‘The best abs I’ve ever had – but it hurt!’: the punishing rise of extreme pilates

‘Pilates has been associated with cash- and time-rich older white women for decades.’ Illustration: Pedro Nekoi/Guardian Design

It’s lunchtime on a Wednesday and I am in a dark room, shaking intensely. My forearms are propped up on a big black machine called a “Sweatlana”. Like five other quaking women beside me, I am furiously plank-crunching, attempting to move the machine’s carriage forwards and backwards using only the force of my abs.

“Come on team!” bellows a high-energy instructor over the booming music, urging us all to get “comfortable with discomfort”. Our trembles, she says, are a sign of reaching “second-stage muscle failure” which is not, as it sounds, fatal, but, apparently, a state to aspire to if we want to get stronger.