Early this year, a certain TikTok video featuring Hollywood hunk Glen Powell, pop star Tate McRae, and TikToker Jake Shane exercising on Pilates reformers went viral. I suspect it wasn't just the combined star power involved that drove the clicks, but that Shane—legs quaking beneath him like Jello in every frame—served as the ultimate shareable punchline. If you've spent any time on the clock app recently, maybe you've noticed more and more videos like this popping up on your feed. Overconfident men—from gym rats to chiseled celebs like the Biebs himself—are dragged to a Pilates studio by their partners and emerge fully humbled by the body-quaking experience. The consistent through-line? Pilates is tough, bro, and it's definitely not just for the girls.

Though the workout has been overwhelmingly popularized by women since its early days, people sometimes forget that Pilates was actually founded by a dude. German gymnast and bodybuilder Joseph Pilates started honing his technique of contrology during World War I. Interned on the Isle of Man with a bunch of fellow Germans, he began training his fellow inmates in his muscle-strengthening exercise methods. Later, he patented the model for his reformer machine (a contraption comprised of a bed-like base and a sliding carriage connected to springs and pulleys), though he maintained that contrology was a practice you could do with zero additional equipment besides maybe a mat.

In the 1920s, he transported his teachings stateside, and ballet dancers like George Balanchine (co-founder of the New York City Ballet) and Martha Graham quickly adopted his eponymous workout. You'll understand why if you've ever set foot in a barre or ballet class. Pilates' emphasis on improving posture and flexibility, plus a micro-focus on small muscle groups, is an easy crossover for the kind of postures and musculature it takes to relevé and plié on repeat. Once the word was out, the well-heeled women of Manhattan came flocking, helping cement the sport's modern reputation as a workout for ladies.

That is, until recently. Incrementally, the landscape of Pilates has started to shift, nudged along by a pandemic that kept us out of our gyms and holed up in our living rooms with often just a mat and a TV, plus some helpful endorsements from celebs like Harry Styles. In the world of professional sports, athletes like LeBron James, Cristiano Ronaldo, David Beckham, and Bryce Harper have also been sounding the bell about Pilates for years. You might have even seen the Chiefs working out on Pilates reformers to prep for the Super Bowl.

Pilates instructor Melissa Bentivoglio, the founder of the GQ Fitness Award-winning Frame Pilates reformer, has trained lots of pros in the past and says the workout's appeal among the most shredded athletes in the world is pretty simple: the muscles you engage when you're trying to stabilize yourself on a reformer's moving carriage are way different from the ones you'd mobilize on the ground. Even with a simple move like a lunge, she explains, where an athlete has the body mechanics down perfectly on a mat, "you put them on the reformer, and it's 1,000 times harder, and they're quivering."

Maybe because of the sport's overwhelming popularity among professionals, over the last few years, we've seen a trickle-down effect to regular guys of all ages chasing a more toned physique. Garmin has included Pilates activities on its app since 2019, and the brand confirmed there was a huge 96% leap YOY in the numbers of men logging Pilates minutes at the height of the pandemic—between 2020 and 2021.

Bentivoglio even tells us that recently, interest in her at-home reformers has peaked among shoppers' spouses. "In the last three weeks, I've had over 10 of our customers write me to say that they can't get their husbands off the reformer. It'll be like, 'My husband's never done Pilates, and he's on a 30 day streak.'"

She chalks that up to how Pilates ignites a competitive nature in men. "Once you start doing Pilates, there's a complexity associated because you have to learn foundational elements, but it's so fucking hard you keep doing it and it almost becomes obsessive."

As gyms and studios have opened back up to the world, more men are showing up to get their ass handed to them in person, too. Solidcore (a national chain of studios that uses Pilates-style reformers for their grueling strength-training workouts) tells us that membership among men increased 71% YOY between 2022 and 2023 as gyms and studios started opening back up to the world.

Asad Syrkett, the editor-in-chief of ELLE Decor, got into Pilates in 2017 after a biking injury that messed up his shoulder. A dancer friend put him onto it for the rehabilitative aspects of the sport, and as he tells it, he's never left. "The primary motivator for me and the thing that's kept me coming back is feeling like it's low-impact physically and also in some energetic ways, which I appreciate," he says. He confirms that over the nearly seven years he's been attending reformer Pilates classes, he's seen increasing numbers of men stepping onto the machines.

Even young and limber Zoomers are taking up the workout, like Oliver Seid—the 24-year-old creator behind the Instagram account Your Fashion Archive—who had the luck of growing up surrounded by Pilates thanks to his mother, who's been an instructor since the '90s (and owns Beverly Hills studio Bodyline). "I naturally go to the gym a lot, and I have a pretty flexible body, so she says I move pretty well in Pilates," Seid says. He admits that it's not his main form of exercise, but because of the core work and balance required, "it's still difficult for me, and I do find myself getting a lot out of it."

As word spreads about the wonders of Pilates, perhaps one of the most unsung benefits will be a perspective shift in the way we view fitness successes. "The biggest thing for me about a Pilates class is that the energy in the room is less about gains and more about a mindset difference," Syrkett says. Or at least, he clarifies, it's a different type of gain: "You're gaining awareness of muscles that you may not have used in a concerted way before. You're gaining a holistic thinking about how exercise can help with injuries and help you improve in terms of strength or flexibility."

So, if you're feeling inspired to test your mettle in the studio, there's never been a better time than ever to step up and join the club. "A lot of men are trying Pilates and getting humbled by it," Syrkett adds. "I mean, I was one of them."

Lori Keong is a freelance writer and editor who's been contributing at GQ since 2021. She's previously worked on staff at The Cut, The Strategist, SELF, and Marie Claire. Elsewhere, her writing on design, style, wellness, and beauty has appeared in Architectural Digest, Dwell, Allure, ELLE, PAPER, and beyond.Related Stories for GQStrength training