Wait, what’s the difference between pilates and yoga?

If you’re not sure whether you’re better off booking a hatha class or a mat pilates session, this should help to you decide…

For ages, yoga seemed to be the go-to stretch-based activity for anyone looking to improve mobility. Whether yin, ashtanga or hot, yoga was the slower, more mindful bodyweight workout. But in recent years, pilates seems to have taken over. Sure, plenty of us still like to do a yoga class here and there, but it takes military planning to snag a place in a pilates session these days.

If the recent noise around pilates has had you wondering whether you should be swapping your hatha for reformer, then it’s worth knowing exactly what the difference is between the two activities.  

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What makes pilates different from yoga?

First off, pilates and yoga are two very different practices, so if you’re thinking about swapping your weekly Yoga with Adriene session for a Blogilates class, don’t go expecting to have a similar experience.

Pilates is about strengthening the body

“Pilates is a training method that aims to create a strong, functional body by reducing muscle imbalances and increasing core strength,” explains Hollie Grant, founder of Pilates PT. “Created by Joseph Pilates as a way of building strength in prisoners of war, it is incredibly powerful. As the body gets stronger and our posture improves, we will also notice an increase in flexibility and mobility.”

Yoga goes beyond the physical

Yoga, on the hand, is about the mind-body connection – practising mindfulness in movement. “The postures we associate with yoga were not designed with fitness in mind but were created to help assist someone with their practice of mindfulness. The poses in yoga (asanas) are there to help you focus, rather than change the way your body moves.” 

Yoga is a practice that’s as much about spiritual and emotional connection as it is about the physical.

Now, of course, you can find yoga classes that require quite a decent level of fitness and flexibility. A 90-minute hot yoga session, for example, can be incredibly powerful and requires some conditioning; an inversions class is more like a calisthenics or gymnastics class.

Yoga has been adapted for the fitness industry, while pilates was created with purely fitness in mind. Flexibility is a key aim of yoga but a by-product of pilates, Grant says. 

Do you need different equipment for yoga and pilates?

Both practices use accessories but for different purposes.

Yoga is a bodyweight practice

You have blocks, straps and bolsters in yoga to make getting into certain poses easier but, fundamentally, it’s a bodyweight practice that’s about having control over how your body moves.

Pilates often uses equipment to increase resistance

Pilates also tends to use bodyweight alone as resistance, but there are also lots of pieces of equipment that it uses to strengthen muscles, encourage rotation or work on balance, such as resistance bands, magic circles, reformer beds and arc barrels. 

What are the benefits of pilates v yoga?

Pilates improves posture and function

Grant tells Stylist: “I always explain to clients that pilates brings your body back to where it should be. Modern day life involves so much flexion: looking at phones, sitting at laptops, driving cars, and our bodies almost end up forgetting what they were designed to do. Pilates fixes that. It improves your posture, strengthens weak muscles and, in turn, these reduce back pain and weakness.”

Dynamic yoga improves cardio fitness, strength and flexibility

There are so many types of yoga, and the benefits depend on which type you practise. Ashtanga, for example, is physically demanding, so it can be great for building strength, endurance and flexibility.

In fact, a 2022 study, published in the Canadian Journal Of Cardiology, found that 12 minutes of yoga alongside 30 minutes of aerobic exercise, five times a week, improved resting blood pressure and heart rate. When the researchers compared yoga to stretching, they found the practice further reduced systolic blood pressure (by 10mmHg with yoga v 4mmHg with stretching). Yoga also reduced the participants’ 10-year cardiovascular risk. 

Pilates works on balance and core strength

A review of 10 studies looking into the effects of pilates found that doing pilates regularly can noticeably improve balance, flexibility and quality of life in older adults aged 60 to 80. The review concluded that pilates was especially beneficial in reducing the risk of falling, going so far as to suggest that GPs might be better off thinking about prescribing pilates to elderly patients.

“Well known for it’s core-strengthening benefits, people who practise pilates regularly can experience better function and strength of the muscles of the torso,” explains Gillian Reeves, head of group exercise at Third Space.

“Core strength plays a part in decreasing back and hip pain and improving pelvic floor function.”

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Hatha yoga promotes spiritual connection

Hatha, on the other hand, involves balancing series, core work, chanting, meditation and back-strengthening poses. If you’re after a more spiritual outcome, kundalini combines poses with pranayama (breathwork), mantras and music. Yin – often confused with restorative yoga – is about sitting in often uncomfortable, challenging poses for long periods of time, which improves flexibility and joint mobility while forcing the mind to overcome discomfort. 

Yoga is great for stress relief

Research published in the journal Stress & Health found that yoga helps to increase ‘interoceptive awareness’ – aka awareness of the internal states and sensations within your body. In doing so, yoga helps you to understand and recognise when you’re feeling stressed and feel more in control of what’s going on. 

Pilates is great for back pain

A Brazilian study into the effectiveness of equipment-based pilates and non-equipment mat pilates to treat chronic lower-back pain found that equipment-based pilates (notably reformer) helped to reduce back pain and kinesiophobia (a fear of exercising after picking up injury). 

Which is better if you’re new to exercise?

Again, it kind of goes back to what your goal is. Anyone can do pilates and most forms of yoga – you don’t need any previous fitness experience. That’s because both are low-impact exercises that don’t require a load of pressure to go through the joints.

Grant says she trains clients who are in their late 80s, teens and has even had one women train at 41 weeks of pregnancy.

“It’s safe and valuable for everybody!”

Donna Noble, yogi and founder of CurveSomeYoga, is a big advocate for making yoga as accessible as possible for everyone. She previously told Stylist: “I’m so passionate about encouraging people to believe that yoga is for them and that it can help to navigate life in a more mindful and meaningful way. You don’t have to be upside down in headstand to see how daily practice can help to provide you with a different perspective.  

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“Anyone can experience yoga in a safe, judgment-free space where anyone can come and do as little or as much as they want. In fact, I tell my students that if all they want to do is to lie on their mat for the duration of the class in savanasa, that’s totally fine.” 

How often should you practice pilates or yoga?

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Grant recommends two pilates classes a week – which is just enough to recover properly in between each. “You’ll feel muscles you never knew existed and it will be a shock at times,” she warns. The more comfortable you get with the practice, the more you can increase your load.

As for yoga, well, you might have seen the hashtag #YogaEveryDamnDay over the years. It’s often promoted as a daily fitness practice when, in fact, the asanas – the movement flows – are only one part of a yoga practice. 

Yoga traditionally has eight paths, and the flows we do at the gym are only one part of that. 

The eight paths of yoga are:

  1. Yamas – external disciplines (often known as the ‘the don’ts’, like not harming living beings, not stealing, avoiding infidelity)
  2. Niyamas – internal disciplines (clearness of mind, austerity, introspection)
  3. Asana – yoga and posture
  4. Pranayama – breathwork
  5. Pratyahara – withdrawal of senses (a drawing within of your awareness – fighting against distractions)
  6. Dharana – concentration
  7. Dhyana – meditation
  8. Samadhi – enlightenment (a coming together of everything – nirvana)

You can run the risk of overuse injuries with intense poses, but yoga is a broad church and if you’re genuinely interested in the practice, you wouldn’t be doing asanas every day. You’d be spending time focusing on meditation, breathwork, reading, etc.

If you do want a physical practice that comes with specific goals, outcomes and processes, pilates is probably your best bet.

Images: Getty

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