The Edit: Why Fitness Trends Work Like Fashion | LDM Journal
I've spent my career moving between two worlds that have more in common than either likes to admit — and for much of it, I was living inside both simultaneously.
My professional life began as a dancer. Not fitness, not wellness — dance. A ballet scholarship in childhood led to a performance career that took me from touring with Roxy Music and Bryan Ferry to Live Aid Berlin, from movement direction for Roksanda's models at London Fashion Week to commercial work with Bvlgari, Agent Provocateur and Mont Blanc across Hong Kong, Shanghai, Lisbon, Italy and Paris. I was cast on looks as much as on skill — the girl next door one week, something edgier the next — and the fashion industry was not a backdrop to my career, it was woven through it. My partner is a photographer. My friends were in the industry from designers, stylists, make-up artists, to hair. I was introduced to Isabella Blow on tour. I watched the relationship between how a body moves and how it's dressed play out in real time, at the highest level.
I was teaching and training clients at the same time. Not instead of dancing — alongside it. Being cast on looks as much as on skill taught me something no coaching manual does: what it actually feels like to have your body judged before you've moved a muscle. I understood the pressure that actors, public figures and those who live in front of a lens carry — not theoretically, but physically, from the inside. When the clients who found me were preparing for red carpets, film roles and public appearances, that understanding was already there.
The conversations in those sessions were often as much about fit and form — how to carry a dress, how to move in a look — as they were about strength. When I trained Victoria Beckham, she was building her fashion house. When I worked with Gwyneth Paltrow, she was growing Goop into a wellness empire. Those sessions were never just about the body — they were about the whole architecture of a public life. When Felicity Jones spoke to Porter Magazine about finally giving herself permission to enjoy the red carpet — "It's literally taken myself years to give myself permission to enjoy it" — she credited what she called her squad: her make-up artist, her hair, her stylist, and me. "I know it sounds a bit American but it takes a village." I had designed a bespoke programme built around her schedule, the physical demands of her role, and an LDM kit she could take into any hotel room in the world. Fitness as portable headspace. That has always been the point.
I understood that world instinctively because I had lived in it. And it's the lens through which I have always watched wellness. What I've observed, across fifteen-plus years of practice and a lifetime in movement, is this:
Fitness trends behave exactly like fashion. Nothing disappears. It gets recut.
The silhouette changes. The fabric updates. The marketing finds a new language. But underneath, the body is the same body, responding to the same stimuli it always has. What changes is the cultural story we tell about it — and who's selling it.
Right now we are in one of the most interesting moments I've witnessed. I want to take you through the major trends — not to dismiss them, not to breathlessly endorse them, but to do what a good coach should always do: read what's real, name what's marketing, and tell you what actually holds up.
One more thing before we get into it — because it's part of the same story. In 2015 I choreographed Charli Cohen's show at London Fashion Week, picked up by British Vogue. Influencers were cast deliberately to bring heat and attention to her collection — a very early and very clever understanding of how fashion and cultural capital work together. I watched that world evolve in real time. I remember Gwyneth being sent athleisure from brands so new they barely had a name yet, and testing product in sessions before it reached the wider market. Back when I was dancing, the kit was ballet leotards, jazz pants, dance-wear mixed with Nike and Adidas from the high street — and in commercial work, bikini tops, army trousers, Ugg boots and layers of accessories, because how you looked got you noticed as much as how you moved. Now we have Sweaty Betty, Lululemon, Alo, Varley and Vuori — and more considered brands like Live the Process and Nagnata for those who want the quality without the logo. The collision of sport, fashion and wellness is one of the most significant cultural shifts of the past two decades, and it deserves its own piece — which is coming. For now, know that when I talk about fitness trends working like fashion, I mean it from the inside.
The Shift That Changes Everything: Longevity Over Aesthetics
The dominant motivation for exercise is changing. For the first time in my career, clients across every demographic — twenties to eighties, men and women — are arriving not primarily because they want to look different, but because they want to last.
The longevity conversation has moved from the biohacker fringe into the mainstream. And with it has come a quieter but more important shift: the backlash against over-optimisation. Clients who've been tracking every metric, stacking every protocol and feeling increasingly anxious rather than vital are beginning to ask whether the data obsession has gone too far. Optimisation culture is starting to feel like another form of the same performance anxiety that drove the crash diets and the doubles — just dressed in the language of science.
What's replacing it is more sustainable: the idea that moving well, consistently, across a lifetime, is the most powerful thing you can do for your health. In early 2026, the American College of Sports Medicine published its first major update to resistance training guidelines in seventeen years, which mirrors the growing consensus among UK exercise scientists at the British Association of Sport and Exercise Sciences (BASES). The headline message, after synthesising over 30,000 participants worth of research, was almost disarmingly simple: any resistance training improves strength and physical function. The best programme is the one you'll actually stick with. Move with intent. Show up.
