I am about to find out, because the 11am class at the newly opened Chloe\u2019s Pilates, at the Old Coal Yard in Gagingwell, Oxfordshire \u2014 chosen Pilates pin-drop for Natalie Imbruglia, Ellie Goulding and Clarkson\u2019s Farm\u2019s Lisa Hogan<\/a> \u2014 will include uptight, unstretchy, sad sack old me and about 15 or so other similarly aged, similarly ill-aligned males.<\/p>\n Simon Mills: \u201cMy old chassis emerges from the session exhausted but elated, calm and tingling\u201d<\/p>\n SARAH CRESSWELL\/THE TIMES<\/p>\n It will be conducted not by the studio\u2019s 41-year-old proprietor \u2014 Chloe Hodgson, already known as the go-to Cotswolds Pilates teacher \u2014 but her father, Pete Sidgwick, a grandad, former sheep farmer and Heythrop Hunt horseman turned fitness guru who is a quite magnificent, skinny, lithe and upright 71 years old.<\/p>\n Is he ready for me, Pilates Dad?<\/p>\n Sidgwick instructs me to find a black rubber bed, get on my back, knees up, clenching a rubber brick between my knees, and assume the T-position \u2014 then breathe, inhaling through my nose, pausing, then exhaling through my mouth. (This being a class of mostly males, some men decide that a loud and performative exhalation, like a siding steam train, is required here.) An hour of intense and deliberate repeated movements follows \u2014 leg circles, all fours, back extensions, planks. I relax and get into it, my intention and concentration growing. It feels good to be taught this stuff by a man. Less intimidating than being the single schlubby, rookie fella in a class of perky women, all hip to the shapes and jargon.<\/p>\n And it is tough. After 60 minutes of Sidgwick\u2019s firm instruction and his chosen Tom Petty soundtrack, my old chassis emerges from the slow, stretchy, balletic ritual of open-leg rockers, corkscrews, high scissors, high bicycles and pelvic lifts exhausted but elated, calm and tingling. Pleasantly beaten up. Turns out Pilates is not just a bit of gentle, girlie lying down on a mat after all.<\/p>\n Pilates devotee Kate Hudson<\/p>\n KATEHUDSON\/ INSTAGRAM<\/p>\n As for Sidgwick, who has ten years on me, he is all ready to go again. He will be taking another six classes this week. Some here at his daughter\u2019s studio, others in a village hall down the road in Charlbury, others in a private barn.<\/p>\n Following his spry and upright example, more and more men in the area are taking to Pilates. They come to him not via the conventional metric of social media (rather delightfully, @pete.sidgwick has just 163 Instagram followers) but mostly by rural word of mouth and on the encouragement of their Cotswolds wives. He teaches aristocrats, pop stars and farmhands. Young and old. \u201cLast week, one of my classes had an 80-year-old,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n This is happening all over the country \u2014 a new wave of mature, mat-bound men taking to Pilates for improved flexibility, wellbeing, lower stress levels and better deportment.<\/p>\n Recent data from Virgin Active shows a 50-50 male-female split of attendees at Pilates classes, \u201coverturning outdated perceptions of Pilates as a female-only fitness discipline that\u2019s a bit \u2018soft\u2019 or \u2018easy\u2019 \u201d. The smart gym chain Third Space reports growing numbers of men at its classes over the past year. Pilates is booming in the UK. More than 1.2 million of us now regularly practise it, a 30 per cent rise in 5 years. Worldwide there has been an incredible 84 per cent jump in 2024 compared with the previous year \u2014 yet classes averaged just 15 per cent men 10 years ago. Ignorant, uneducated, body-unconscious males like me, assuming Pilates to be too much lying down and not enough working out.<\/p>\n \u2022 Read more expert advice on healthy living, fitness and wellbeing<\/a><\/p>\n Male converts include Harry Styles<\/a>, Ed Sheeran and Sirs Ian McKellen and David Beckham<\/a>. In professional sport, LeBron James, Cristiano Ronaldo, Tiger Woods, Mo Salah, Harry Kane, Jack Grealish and the New Zealand All Blacks squad have taken to the mats. The veteran NFL player Tom Brady credits reformer Pilates with helping to extend his career well into his forties. Last year, a spate of poor performances by Chelsea FC<\/a> was blamed not on the manager or the team\u2019s defensive strategy but the training ground\u2019s \u201cinexperienced Pilates teacher\u201d.