Pro Athletes Are Turning to Pilates. What Does That Mean for the Rest of Us?

Pro Athletes Are Turning to Pilates. What Does That Mean for the Rest of Us?

POLESTAR Personal Pilates BLOG

October 2026

Pro Athletes Are Turning to Pilates. What Does That Mean for the Rest of Us?

Whether you’re newly qualified, years into teaching, or still deciding whether to train at all, here’s something worth your attention: professional athletes are quietly becoming one of Pilates’ fastest-growing client groups, and the people teaching them, in the US and closer to home, are offering a useful case study in how to build a Pilates career, whatever stage you’re at.

What’s actually happening

A growing number of instructors are building entire practices around professional athletes. Kemberly Deane runs Kinfolk Pilates in Atlanta, where her one-on-one clients include NFL safety Cole Bishop and NBA forward Isaac Okoro. In Miami, Kenlie Reed has worked with pro athletes for over a decade and now counts more than 100 across baseball, basketball, and football. Robyn Cohen spent several years with the LA Dodgers before moving into a full-time role as the Cincinnati Reds’ movement and mobility coach, an in-house position that didn’t really exist for Pilates instructors a few years ago.

It isn’t only a US story. Closer to home, former Team GB badminton player Fontaine Wright opened The Studio Cheltenham in February 2026, a boutique reformer studio built directly on her own elite sporting background. It’s a smaller-scale version of the same pattern: performance training knowledge becoming the foundation of a teaching career, rather than something left behind once the competing stops.

Why now, and why does it matter beyond pro sport

This is happening against a backdrop of real global growth. Pilates was the world’s most-booked workout on ClassPass for the third year running in 2025, with reservations up 66% worldwide and reformer Pilates specifically up 71% year on year. A third of all reservations people made while travelling, outside their home market, were for Pilates, which says something about how consistently it’s taught, wherever you happen to be. Reed says more college athletes are starting Pilates earlier in their careers than they were three years ago, which suggests the pipeline feeding this trend is only going to widen, wherever in the world you’re teaching.

Deane also points to something worth sitting with: the perception that Pilates is “primarily for women” persists, even as male athletes quietly adopt it for longevity and injury prevention. Whether that perception shifts, and what it would take to shift it, feels like an open question for the whole industry rather than something any one studio can solve alone.

For studio owners, there’s a separate question worth asking here too. Does this kind of specialisation only make sense for instructors working independently with high-profile clients, or is there a version of it that a studio could build into its own offering, a particular population or sport it becomes known for locally, rather than trying to be everything to everyone who walks through the door?

What this reveals about building a resilient teaching career

What’s interesting here isn’t really the celebrity clients. It’s the method. Reed tailors sessions by sport and even by position, training a running back differently to a linebacker, and adjusts intensity by season: harder conditioning work in the off-season, more recovery-focused sessions once competition starts. She also coordinates directly with strength coaches and physiotherapists rather than working in isolation, and she targets the injury zones most common to each sport, stabiliser work around the groin and ankles for footballers, for instance.

None of that happened by accident, and none of it required celebrity clients to start. It required picking a population, learning it in depth, and building outward from referrals and visible results rather than broad marketing. Cohen’s move in-house with the Reds hints at where that depth can eventually lead: full-time, embedded roles that barely existed as a career path for Pilates instructors a decade ago.

Does specialising only work once you’re already established?

It’s tempting to assume this only applies to instructors with ten years of experience and a client book full of athletes. But is that actually true, or is it just the version of specialising that happens to make headlines?

A newer instructor could just as easily choose a population early, postnatal clients, runners, older adults managing joint pain, office workers with desk-related pain patterns, and build depth there from the start, rather than treating specialising as something to think about later. The athletes story is one visible version of a much more general principle: depth in a specific area tends to compound, and it can start on day one as easily as it can start ten years in.

There’s also a practical side worth naming. Specialising usually means learning things a general teacher training programme won’t cover in depth, the demands of a particular sport, the realities of a particular health condition, or how a particular population actually moves and recovers. That tends to mean seeking out extra reading, mentorship, or short courses in that specific area, on top of whatever got you qualified in the first place. None of that needs to happen all at once, and it rarely does for the instructors already doing it well.

What this means if you’re just starting out, or still deciding

To anyone weighing whether to train as an instructor at all: the appeal here probably isn’t “go and work with professional athletes.” It’s that a career teaching Pilates can look like genuinely different things depending on who you choose to go deep with and how deliberately you build toward it. That might mean working with a specific sport, a specific condition, a specific life stage, or simply a specific style of teaching you love. The athletes trend is just the most visible current example of a pattern worth noticing either way.

Where this leaves us

If you’re an instructor, a studio owner, or still weighing whether this is the career for you, here’s the question worth sitting with: what’s the one population or skill you could go deeper on this year, rather than spreading yourself across everyone? And if you’re already specialising in something less headline-grabbing than pro sport, we’d genuinely love to hear what that focus looks like for you. Drop it in the comments, this is exactly the kind of thing worth comparing notes on.

 

Sources used this week

Editorial note: The athlete-specialisation story is a notable recent trend rather than something that broke in the last 7-14 days specifically; the underlying US reporting is from June 2026 and the UK studio opening from February 2026. It’s used here as the most relevant recent development in the business/career-building space this week, per Andre’s broadened brief, rather than a brand-new story.

Enquire Now