Is Pilates good for weight loss?

Can you lose weight with Pilates? Studio marketing says yes, and plenty of people in online Pilates threads say they lost nothing. The research lands in between. Pilates trials do show weight loss, but Pilates burns fewer calories per minute than almost any cardio you could pick. Whether it works for you depends on how often you go and what fills the rest of your week.

This page answers the question with numbers. You'll get the calories a class actually burns, measured in the lab, what the randomized trials and meta-analyses found for body weight and body fat, how mat and reformer compare, and a weekly plan that uses Pilates for what it does well. If your bigger question is whether Pilates can replace your strength training, our answer to is Pilates strength training covers that.

Does Pilates Burn Calories? What One Class Costs

A 50-minute Pilates class burns roughly 100 to 200 calories for most adults. Lab measurements put it in the light-to-moderate range. A 2026 meta-analysis by Vitor and colleagues pooled six studies that measured the energy cost of Pilates sessions. Across all six, a typical session averaged 3.7 METs and 3.8 calories a minute. When the authors dropped the two studies with a high risk of bias or no direct measurement of oxygen use, the estimate fell to 3.0 METs and 2.9 calories a minute, which they called the most reliable figure to date. At 2.9 calories a minute, a 50-minute class burns about 145 calories.

The 2024 Adult Compendium of Physical Activities (Herrmann and colleagues) rates general Pilates at 2.8 METs and traditional mat Pilates at 1.8 METs, against 4.8 for brisk walking at 3.5 to 3.9 mph. One MET is roughly one calorie per kilogram of body weight per hour, so here's what a 50-minute session comes to by body weight:

Total calories, including resting metabolism, from Compendium values of 1.8, 2.8 and 4.8 METs, rounded to the nearest 10. Figures you'll see quoted online, around 175 calories for a mat class and 200 to 250 for reformer, sit at the top end of what labs have measured.

One detail from the Vitor meta-analysis is worth using: rest periods of 60 seconds or less between exercises were linked with a higher metabolic intensity. A flowing class that moves from one exercise to the next burns more than one with long pauses for setup and instruction.

Can Pilates Help to Lose Weight? What the Trials Found

Yes, and the trials agree on the direction more than the size. Three meta-analyses have pooled the research, and each asked a slightly different question.

• Pilates against no exercise, adults with overweight or obesity. Wang and colleagues pooled 11 randomized trials with 393 adults, 303 of them women. Pilates reduced body weight by 2.40 kg, BMI by 1.17 and body fat percentage by 4.22 points compared with controls. Waist circumference (two trials) and lean mass (three trials) didn't change significantly. Programs longer than 10 weeks took off 3.30 kg, while programs of 10 weeks or less showed no significant weight change. People with obesity lost more, about 3.8 kg, than people with overweight.
• Pilates in adult women. A 2026 meta-analysis by Bajčetić and colleagues reviewed 12 studies of structured Pilates programs in women and found about 4.0 kg of weight loss and a BMI drop of 1.22. It found no significant pooled change in body fat percentage, waist circumference, waist-to-hip ratio or lean mass.
• Mat Pilates against other exercise. Cavina and colleagues (2020) reviewed 10 studies of mat Pilates in healthy adults and found it was no more effective than traditional exercise or control conditions for BMI, lean mass, body fat percentage or abdominal circumference.

Read together, they say Pilates moves the scale a little when it's added to a sedentary week, and it doesn't beat other exercise at it. That fits the calorie numbers above. Many of the trials were small and short, so the exact figures carry wide margins.

What the individual trials looked like

The trials behind those averages show what it took. In Şavkın and Aslan (2017), 37 sedentary women aged 30 to 50 with overweight or obesity did 90-minute Pilates sessions three times a week for 8 weeks, with the effort rising over the weeks from light to very hard. Weight, BMI, body fat percentage and waist, abdomen and hip circumference all fell, and lean mass held. The control group's abdomen and hip measurements went up over the same 8 weeks.

Rayes and colleagues (2019) compared Pilates with brisk walking in adults with overweight or obesity, 60 minutes three times a week for 8 weeks. The Pilates group used the floor, spring apparatus and 1 kg dumbbells. Fat mass fell and lean mass rose only in the Pilates group, though the effects were small. Waist and hip measurements shrank by similar amounts in both groups, and calorie intake didn't change.

Diet changes the picture. In Greco and colleagues (2024), 35 women with obesity all followed a Mediterranean diet for 12 weeks, and half also did online mat Pilates at home three times a week. The Pilates group ended with a lower body fat percentage and more fat-free mass than the diet-only group. And dose matters at the low end: in a 2025 trial by Arslan Kabasakal and Delice, Pilates twice a week for 8 weeks mainly stopped BMI and body fat from rising in women with obesity, rather than lowering them.