Seventeen years of science, and the conclusion is: fundamentals beat complexity, and consistency beats everything. Every good coach has been saying this for decades. The research just caught up.
For women specifically, something is shifting that I find genuinely moving to witness. After an industry that spent decades telling women to shrink — lighter weights, more cardio, fewer calories — there is a real cultural turn toward strength. The language in my studio has changed markedly: less I want to tone up, more I want to feel capable. That shift is everything.
Heat: The Full Circle
I want to tell you about the rooms I trained in.
Early in my career, working within one of the most high-profile boutique fitness methods of the time, heat was explicit philosophy. Space heaters cranked up, bodies moving non-stop — full-body dance cardio, relentless high-rep toning sequences, an hour of continuous movement in rooms where the temperature climbed until the air felt barely breathable. The ideology was clear: sweat was proof of work. A red face and a dripping body meant something real was happening. I remember fighting through the fatigue and the dehydration, telling myself the discomfort was transformation in progress.
It wasn't. It was dehydration and an overloaded nervous system pushed past the point where adaptation occurs.
At the same time, Bikram yoga was at its cultural peak. Twenty-six postures, ninety minutes, forty-degree rooms — and the floors. Anyone who practised in those early hot yoga studios will remember the floors. Carpet, always carpet, with the accumulated warmth and moisture of ten thousand sessions worked into the fibres. It smelled, distinctly and memorably, like a hamster cage. We went back anyway.
Then came the legal cases against Bikram Choudhury. The brand collapsed. Heated movement fell quietly from favour, rebranded cautiously as 'hot yoga,' stripped of its more extreme protocols.
That was fifteen years ago.
Hot Pilates and hot yoga are genuinely resurging now — but the version arriving in 2026 is considerably more sophisticated. Modern infrared studios heat the body directly rather than blasting recycled hot air into an enclosed space. The floors, I'm relieved to report, are no longer carpeted. The science supports the core benefits clearly: heat enhances range of motion, muscle readiness, and makes movement more accessible — particularly for women navigating hormonal shifts who find cold studios a real barrier to showing up. What it doesn't support are the wilder claims. Sweat-based detoxification is marketing, not physiology. Sweating is not the same as burning. I learned that the hard way.
The problem was never the heat. It was the ideology around it, and the belief that suffering was the same as progress. That version needed to go. What's returned is better.
The Electricity Wave: What Your Physio Stopped Using — and Why the Studios Just Found It
This is where the fashion cycle becomes almost too neat — and where I want to be honest about something the industry consistently underplays.
Electrical muscle stimulation has its origins in clinical rehabilitation. Physiotherapists used it to re-educate muscles after surgery or injury — a specific, supervised, therapeutic tool. By the 1990s it had migrated into consumer toning belts, televised with promises of effortless abdominal transformation. The claims eventually failed scrutiny and the category quietly faded.
Now it's back — in premium studios, full-body EMS suits, marketed with the claim that twenty minutes equals four hours of conventional exercise. My physiotherapist colleagues have largely moved away from passive electrical stimulation, not because the science is worthless but because active, functional movement rehabilitation produces better outcomes with fewer risks. The profession moved forward. The fitness industry repackaged what was left behind.
The evidence on EMS suits shows they can support muscle mass in sedentary or older populations with limited mobility — that's legitimate. For active people already training well, the research shows no meaningful advantage over regular resistance work. And there is a safety issue that studios consistently underplay: rhabdomyolysis — severe muscle breakdown — has been documented after single EMS sessions, including in athletes. Fitness level does not protect you the way most people assume.
Vibration platforms tell a similar story. Power Plates were on every gym floor in the early 2000s, quietly retired to the corner, and are now back via TikTok's lymphatic drainage moment. The evidence on vibration and fluid removal from the lower body is real but modest — considerably more so than the viral content suggests. As a supplement to proper movement work? There's something there. As a centrepiece of a fitness strategy? No.
Both of these technologies are the fashion equivalent of a trend that returns because the marketing found a new story — not because the underlying garment changed.
Recovery: What's Real in the Noise
Red light therapy. Cold plunge. Infrared sauna. PEMF mats. The recovery technology market has moved firmly into the mainstream — and much of it is genuinely interesting. During a year-long partnership I held with a private London members' club, I introduced Bon Charge — their red light therapy, infrared heat and PEMF mat technology — to the club's members as part of a curated wellness week I facilitated and led. Bringing my own contacts and relationships into that environment was something I did throughout that partnership. The uptake from clients of all ages was remarkable. There is something about experiencing these modalities in a community setting, led by someone who understands how they complement movement, rather than in a clinical or self-optimising context, that changes the relationship to them entirely.
