Reformer and strength training

Is Reformer Pilates enough on its own? It depends on what you want.

The short answer

Enough for what?

The question is not whether Reformer Pilates works. It works. The question is what for. For the first two rows, the Reformer is as good as anything you could train on. For the bottom three, one single thing is missing, and that is what the rest of this text is about.

What the Reformer really does

Core stability, the thing that makes your progress possible in the first place

On the Reformer you lie or sit on a carriage that moves. Your core has to hold you steady the whole time, otherwise you cannot get through the exercise cleanly. That is the same stability you need later when you work with weight. Without it, your body takes the force through your back, and the exercise stops reaching the muscle it is meant to reach.

Full movement instead of momentum or half repetitions

The spring pulls through the entire movement. You cannot shorten it with momentum and you cannot stop halfway. You notice both immediately, because the spring holds against you. That clean execution is something most people in a gym learn only after years, if at all.

Low impact on your joints

On the Reformer you do not jump and you do not land. The resistance builds evenly instead of hitting the joint all at once. That is why the Reformer still works when your knees or your back give you trouble in other formats. And it is why you can train often without wearing your joints down.

And yes, in the beginning it builds muscle

For many people the spring is the first serious resistance in years, and the body responds to it. The first months bring visibly more strength and more control. That is not a beginner effect worth playing down, it is the part that works. What happens after that is a different question.

Where the limit is

Spring resistance has a maximum

Springs are not too weak. They are limited at the top. The strongest setting is where it ends, and at some point you are there. With weight there is no such upper limit.

Spring settings are big jumps, not a scale

The gap between two spring settings is often bigger than what your body can manage at that moment. One setting is too light, the next is too heavy. So you stay on the lighter one, sometimes for months. With weight it is two kilos more than last time, and that step is almost always within reach.

Going slower helps, but only up to a point

Working slower genuinely makes an exercise harder. That is not a trick, it is a real increase, and your muscle knows the difference. The problem is that this route ends. At four to five seconds down and back up again you have reached the maximum. After that the exercise does not get harder, it only gets longer. With weight it keeps going, in small steps, week after week.

The real reason is how the weeks build on each other

Variety is not the same as progression. In most Reformer classes the exercises change from week to week, but the demand stays the same: the same spring setting, the same number of repetitions, the same tempo. It feels like progress because it feels new. Nobody records where you were last week, so this week cannot build on it. What your body needs is exactly that, a week that goes one measurable step further than the one before. Take that step away for a few months and it has adapted to the load, and then it has no reason left to change.

So this is not Pilates against weights. It is progression against no progression.

What strength training adds

Weight that grows with you in small steps

Two kilos more than last week, or one more clean repetition. With weight the next step is always within reach, and that is exactly what your body needs in order to keep changing. It is not about spending longer in the studio. It is about moving more than you did last time.

The muscles that create shape

Muscle grows where enough load arrives. Every exercise has one main muscle doing the work, on the Reformer just as much as with weight. The difference is how much load reaches that muscle, and in what steps you can increase it. You can load glutes and hamstrings heavily on purpose, or shoulders and back, depending on the shape you want. That difference is what shows up later in the mirror.

Why the combination is more than doing both separately

The core stability from the Reformer makes you stronger with weight, because you control the load instead of letting other muscles take over. The strength from weight training lets you work with more resistance on the Reformer than you could hold before. Each one lifts the other. So the order does not matter, the combination does.

How often, and what realistically happens

Two to three sessions per week, with both kinds of work in them. That is enough load for your body to respond and enough time in between for it to recover.

What changes first is control. You hold positions where you used to wobble, and you feel the muscle the exercise is meant to reach. Then come the numbers. You work with more weight than in your first month and you manage more clean repetitions. Shape comes last, and it comes more slowly than most training plans on the internet promise. Anyone who gives you a number of weeks knows neither your sleep nor your nutrition nor where you started.

Common questions

How Method26 combines both

Method26 is built for exactly this gap. Every session combines the Athletic Reformer and strength training on the bench. The Athletic Reformer uses the same mechanics as classical reformer pilates, built for higher intensity. Your trainer sets your starting point so that next week is harder than this one. What a session looks like is on the homepage. We open in December 2026 in Kreuzberg, and the waitlist gets access first.