<\/p>\n During his later years, even the mostly deskbound and Lycra-averse novelist Martin Amis<\/a>, keen drinker and inventor of what he termed the \u201cmetaphysical hangover\u201d, turned to Pilates for relief. \u201cThe exercises are really very necessary when you do a lot of sitting,\u201d he said. \u201cThey keep you flexible enough to pull on your socks as you get older\u2026 When I get out of the car now, I don\u2019t go, \u2018Arrggghhh.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n Sidgwick discovered Pilates via a more calamitous and painful, distress-driven route. Now lean and wiry, it is hard to imagine him two decades ago, in his early fifties, as a stiff and pained, stressed-out physical and mental wreck. Decades of chasing livestock around his farm in Oxfordshire had all but ruined him.<\/p>\n \u201cShepherd\u2019s crook shoulder, I called it,\u201d he says. \u201cEvery time I reached out for a sheep with my crook, I could feel my shoulder almost dislocating from its socket and then freezing up. I was still comparatively young but feeling older and weaker every day.\u201d Assuaging the pain with booze, he developed a hunched back and a worrying heart arrhythmia.<\/p>\n Sidgwick with his daughter, Chloe Hodgson, 41, at Chloe\u2019s Pilates in Oxfordshire<\/p>\n TOM JACKSON FOR THE TIMES MAGAZINE<\/p>\n Every now and then, Sidgwick, whose antecedent Charles Twining Sidgwick was a co-founder of the Twinings tea empire in the 1900s, attended local yoga classes in Cheltenham.<\/p>\n \u201cAlthough I was never really down with the woo-woo of yoga,\u201d says Sidgwick, who admits to having been more of a macho type. \u201cI\u2019d go out for a six-mile run and then come back and drink half a bottle of whisky. Stupid stuff like that.\u201d<\/p>\n He was also quite accident prone. In 2012, having returned from a long and wet countryside bike ride and storing his muddy kit in the barn, he slipped and fell, catching the side of his head on a sharp metal corner. He almost bled to death.<\/p>\n Due to walk his daughter down the aisle in less than two months, the unfortunate shepherd found himself \u201ceffectively scalped. I had to do a major combover to hide the scars for the photos,\u201d he says, showing me the faded stitch marks on his forehead. Then, in 2022, mid-Covid (while he had the virus), Sidgwick was involved in a head-on car crash that \u201ctotally wrecked\u201d his neck, obliterated his memory and exacerbated his shoulder problem. \u201cThe doctors told me I was lucky to be alive.\u201d Six months later, a fall from his horse smashed up his coxal region and required an urgent hip replacement op, which he flatly refused.<\/p>\n He was also crushed by a herd of cattle \u2014 literally bullied into the corner of a field by angry bovines \u2014before his sheepdog saved his life, biting an encroaching bull on the nose and not letting go until his master was free. \u201cYou could hear the screams of that bull miles away,\u201d Sidgwick says, border collie Scrabble at his feet. \u201cMy 14th sheepdog.\u201d<\/p>\n All this wear and tear had a profoundly enfeebling impact on Sidgwick, but he declined surgery, deciding that would be limiting and eventually debilitating.<\/p>\n Harry Styles doing reformer Pilates<\/p>\n INSTAGRAM\/HARRYSTYLES<\/p>\n Seeking an alternative way back to health, flexibility and uprightness, he watched his daughter progress. She gave up her job at luxury concierge company Quintessentially, retrained and started her own Pilates classes. He quit drinking, sold the farm, hung up his crook, underwent ablation therapy for his heart and started attending his daughter\u2019s sessions.<\/p>\n Keen to know more, Sidgwick studied the work of German-born Joseph Pilates, a bodybuilder, prizefighter and circus performer who moved to England in 1912, where he found work as a self-defence trainer for the police at Scotland Yard before serving a four-year stretch at Knockaloe internment camp on the Isle of Man during the First World War. Working on the wellbeing of his fellow internees, Pilates developed a system of exercises that focused on breath, cervical alignment, rib and scapular stabilisation, pelvic mobility and the utilisation of the deep transversus abdominis muscles, all intended to strengthen both mind and body. He called his method \u201ccontrology\u201d.<\/p>\n Over the years, Pilates\u2019 regime became something of a niche and alternative practice. In 1970, the British dancer Alan Herdman opened the first Pilates studio in the UK after studying it in New York. Now 84, Herdman is still going strong.