Pilates vs Cardio for Fat Loss

Per minute, cardio wins clearly. A brisk walk burns about 1.7 times what general Pilates does, and a jog at your own pace more than twice as much. The best estimate for cardio and weight loss comes from Jayedi and colleagues (2024), who pooled 116 trials of aerobic exercise. Each 30 minutes a week was linked with about 0.52 kg of weight loss, reaching about 2.8 kg at 150 minutes a week and 4.2 kg at 300.

On paper, the Pilates trials land close to that 150-minute cardio figure, at about 2.4 kg from roughly 150 to 180 minutes a week. Don't read too much into the match. The Pilates trials are smaller and noisier, several compared Pilates with people who did nothing and slowly gained, and the review that pitted mat Pilates against other exercise found no advantage.

Pilates earns its place in a weight loss plan for other reasons:

• It's low impact. Most of it happens lying, sitting or kneeling, which suits heavier beginners and anyone whose knees or back complain during long walks.
• It builds trunk and hip strength. In the Rayes trial, abdominal and back endurance improved more with Pilates than with walking, and so did chair-rise and stair-climb tests.
• It may help you keep going. In the Arslan Kabasakal trial, women with obesity who did Pilates reported less emotional eating and less anxiety about their bodies. Those are small, early findings, but they point at the real problem: staying with a plan long enough for it to work.

So the answer to Pilates vs cardio for fat loss is both. Cardio does most of the calorie work, and Pilates covers strength, control and the days you want something gentler.

Is Reformer Pilates Good for Weight Loss?

Reformer Pilates burns a bit more than mat Pilates, though both are light. In de Souza Andrade and colleagues (2021), 18 healthy young women did a 15-exercise session on the reformer and another on the mat while the researchers measured their oxygen use. The reformer session cost 2.59 calories a minute and the mat session 1.93, about a third more. For these women, who averaged 61 kg, that's roughly 130 calories against 95 over 50 minutes. Neither session raised blood lactate, heart rate or blood pressure significantly above resting values.

The springs likely explain the gap, because they let you push against more resistance than your body weight alone gives you. Rest periods matter too, so a mat flow with little downtime closes some of that gap. If you're training at home without a reformer, our guide to wall Pilates at home shows how a wall adds some of that feedback and resistance.

Does Pilates Burn Belly Fat?

Pilates burns fat in general, and some of it comes from your belly, but it can't target the belly. In the Wang meta-analysis, body fat percentage fell by about 4 points while waist circumference didn't change significantly. The 2026 meta-analysis in women found the same pattern for the waist. Individual trials vary: Şavkın and Aslan's 90-minute sessions did shrink the waist, and in the Rayes trial Pilates and walking trimmed it equally.

What Pilates can change is how your midsection holds itself. Stronger deep abdominal and back muscles improve posture, and some people see a flatter look before the scale moves much. For actual belly fat loss, the levers are the same as for fat anywhere: weekly activity and a modest calorie deficit held for months.

Is Pilates Good for Toning Muscles?

Yes. "Toning" is mostly muscle you can see because there's less fat over it, and Pilates helps on the muscle side. It's light-load strength training: you work against your body weight or a reformer's springs, which builds endurance and control, especially through the trunk and hips. In the weight loss trials lean mass held steady while fat came down, and in the Greco trial it rose when Pilates was added to a diet. For what Pilates can and can't do for muscle size, see our review of whether Pilates builds muscle.

How Many Times a Week Should You Do Pilates to Lose Weight?

Three times a week, for at least 10 to 12 weeks. That's the dose most trials in the Wang meta-analysis used, with sessions of 50 to 60 minutes, and programs longer than 10 weeks were the ones that produced significant weight loss. Twice a week was enough to stop weight gain in one trial, but not to reverse it.

Here's a week that uses Pilates for what it does best and lets cardio carry the calorie load:

Can you lose weight doing Pilates every day? You can, if the rest of the week supports it. Thirty minutes of general Pilates a day burns about 700 calories a week at 160 lb, about as much as two and a half brisk 50-minute walks. Daily practice at a moderate effort is fine for most healthy adults, but if you have time for more exercise, a walk adds more calorie burn than a second Pilates session.

What This Means for You

If Pilates is the exercise you actually enjoy, keep it. It's good for weight loss as long as you treat it as one part of the plan, not the whole plan. Go three times a week, keep the rests short, add brisk walks on the other days, and judge progress by your waist and the scale over months, not after a single week of classes.

The bigger risk isn't choosing the wrong workout. It's the week the routine slips and never quite restarts, and that's a design problem, not a character flaw. Build in what brings you back: a fixed class time, a home session short enough to survive a bad day, a streak you don't want to break. Stacy, 41, who lost 22 lb in four months, put it simply: "After my second kid, I needed something stupidly simple." FitCraft programs include yoga, mobility, dumbbell and bodyweight strength, and cardio workouts led by a 3D AI coach who demonstrates every exercise, and if you're comparing apps to support the plan, our roundup of the best workout apps for weight loss looks at which ones help people stay consistent.