If you have walked past a reformer studio and looked in, you will have seen a room full of low wooden beds with springs, straps and a sliding platform, and a group of people doing something that looks both extremely calm and extremely difficult. That machine is a reformer, and it is the single most useful piece of equipment most people have never touched.
What a reformer actually is
A reformer is a sliding carriage that runs on rails inside a frame. The carriage is connected to one end by springs, and you change how hard the exercise is by changing which springs are attached. There is a footbar at one end, and a pair of long straps with handles at the other.
You can lie on it, sit on it, kneel on it, stand on it, or stand beside it. That is the reason a reformer studio can run a hundred different exercises in a room with ten machines and no other equipment.
It was designed by Joseph Pilates in the first half of the twentieth century, originally using bed springs. The modern versions are considerably more comfortable.
How the springs change everything
This is the part that surprises people. On most gym equipment, more resistance means harder. On a reformer it depends entirely on which direction you are moving.
Pushing the carriage away from the springs gets harder as you add springs. But in exercises where the springs are helping you — supporting your body weight, or slowing the carriage down — adding springs makes it easier. Removing them makes it brutal.
That is why a reformer works for a complete beginner and a professional athlete in the same room, on the same machine, at the same time.
It also means your instructor can change the difficulty of an exercise in about two seconds without changing what you are doing. If something is too much, they take a spring off. If you are sailing through it, they will find you something that is not.
What it actually does to your body
Reformer Pilates is resistance training, done slowly, with a lot of attention paid to control and alignment. In practice, that tends to mean:
- Core strength — not just the abdominals you can see, but the deeper muscles that stabilise your spine and pelvis while everything else moves.
- Mobility and control through a full range — the straps take your limbs further than you would normally take them, under load, in a controlled way.
- Even strength, left to right — the carriage is unforgiving about asymmetry. You find out very quickly which leg has been doing all the work.
- Posture — largely because you spend an hour thinking about where your ribs, shoulders and pelvis are, which almost nobody does otherwise.
It is low impact, which is why it sits comfortably alongside running, lifting, cycling or nothing at all.
Is reformer Pilates hard?
Yes, when you want it to be. The pace is controlled rather than frantic, and there is very little jumping about, so people often expect it to be gentle. Then their legs start shaking on the fifth repetition of something that looked like nothing at all.
It is a different kind of hard from a spin class. You are not out of breath so much as out of leg. It is an oddly satisfying sensation, which is a large part of the appeal.
Reformer Pilates for beginners
You do not need to be fit, flexible, coordinated or young. You need to be able to get down onto and up off a low bed, and you need to be willing to be told what to do for an hour.
A good beginner class explains the machine before anybody moves: what the springs do, where the footbar sits, how to get on and off safely, what to do with the straps. If you ever attend a first class where nobody explains that, find a different studio.
What a session looks like at reef
At Reef Wellness Studio on Wyle Cop in Shrewsbury there are three ways to do it. An instructor-led class, in a small group, with someone correcting you. A guided session, where you book a reformer rather than a class and the session plays at your machine so you can work at your own pace with headphones in. Or one to one, which is the fastest way to learn the machine properly.
All three happen in the same room, with the same equipment, in the same warm light, with the same coffee afterwards.
