Muscle Groups Worked

A Great Class should promote balanced muscle development.  Broadly speaking, that just means we need to make sure the class isn’t neglecting some major muscle groups.  I think, for example, it’s easy to design a Pilates class these days with not very much oblique or spinal extensor work.  This visual representation should help me quickly assess that I’m designing a class that doesn’t leave any muscle group behind.

A major caveat here is that I’ve chosen what may seem like an arbitrary list of muscles.  I won’t deny it.  My current list has 20 “groups”, while I have another list that has just 11.  I want to create a list that is as simple as possible to use (no advanced anatomy required) and still gives adequate feedback on the class design.  I’m not sure what that list looks like, yet.

For example, I think “Upper Body” “Lower Body” and “Core” are too broad.  Analyzing the class with only those three “muscle group” classifications still leaves plenty of room to program an unbalanced class even though the graph could be balanced between the three categories.  I most commonly see the back body get neglected, especially spinal extensors.  So what if we did it by back body/front body?  Or fascial slings?  Or joints?

No firm answer, yet.

For now, we can visualize the muscles worked in a class with the current list of muscle groups in a pie chart.  This is a representation of a class I took recently, and it felt like it matched my session experience and delivered a fairly balanced workout.

While pie charts are Excel’s bread and butter, they don’t have a bubble chart that works well.  But guess what, Canva does!  I like the bubble chart below because it’s a little easier, at a glance, to see where the emphasis was. 

However, like the body positions visualization, I think this is an incomplete picture.  

For one, we need to have a specific target distribution for each class.  This target can vary depending on the type of class it is (i.e. Butt + Abs vs. General).  

And second, we need a way to measure how many exercises incorporate multiple muscle groups, aka challenge full-body coordination.  We know that A Great Class doesn’t just focus on a few joints moving alone (i.e. like a single bicep curl), but builds to a bigger challenge that requires coordination and strength (i.e. like a plank).

What’s next

Those three components make up the Pilates Principles that “A Good Class” needs to consider.  I think classes that don’t consider these start to stray from being “Pilates” but that’s a conversation for another post.

For the discussion on Student Goals and how that combines with Pilates Principles to create A Great Class, stay tuned for the next post where I’ll discuss Rate of Perceived Exertion (RPE) and how it’s a vital input for class design.

Read Part 2, here.

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