Buying a Pilates reformer for home

January 10, 2023 8:59 AM

I'm looking for advice and experience around buying a Pilates reformer for home practice. Recommendations? Warnings? Advice?

I'm looking to buy an at-home Pilates reformer machine. I'll be using it for Pilates workouts. Ideally, I'll find one that can recreate most of the whole body strength training regimen I'm doing with free weights.

I'm looking at Elina Pilates, and their Pilates wood reformer with tower. I really like the wood look of the reformers I've seen in studio, and I'm imagining that the tower would make more exercises available. (I haven't used a tower in-studio, so please let me know if I'm wrong about that!)

Do you have any experience purchasing a reformer? I like how Elina offers a service to set up the machine (at a cost, natch). But it also looks like there are good options via Amazon and elsewhere.

If you've ever started down this road, I'd appreciate any thoughts or advice you have on the process! If it's helps, I'd say I'm at the beginner-intermediate level, not worried about space constraints, and have a pretty generous budget that caps out around $6,000.

posted by kinsey to Health & Fitness (2 answers total)

During lockdown my Pilates studio rented out their existing Reformers to students so they could continue the work at home--for some it worked well and for others, not so much. I chose not to do it because I find I need the feedback during my workout to insure I'm not hurting myself or not getting the benefits. I am older (63) and have arthritis, hip replacements and other mechanical issues so this may not apply in your case.

I have a lot of the accessories at home, Circle, Parasetter, foam rollers of various sizes, rubber balls of various sizes, etc. as well as rubber bands to practice resistance and with those I can do a number of the mat exercises. My studio has developed a pretty good library of class videos that we have access to for home workouts.

Maybe talk with your studio and see what they recommend. They may also have a line on used equipment that would be a lot less expensive.
posted by agatha_magatha at 9:25 AM on January 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

Like agatha_magatha, my studio also rented their reformers during the pandemic. I rented mine (an Allegro 2) and ultimately bought it, as the owner permanently shut down one of his three locations and had excess equipment.

Now three years down the line, I still use it regularly (1-3 times a week), although I've increasingly mixed in other strength and mat fitness workouts to change things up (2-4 times a week). I don't think it's as effective as it was taking studio classes for me. I find myself in a rut of doing similar exercise sequences and I wish I had an instructor or a really good series of online videos to challenge me more with different moves and flows. My instructor tried to build this out, but they didn't add much new content over time and it became very repetitive to work from.

To make it clear, I don't regret it and on balance it's better for me in the pandemic and now than taking studio classes, but I think it was a more effective workout for me in the studio.
posted by handful of rain at 6:27 PM on January 10, 2023