So, the Pilates trend. Strictly for bendy girls and skinny Gwynethy women, right? Or for Hollywood types such as Margot Robbie, Hailey Bieber, Scarlett Johansson, Jennifer Aniston, Kate Hudson, Miley Cyrus, Kim Kardashian, Kendall Jenner, Cameron Diaz, Taylor Swift, Sandra Bullock, Reese Witherspoon and Charlize Theron?
Older civilian men, like me, with bad backs and pained expressions, their posture ruined by long days hunched over a laptop, muscles fatigued, shoulders rounded, heads lowered and bodies generally slumped? They are better off in the gym, deploying the heavy artillery of conditioning tools such as battle ropes and kettlebells to get back in shape. We do enough lying down in front of the TV — no need to pay someone with Bambi legs to watch us doing even more lying down, right?
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I am about to find out, because the 11am class at the newly opened Chloe’s Pilates, at the Old Coal Yard in Gagingwell, Oxfordshire — chosen Pilates pin-drop for Natalie Imbruglia, Ellie Goulding and Clarkson’s Farm’s Lisa Hogan — will include uptight, unstretchy, sad sack old me and about 15 or so other similarly aged, similarly ill-aligned males.
Simon Mills: “My old chassis emerges from the session exhausted but elated, calm and tingling”
SARAH CRESSWELL/THE TIMES
It will be conducted not by the studio’s 41-year-old proprietor — Chloe Hodgson, already known as the go-to Cotswolds Pilates teacher — 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.
Is he ready for me, Pilates Dad?
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 — 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 — 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.
And it is tough. After 60 minutes of Sidgwick’s 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.
Pilates devotee Kate Hudson
KATEHUDSON/ INSTAGRAM
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’s studio, others in a village hall down the road in Charlbury, others in a private barn.
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. “Last week, one of my classes had an 80-year-old,” he says.
This is happening all over the country — a new wave of mature, mat-bound men taking to Pilates for improved flexibility, wellbeing, lower stress levels and better deportment.
Recent data from Virgin Active shows a 50-50 male-female split of attendees at Pilates classes, “overturning outdated perceptions of Pilates as a female-only fitness discipline that’s a bit ‘soft’ or ‘easy’ ”. 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 — 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.
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Male converts include Harry Styles, Ed Sheeran and Sirs Ian McKellen and David Beckham. 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 was blamed not on the manager or the team’s defensive strategy but the training ground’s “inexperienced Pilates teacher”.
During his later years, even the mostly deskbound and Lycra-averse novelist Martin Amis, keen drinker and inventor of what he termed the “metaphysical hangover”, turned to Pilates for relief. “The exercises are really very necessary when you do a lot of sitting,” he said. “They keep you flexible enough to pull on your socks as you get older… When I get out of the car now, I don’t go, ‘Arrggghhh.’ ”
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.
“Shepherd’s crook shoulder, I called it,” he says. “Every 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.” Assuaging the pain with booze, he developed a hunched back and a worrying heart arrhythmia.
Sidgwick with his daughter, Chloe Hodgson, 41, at Chloe’s Pilates in Oxfordshire
TOM JACKSON FOR THE TIMES MAGAZINE
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.
“Although I was never really down with the woo-woo of yoga,” says Sidgwick, who admits to having been more of a macho type. “I’d go out for a six-mile run and then come back and drink half a bottle of whisky. Stupid stuff like that.”
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.
Due to walk his daughter down the aisle in less than two months, the unfortunate shepherd found himself “effectively scalped. I had to do a major combover to hide the scars for the photos,” 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 “totally wrecked” his neck, obliterated his memory and exacerbated his shoulder problem. “The doctors told me I was lucky to be alive.” Six months later, a fall from his horse smashed up his coxal region and required an urgent hip replacement op, which he flatly refused.
He was also crushed by a herd of cattle — literally bullied into the corner of a field by angry bovines —before his sheepdog saved his life, biting an encroaching bull on the nose and not letting go until his master was free. “You could hear the screams of that bull miles away,” Sidgwick says, border collie Scrabble at his feet. “My 14th sheepdog.”
All this wear and tear had a profoundly enfeebling impact on Sidgwick, but he declined surgery, deciding that would be limiting and eventually debilitating.
Harry Styles doing reformer Pilates
INSTAGRAM/HARRYSTYLES
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’s sessions.
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 “contrology”.
Over the years, Pilates’ 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.
While Hodgson’s 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.
“I 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,” he says.
“My 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’ve built up by doing Pilates, I will have reduced the chances of serious injury from an accident.”
Recently he went back to the doctor to have his hip assessed, “the same hip that was once nailed on for a replacement”. The doctor took one look at Sidgwick’s x-rays and said, “Carry on doing what you are doing. If anyone is a good advertisement for doing Pilates, you are.”
Is it good for one’s sex life?
We sit in the café next to Hodgson’s 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.
More and more, the pair are coming across older Cotswolds types who are combining Pilates with courses of weight-loss medication — Mounjaro, Ozempic, etc. Sidgwick does not approve. “Don’t do it,” he says, pulling out a phone to show me a detailed map of a man’s body and the muscles that provide stability and support during joint motion. “Forget about your six-pack. Work on your core strength instead. Your internal obliques are the body’s engine room.” A round of Hodgson’s dynamic Pilates will build lean muscle, which helps to increase basal metabolic rates, burning more calories at rest.
“With Mounjaro, you lose weight very quickly,” Hodgson says. “Muscles 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.”
The message seems to be getting through locally. “When I moved here a few years ago, there were just two Pilates teachers in the area,” Hodgson says. “Now there are dozens.” 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’s classes were a 40-mat sell-out.
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 — men and women, show significant gains in muscle and mobility.
Perhaps crucially, even for men, Pilates is not sweaty and ugly. Not butch or competitive. Less intimidating. There are no hard-boiled incitements to “embrace the grind” or “define your strong”. As you assume the position, no one will suggest, at volume, that you are “one rep closer to greatness”. 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.
Is it good for one’s sex life? “Of course,” Hodgson says. Pilates helps develop a pelvic floor that is “strong and tight and flexible”.
Still in my sweats and sneakers, pelvis strangely fatigued and elated, I feel exhausted at the thought of any kind of further exertion.
Sidgwick, bouncy like a cat, suddenly jumps up and says goodbye. Pilates Grandad is ready for his next session.