The most common way people enter Pilates today is through a group reformer class — often at a boutique studio, often booked through an app, often the same class every week until it becomes habit. This is a reasonable entry point. Group classes are accessible, social, and relatively affordable. They introduce the equipment and a set of movement patterns. For many people they are, for a while, enough.
The most common regret among people who have been doing Pilates for years is that they did not start with private instruction. Not because they wasted their time in group classes, but because they did not know what they were missing until they experienced the difference. A well-structured private session from a trained classical teacher is a different category of experience from a group class, and the gap between them is not primarily a matter of attention or price.
What a private session can do that a group class cannot
In a group class, a teacher is managing eight to twelve bodies simultaneously. They are delivering cues designed to work reasonably well across a range of bodies in a range of conditions. They are watching for safety. They are keeping time. The best group teachers do this skillfully and still manage to offer meaningful individual corrections. But what they cannot do is build a session around a single body's specific needs, restrictions, and developmental arc.
A private session with a classical teacher is structured around you. The teacher assesses what your body is doing — where it is gripping, where it is collapsing, which movement patterns it defaults to when fatigued — and selects exercises and apparatus to address those specifics. The progression from session to session is deliberate. The teacher is building something, not delivering a workout.
Why privates first is not just a sales pitch
Classical Pilates studios typically ask new clients to begin with a series of private sessions before joining group classes. This is sometimes presented as a policy, and new clients occasionally resist it — it feels like an upsell, a hoop to jump through before being allowed into the "real" classes.
It is not. The reasoning is practical. The classical method depends on understanding the principles — centering, breath coordination, pelvic position — at a physical level, not just an intellectual one. In a group class, a new client who has not internalized these principles will substitute whatever movement pattern is most available to them. They will recruit the wrong muscles. They will hold their breath. They will compensate in ways that feel fine but undermine the purpose of the exercise. None of this is visible to a teacher managing a group, and none of it gets corrected.
Private sessions establish the foundation on which group work can then actually build. A client who arrives at their first group class having already done five or ten private sessions moves differently from one who walks in cold. They know what they are trying to do, and the group format reinforces it rather than letting them drift.
Between a private and a group class lies the duet — two clients, one teacher, a session structured around both bodies. For clients who work well together and have compatible needs, a duet offers more individual attention than a group class at a lower price point than a private. Many serious students settle into a rhythm of one private and one or two duets per week.
The duet works best when both clients are at a similar level and have an existing relationship with the teacher. Walking into a duet with a stranger whose needs are very different from yours is closer to a small group class than a private — less ideal as a foundation, but reasonable as a supplement to an established practice.
What group classes are for
Once the foundation is established, group classes serve a real purpose. They offer repetition — the volume of practice that builds physical memory. They offer a social dimension that many clients find motivating. They allow a client to consolidate what they have learned in private sessions in a less supervised setting, which is its own form of development. And in a small group setting with a skilled classical teacher, they can be genuinely rigorous.
The key word is small. A group class of six to eight people with a teacher who knows each client's practice is meaningfully different from a class of twenty people on reformers where the teacher is managing safety and momentum above all else. When evaluating a studio's group offerings, class size matters more than most people realize.
The honest answer about what serious practice looks like
Most people who practice classical Pilates seriously do both — private sessions and group classes — and they view them as complementary rather than substitutable. The private session is where the work deepens, where the teacher introduces new material and addresses what has come up. The group class is where that material gets consolidated through repetition.
If you are choosing between privates and group classes because of budget, privates are the higher-value choice — particularly in the beginning. Less frequent private sessions with a genuinely trained classical teacher will produce more lasting physical change than more frequent group reformer classes. That is not a sales pitch for any particular studio. It is simply what the method was designed for.
Good Pilates is an independent editorial site written by practitioners trained in the classical lineage. We do not accept advertising. Our only agenda is helping people find good Pilates.