Sore after your first reformer session? What's normal and what isn't
Somebody always texts me the morning after. Usually around eleven, usually some version of the same thing: is it meant to ache there? My stomach I understand — but why my feet?
September fills the studio with first sessions, so I have had that message several times in the last fortnight from people who have just started with me here in Harrogate. Here is the honest answer to all of it, so you know roughly what to expect before you book anything.
The ache you want
The ordinary one usually turns up a day later rather than that evening, and it is often worse on the second morning than the first. It feels like a broad, dull tiredness through a muscle, it eases once you get moving, and it fades over two or three days without you having to do anything clever about it.
Where it lands tells you something useful. After a first reformer session the usual suspects are the deep abdominals, the inside of the thighs, the glutes, and the one nobody predicts — the soles of your feet and everything around your ankles. Standing and pushing on a carriage that moves asks your feet to do a job they have not been asked to do since the last time you walked over rough ground.
The rule of thumb I give people is this: you should feel like you worked, and you should not feel like you hurt yourself. Those are two different sensations, and most people can tell the difference straight away.
The ache you don't want
- Sharp rather than dull.
- In a joint rather than in a muscle.
- On one side only, when we worked both sides evenly.
- Travelling down a leg or an arm, or arriving with pins and needles.
- Anything that wakes you in the night, or that is worse on day four than it was on day two.
None of that is ordinary muscle soreness and none of it is something to be brave about. Tell me, and stop doing whatever is provoking it in the meantime.
Worth saying plainly, as I do to everybody: I teach Pilates. I am not a physiotherapist, and a session with me is not treatment or a diagnosis. If something in that list is happening, get it looked at by somebody qualified to assess it. If you are already under a physio or an osteopath, tell me what they have said and I will work inside it — and keep up the exercises they have given you rather than swapping them for my own. That is true whether you came to me for general reformer work or specifically because you are working around an injury.
Why you ache in places we barely touched
Two reasons, and both of them are quite reassuring.
The first is that Pilates loads a muscle slowly and then keeps it there. It is a different demand from a walk or a set in the gym, and muscles you use every day without complaint will still object to being held under tension for thirty seconds at a time.
The second is that if one muscle has not been doing its share, something else has been quietly covering for it, possibly for years. The first time we ask the lazy one to work, you feel it. That is the point of the hour, not a side effect of it.
"I wasn't sore at all. Was it worth it?"
Yes. Soreness is not the receipt.
I would far rather your first session left you a bit tired and entirely intact than wrecked for three days, because the second of those means you will not want to come back for a week and we lose the thread. In the first few sessions I am mostly watching how you move and finding out what you can control, and control does not always announce itself the next morning.
The thing to look for after two or three sessions is not aching. It is noticing yourself: standing at the kitchen counter with all your weight through one hip, holding your breath every time something gets hard, the way you get out of the car. That is the change that carries into the rest of the week.
The two days afterwards
Keep moving. A walk — round the Stray, through the Valley Gardens, wherever suits you — will do more for a stiff pair of legs than the sofa will. A warm bath is fine if it makes you comfortable. What I would avoid is going out to do your hardest ever run the next day to prove a point.
And come back roughly when we planned to. The temptation after a first session is to leave it a fortnight until everything has completely settled, but the second session is where the corrections from the first start to stick.
Before your first one
Tell me what your body does before we start rather than halfway through.
Sessions are one to one, 55 minutes, by appointment, 9am to 3pm, from the studio at my home in Harrogate. Clients travel in from Knaresborough, Pannal, Killinghall, Spofforth, Wetherby and Ripon.
Most people begin with the introductory session at £45 — a full 55 minutes, with time at the beginning to talk properly. After that a single session is £55, or a block of five is £220, which works out at £44 each. Mat sessions are priced separately. The rest is on the prices page.
Call or text me on 07960 746480, or send me a message, and tell me what you would like to get out of it.