<\/p>\n While Hodgson\u2019s career flourished, first drawing a cult following at Soho Farmhouse before she was poached by the Club by Bamford, part of Daylesford Organic, her father gained a Stott Pilates qualification and began teaching privately.<\/p>\n \u201cI am on a mission to encourage people of a similar age to me not to get surgery but to work on their inner core, so that they can build up their strength and find another way to recover,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n \u201cMy riding has improved 100 per cent since I started Pilates. I definitely fall off less. And even if I did, with the muscle strength I\u2019ve built up by doing Pilates, I will have reduced the chances of serious injury from an accident.\u201d<\/p>\n Recently he went back to the doctor to have his hip assessed, \u201cthe same hip that was once nailed on for a replacement\u201d. The doctor took one look at Sidgwick\u2019s x-rays and said, \u201cCarry on doing what you are doing. If anyone is a good advertisement for doing Pilates, you are.\u201d<\/p>\n Is it good for one\u2019s sex life?<\/p>\n We sit in the caf\u00e9 next to Hodgson\u2019s studio, among a fit and affluent Cotswolds clientele who are mostly ordering the chicken bone broth cooked in a kitchen run by the team from the Bull pub down the road in Charlbury. No one is overweight.<\/p>\n More and more, the pair are coming across older Cotswolds types who are combining Pilates with courses of weight-loss medication<\/a> \u2014 Mounjaro<\/a>, Ozempic<\/a>, etc. Sidgwick does not approve. \u201cDon\u2019t do it,\u201d he says, pulling out a phone to show me a detailed map of a man\u2019s body and the muscles that provide stability and support during joint motion. \u201cForget about your six-pack. Work on your core strength instead. Your internal obliques are the body\u2019s engine room.\u201d A round of Hodgson\u2019s dynamic Pilates will build lean muscle, which helps to increase basal metabolic rates, burning more calories at rest.<\/p>\n \u201cWith Mounjaro, you lose weight very quickly,\u201d Hodgson says. \u201cMuscles disappear and you lose your inner strength. If you are taking any of those medications, you need to improve your muscle strength in parallel. Once the weight starts dropping off, maintaining bone density and muscle mass is really important.\u201d<\/p>\n The message seems to be getting through locally. \u201cWhen I moved here a few years ago, there were just two Pilates teachers in the area,\u201d Hodgson says. \u201cNow there are dozens.\u201d Actually, at least 15 dedicated studios within a 10-mile radius of Oxford and many more private teachers. By the end of its opening week last month, Chloe\u2019s classes were a 40-mat sell-out.<\/p>\n Particularly popular is her dynamic Pilates because, through its utilisation of weights and resistance bands, it combines strength, flexibility, posture improvement, stress relief and injury prevention. Her repeat attendees \u2014 men and women, show significant gains in muscle and mobility.<\/p>\n Perhaps crucially, even for men, Pilates is not sweaty and ugly. Not butch or competitive. Less intimidating. There are no hard-boiled incitements to \u201cembrace the grind\u201d or \u201cdefine your strong\u201d. As you assume the position, no one will suggest, at volume, that you are \u201cone rep closer to greatness\u201d. No one will mind if, like me, you fail to balance on one leg while keeping your eyes closed. Instead, Pilates is calm, slow-burning, gently escapist and quietly challenging.<\/p>\n Is it good for one\u2019s sex life? \u201cOf course,\u201d Hodgson says. Pilates helps develop a pelvic floor that is \u201cstrong and tight and flexible\u201d.<\/p>\n Still in my sweats and sneakers, pelvis strangely fatigued and elated, I feel exhausted at the thought of any kind of further exertion.<\/p>\n Sidgwick, bouncy like a cat, suddenly jumps up and says goodbye. Pilates Grandad is ready for his next session. <\/p>\n![\"NINTCHDBPICT001058528294\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/\/1e5edb7d-ee47-4f4e-b748-459bee958577.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"NINTCHDBPICT001054776171\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/\/65825f4b-ac98-418d-8568-bd353ef65c95.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"NINTCHDBPICT001058528036\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/\/35074388-36ee-44bc-863f-ba05a3a5dc42.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"NINTCHDBPICT000913289843\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/\/5abb9c36-19ae-49b4-87d5-882a4291ba2c.jpg\")
<\/p>\n