Endurance is not a dirty word
Muscular endurance is the ability to sustain or repeat force production over time while resisting fatigue - expressed as the ability to continue completing the movement - usually measured most easily by time rather than reps.
Muscular strength is the maximum force you can produce in a given task - most accurately measured by 1 repetition maximum BUT effectively trained at loads that create 1-10 repetitions maximum.
Strength is how much force you can produce with no time dimension; endurance is how long you can keep producing the force the task requires, where the duration is part of the success condition.
This was written after a conversation with instructors about why some movements work well in group Reformer classes and others are harder to make work at scale.
Specifically, we were talking about the exercise I learned as ‘Feet Pulling Straps” quadruped on the long box with head towards the pulleys. One foot in the same side strap. Pressing the strap back with a straight leg to move the bed via the hip extensors of the leg in the strap.
Feet pulling straps is - relatively speaking - very complicated to set up and equally as complicated to complete with stability, and keeping the movement stable and smooth is the expression of efficiency which is the prerequisite for increasing load and force production.
Said another way
Nested in that conversation was a distinction that needs to be made explicit: not advocating a particular movement is not the same thing as not valuing the capacity it trains.
Before any discussion of a movement like Feet Pulling Straps we should look
Endurance is not a dirty word. There is absolutely nothing wrong with building endurance.
When we first started talking about strength and how to do it, some instructors went away and changed their classes. Then they came back saying, “I’m doing strength training in my Reformer classes now and I feel really good about that, but I’ve lost all my clients.”
Where have your clients gone? What are you doing?
“Well, I changed everything so that it’s hard enough that no one can do more than ten reps.”
No wonder they’re not coming back.
The fun thing about Pilates is that you move all the time, and you move in and out of fatigue. The art of it is to fold the strength in with the endurance and with the balance challenges.
The burn is part of our toolkit
Clients value the burn.
If you teach a class where everything is heavy enough that they never feel it, some clients will leave saying, “I never felt the burn. Class was a bit shit.”
And it didn’t flow because everything was so freaking hard. They could only do six or seven reps, then they had to stop and rest while other people did their reps, before everyone moved on to something else.
So if we want to run classes that people enjoy and come back for more of, giving people the burn is part of our toolkit. You should do it.
My go-to is hands in straps for the abs. I can get the glutes in shoulder bridge.
That doesn’t mean every movement needs to produce the burn, or that feeling the burn tells us everything we need to know about what the class is achieving. It means endurance has a place in the class. Strength has a place. Balance challenges have a place.
The job is to fold them together.
What is the problem with the movement?
The question that started the conversation was about donkey kicks with a foot in a strap, kneeling on a box.
There’s nothing wrong with that movement. It’s a cool use of the Reformer. If you know your way around the equipment and you want to play around with spring tension and the angle of your hip, great.
But teaching it to a group creates a different set of demands.
It takes time to get everyone into position. Once they’re there, there aren’t that many layers available. Adding load is a substantial challenge to stability and requires coming out of an already time consuming set up/start position. Changing sides is clunky, and moving to another muscle group in between isn’t easy.
If their wrists have had enough, they can’t easily take their hands off and shake them out because they’re strapped into the position.
So there’s a falls risk. There’s a flow problem. There’s a challenge issue.
The problem is not that it trains endurance. The problem is that, at a group level, it doesn’t meet the criteria of safety and enough layers that everyone can come along.
That distinction matters.
If the problem is the transition, solve the transition. If the problem is the available layers, look at the layers. Don’t turn a problem with how a movement works in a group into an argument that endurance is bad.
Everyone rides together
The premise of this system is everyone rides together. People can move through layers that create meaningful physiological change without having to sit out, in classes that flow.
That means we need a broad spectrum of available challenge.
In footwork, one person can be working on two and a half springs while someone beside them is on full springs and someone else is doing single leg. We have equipment layers and movement layers available within the same sequence.
We can build challenge without requiring everyone to arrive at the same layer.
And we don’t need to make every part of the class so heavy that everyone has to stop after a few reps.
We want to help the general public become stronger, more flexible and more skilful, without getting left behind. We also want them to enjoy the class and come back for more of it.
Endurance belongs in that class.
The art is to fold the strength in.
