What Makes a Great Pilates Class? (Part 2)

Making A Great Class is some art and some science (definitely a skill!), and these days I think it’s an underemphasized part of Pilates teacher training.  In my mind, A Great Class is a combination of incorporating Pilates Principles with Student Goals.  Too often I see classes that are only Pilates Principles and neglect Student Goals, leading to disappointment or disengagement on the students’ faces. (And decreased studio revenue!) Conversely, a class that leans too heavily on Student Goals and not enough of Pilates Principles is just another fitness class.  

Last week I broke down how I am thinking about measuring Pilates Principles.  This week, let’s take a look at Student Goals.

Again, my lens is on how we design and measure whether the Student Goals were met, with the intent that in combination with Pilates Principles, A Great Class is executed.

Everybody is different

This analysis may be one of the more difficult ones to perform because you can argue that everyone comes into class with slightly (or majorly) different goals.  I asked 5 new students the other day why they were in class with me, and I got 5 different answers!  It can seem daunting as an instructor, especially in the moment, to face such a unique class cohort.  But, if you nail the Pilates Principles in the class, you’re more than half way there because like so many dogmatic Pilates teachers say, “The System Works.”  (yes, to the extent I’m about to describe.)

What can make this part of the equation so hard to analyze is that you need feedback from your students.  Honest feedback.  Sometimes instructors can get feedback from the grunts, grimaces, or moans from our students during particularly hard exercises, but more often than not in big group classes it’s really hard to get an accurate read on how challenging the class was for each student.

The class should be hard

Nearly every Pilates student wants the class to be hard.  Of course, how challenging each student finds the class varies based on their capabilities, but there is no bigger disappointment for an instructor to see students leave the class feeling like it was too easy, or so hard they’ll never come back.  

Furthermore, it is an undisputed fact in fitness that loading muscles builds strength.  Use it or lose it.  And we want our Pilates students to get stronger!

Rate of Perceived Exertion (RPE)

Since we’ve established that every student will experience an exercise slightly differently, we as instructors need to understand that true experience so we can deliver the appropriate level of difficulty. Contrary to popular belief, not every Pilates student should be using the same spring settings all the time.  This is not a magic system that simply focusing harder will make it harder.  No.  External load (springs!) is an important scaling tool Pilates instructors should use to teach the same movement to a whole class while making it harder or easier for certain students.

And, we don’t need to reinvent the wheel.  Rate of Perceived Exertion (RPE) is a standardized scale (1-10) that measures how hard you are working during exercise.

For my own analyses, I simplified the scale to range from 1-5 in my Class Design Report (CDE) Tool (download it free using this link!)  Pilates is slightly different as it isn’t cardio, therefore references to breathing may or may not be relevant, but the concept of rating the difficulty is the same.  Here’s how I broke down my scale 1-5.

1 - No Effort (did not feel any burn, could be a stretch)

2 - Light Effort (had lots left in the tank at the end of the set)

3 - Some Effort (completed all repetitions; felt a good burn)

4 - Moderate Effort (barely completed all repetitions; intense burn)

5 - Extreme Effort (could not complete all repetitions as instructed)

Expected RPE

Using RPE as a measure of exercise difficulty should help us design A Good Class.  When we design a new Pilates class, generally there is a warm up, main section with one or several pinnacles, and a cool down.  At a baseline, I’d expect the middle section of the class to build up to peak RPE at least once, if not 4 or 5 times.  So, in a class with 40 exercises, my goal is to deliver a series of exercises with  RPE’s for each movement that looks like this:

This is pulled directly from one of the classes I designed.  If you’re having a hard time interpreting what that graph means, here’s an annotated version for context.

There were other exercises between each of those peaks, but not every exercise in my Pilates classes will make you die 😉.  As you can imagine, the shape of this graph may change depending on the type of Pilates you want to teach.  I’d imagine a solidcore class might try to be all 4’s and 5’s the whole time.  Or, a restorative class might never go above a 3.

The beauty of this system is not that it dictates what you choose to teach, it’s that it gives you a goal to reach and a way to solicit specific feedback on whether you’re actually teaching what you think you are.

Or, importantly, if you’re a studio owner, do your instructors know what you expect them to teach and are they actually designing classes that meet those objectives?

Actual RPE

No matter how experienced an instructor you are, you aren’t a mind reader.  You don’t have X-ray vision.  And you don’t know better than your students what they experienced in class.  (Sure, you can guess and relate, but you are not an all-knowing guru.)

So, their direct feedback is critical.  But, getting honest feedback about a whole class all at once is not productive.  Not only are there very few students who actually want to speak up in front of their classmates, it’s really hard to give negative feedback face-to-face.  I think most unhappy students just disappear.  Bye bye revenue.

So, real-time feedback about each exercise set is a critical piece of the puzzle.

Currently, in my experiments I’m remembering and recreating my class experience in my Class Design Report (CDR) (which you can grab for free, here!) and rating my own RPE after-the-fact.  If I do it right after class it’s pretty accurate, but then again I’m a teacher with a lot of training and have a mental vocabulary for everything that happens in a Pilates class.  In the real world, a different system should exist.

Here’s what my Actual RPE chart looks like for the class I designed above.

Looks vaguely like the wavy Target RPE graph, right?  Slow at the beginning, some peaks in the middle, and a drop off at the end.

But, humans aren’t great at remembering things or analyzing multiple data points.  Without scrolling up to see the grey graph, it’s hard to know how they really compared.  So, let’s overlay those two graphs.

Here we get the answer to the question, did the instructor deliver A Great Class from the student’s perspective?  In other words, was it hard enough?

Generally speaking it was hard.  But none of the actual RPE’s maxed out at 5.  Personally I’d say this is pretty close to good.  But more repetition of this analytical process with more people will help establish baselines.

How Pilates Principles and Student Goals Combine

Now you’ve heard my spiel about the two components that combine to make A Great Class.  It’s clear to see that without adequate execution in either Pilates Principles or aligning with Student Goals, it’s impossible to craft A Great Class.  Too little focus on Pilates Pilates principles but an excellent physical challenge for students… probably not really Pilates (maybe more like [solidcore] or lagree?)  Conversely, perfect execution of Pilates Principles but no meeting Student Goals, then what’s the point?

The design and delivery of a Pilates class are skills to be honed, and the making of a great Pilates instructor is no different than the making of a great startup.  You must continually iterate and solicit feedback from your customers (students), and nothing measured is nothing improved.  

And in case you need a reminder, happy clients = higher retention = more revenue.

Was this post forwarded to you? Get more of my thoughts on Pilates by subscribing to my list here, and never miss a nerdy thought at the intersection of Pilates, Tech, and startups again.