LAGREE VS PILATES - WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE?

PILATES

Hailey Bieber called it “a fad” mid May — and the entire internet asked itself the same question — “is Pilates over”? For the 2% that scrolled down and read the article, you may have seen that she was focused on the teachers themselves, not the method of Pilates in and of itself. She couldn’t find teachers who were truly focused on form. I was a consistent client in that world — 5 years of Pilates classes in LA— and I can say with complete clarity: she’s not wrong, but she’s also not right.

Let me clear a few things up before we get into it. Joseph Pilates was a German inventor, and he built the whole method — Contrology — before bringing it to the States in 1926. The point was never to just work a muscle. It was about control. Conscious, deliberate, every-single-bit-of-your-focus control. Nailing precision and alignment so the body functions better as a whole. Not harder, simply better.

The apparatus (such as Reformer, Cadillac, Wunda Chair) gets mistaken for the method itself, it’s not, let’s call it training wheels. The goal wasn’t the machine, it was you and you only, mastering your own body.

Now Mat Pilates (no springs, no straps, no moving carriages) is your own body, figuring out its own stability, organizing itself in space, controlling every movement from the center because there’s nowhere else for control to come from. Joseph Pilates called this the foundation for a reason.

Master the mat, master the method. The machine is just a tool.

At its core, Pilates was never about the burn, it’s about breath, and that is simply the first principle. Everything else — control, centering, concentration, alignment, flow, integration, precision, and relaxation — comes after, but breath, breath is the door you need to walk through in order to get to any of it.

And here’s the thing nobody’s saying out loud: these principles aren’t exclusive to Pilates. They’re principles of movement. Any instructor worth your money and time is cuing your breath, watching your alignment, and making sure you damn well concentrate — because the second you stop concentrating, you stop being present in your own body, and proprioception goes flying out the door. This is what Pilates is teaching you: awareness. Everything else — the posture, the balance, the strength, the way you carry yourself off of the mat — that’s what awareness looks like once the information has sunk in.

Lagree didn’t inherit this from Pilates. It got there on its own, because you can’t put a body under resistance and ask for control without needing breath, alignment, and focus. 

LAGREE

Sébastien Lagree founded Lagree in the early 2000s. He created a machine called the Megaformer. Unlike Pilates, the workout does not exist without the machine. And the goal here is muscular failure (Progressive Overload). On purpose.

The class is usually 45 minutes, and trust me, that’s all you need (and want when you’re scanning the room for the clock and praying for it to be over near the end). The transitions are quick — there’s still a flow, it’s not complete chaos — and the whole point is time under tension. Constant, unrelenting, focused tension. Here, the goal is the burn. The kind that starts to creep under your skin, the violent shake of your muscles starting to climb their way up to your brain, the challenge to overcome the breaking point of mind over matter. That is the point.

If you can fight the impulse to stop (now that it has started to consume the majority of your thoughts) you will find that the question becomes: “Do I need to stop, or do I want to stop?” This takes willpower, self-discipline, and perseverance, which, in all reality, is not the first place we all arrive at. However, nothing great happens in your first few swings of something, so claim command of your body and you’ll make a great servant of your mind.

Lagree is slow. Brutally so. Unfathomably such. Your teacher will ask you to go in slow motion, and then somehow even slower than that (if you can get a little Juvenile in your head and start singing “slow motion for me, slow motion for me, move in slow motion for me” it might help get you in the mood for Lagree). And there’s a reason for the suffering: that slowness is training your slow-twitch muscle fibers, the ones that don’t care for speed, just stamina. Train those, and your muscles get better at using oxygen. Meaning you go longer before you tap out.

Ultimately, you don’t have to choose. Pilates builds the foundation. Lagree tests it. One teaches you control. The other makes sure you keep it under pressure.

P.S. Still unsure if you’re going to try Lagree? Good. I wrote you a blueprint for exactly that: “What Nobody Tells You About Your First Lagree Class (And Why I Will).”