What I believe the evidence actually supports: red light therapy has legitimate roots — NASA researched it for wound healing in the 1990s, and more recent studies show real effects on collagen density and muscle recovery. Cold exposure has credible evidence for inflammation reduction and mood. The wilder claims — dramatic fat loss, systemic detox — are considerably less supported than the content around them suggests.
Wearables tell the same story. Clients now arrive with Oura rings and Apple Watches, asking about HRV and sleep scores in ways that simply didn't happen five years ago. What I find most valuable is not the data itself but what it does to the conversation — when someone arrives curious about their physiology rather than anxious about their weight, everything becomes more productive. The caveat: data without context can create its own anxiety. I see clients for whom going to bed has become a performance. The wearable is a tool, not a verdict.
Recovery is no longer an afterthought — it's increasingly understood as the mechanism through which adaptation actually occurs. That's not a trend. That's physiology. It just took the culture a while to catch up.
The Return to the Full System: What the Reformer Boom Missed
In early May 2026, Hailey Bieber told Time Magazine — in a video posted to mark Rhode's inclusion in the Time100 Most Influential Companies list — that Pilates is 'a little over' — a fad, she said, where good teachers who care about form have become hard to find. Grazia ran with it: Throw out your grip socks. Hailey Bieber has declared the death of Pilates.
I want to be measured, because Hailey is half right — and the half she's right about matters.
She also described Pilates as a 'moving meditation' essential for her mental balance, and said she's shifting towards weight training — not away from intelligent movement, but away from the watered-down version of it. Her point about teaching quality is legitimate. The reformer boom created a shortcut culture in instructor training. HIIT classes relabelled as Pilates. Studios where the playlist matters more than the precision. The six core principles — concentration, control, centring, precision, breath, flow — quietly dropped because they take years to master, and years of training costs money the market wasn't willing to spend.
But the conclusion that the method is over is precisely backwards.
What concerns me about the Grazia headline is this: there will be women reading it who finally found something that worked for them, who feel stronger than they have in years — and who will quietly cancel their reformer subscription because a headline told them it was passé. We should be celebrating every person who found a form of movement they love. Not handing them a reason to stop.
The answer to poor teaching is better teaching. Not abandonment.
Here's what the reformer boom missed: the reformer was never the system. It was always one apparatus within a comprehensive methodology. Joseph Pilates called his work Contrology. He designed the full apparatus — the Cadillac, the Wunda Chair, the Ladder Barrel, the Tower — not as ends in themselves, but as support structures. Tools to prepare the body for what he considered the most demanding discipline of all: the Mat. Matwork was always the destination. The apparatus was the path.
This is the piece the reformer-only culture missed entirely — and it's precisely why I developed The Invisible Reformer®.
I watched the industry drift away from mat Pilates. Studios and clients had come to see it as the basic option — less exciting than the machine. But matwork is the whole point. By using specific, affordable, lightweight props, we recreate reformer-quality resistance and instability on the mat. A resistance band creates the spring tension. A small ball introduces the instability of the carriage. The tactile feedback, the awareness, the support — all of it translated without a five-thousand-pound machine. It removes the financial barrier, the geographic barrier, and brings people back to matwork by giving them a bridge — something to feel, something to work against, something that makes the invisible principles of the method suddenly, unmistakably, visible.
What I'm observing now is a growing appetite for the full system — the Tower, the Chair, the Cadillac — from clients who came through reformer studios and sense there is more to explore. This is the industry finding its way back to Contrology. Not a new trend. A return.
We are not moving on from Pilates. We are finally learning how to do it properly.
What This All Means
I am not a cynic about trends. I have lived through enough of them — from the inside, as a practitioner and as a body navigating the same pressures as my clients — to know that most contain something real. Hot rooms, vibration platforms, electrical stimulation, red light panels, wearable data: each carries genuine physiological interest. The question is never whether the technology has merit. It's whether the claims match the evidence, and whether what's being sold is a shortcut to results that only consistent, intelligent training can actually deliver.
The fashion parallel holds because fashion and fitness share the same underlying truth: novelty captures attention, but quality is what endures. The pieces that last in your wardrobe aren't the trend pieces. They're the ones cut well, from good material, that fit your actual body.
The same is true of a movement practice. Build it on what the science has always supported — progressive resistance, consistent practice, intelligent recovery, genuine skill — and the trends become interesting additions rather than essential purchases.
That's the edit.
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