For many in Atlanta, April brings the promise of warm weather. It also ushers in the return of Pilates in the Park, a weekly fitness event that takes place in Grant Park with Khetanya Henderson at the helm.
Henderson says each weekly event attracts between 75 to 100 people, ranging in ages from 7 to 70. At the events, she leads the group through various movements, with the idea that if they come regularly they’ll learn enough to practice Pilates outside of class.
“After time, you’ll get to know the exercises really well so that if you go on vacation, or if you’re stuck in the house for some reason and you want to move your body, you have that information,” she said.
The West End native was inspired to start the free event following a move back to Atlanta from Los Angeles after the COVID-19 pandemic, when her desire to make a community impact was at its peak.
In recent years, a number of Black-owned Pilates studios and instructors have entered the Atlanta market, in an effort to meet growing demand. Subscription-based fitness platform ClassPass reported that Pilates courses saw an 84% increase in bookings from October 2023 to October 2024.
Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez
Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez
Black fitness instructors say interest has also increased within the community. They attribute this to interest shown by celebrities like Lori Harvey and a trend toward low-impact workouts enticing people looking to live a “soft life.”
While Pilates has become a fitness craze, it typically comes at a cost, especially for anyone interested in multiple workout classes per week. Henderson said her company, KKRU, is committed to making sure the practice is accessible to everyone.
“Just like yoga, everyone should have access to this, like everyone should be able to feel better. It shouldn’t be based off where you live or how much money you have in your pocket,” the instructor said.
“I have all the things I need. I’m happy to give this to people.”
Tanya Stephenson was also intentional about the community she sought when she started teaching Pilates from a Metropolitan Parkway studio nearly 10 years ago.
“I was in my head about how was I going to get the girlies to know that I’m here. I did a Groupon, and my advertisement had a Black girl on the reformer, and that’s what brought them out,” she said of early advertising for her business Stretch ATL.
“That is how I [got] my first round of clients. They bombarded me.”
The company opened a second location in Buckhead last year and Stephenson is one of six instructors working across the two studios. Stretch ATL is one of several Black-owned Pilates studios operating in metro Atlanta but she is often credited as one of the first.
Kemberly Deane fell in love with the mind-body connection of Pilates after pivoting from a career in tech and becoming a mother. “It was a way for me to fill my cup after a pregnancy. After you give birth to a baby and you’re a stay-at-home mom, what’s really common among a lot of new moms is feeling really depleted, feeling like we want to get back to themselves,” she said.
“How do you make time for yourself and what does that look like? How do you pour back into you? For me, wellness was that thing.”
Today there are more Black Pilates instructors and studios in Atlanta than when Deane first relocated with her husband from New York in 2020. This includes Kinfolk Pilates, the studio founded by Deane in 2023.
By the time she started her business, the founder knew she didn’t want to contribute more group classes to the market. Instead, her clients — a majority of which are Black — pay $120 per week to work with her.
“Why put myself in a pool of competition when there’s an opportunity here that no one’s chartering? And there’s demand for it,” she said.
Deane says her clients include a lot of male athletes looking to rehabilitate an injury or improve their performance. She often works in conjunction with sports coaches, weight trainers and physical therapists.
Kinfolk provides “a very separate environment than a group studio, where the program is designed for a very general body and you either keep up or you don’t,” Deane said.
And yes, she added, the name is an intentional nod to the community the studio owner set out to serve.
“When I decided to have my own studio, I wanted it to feel like this was designed with me and my people in mind,” she said. “Kinfolk was a terminology that came to mind and kind of stuck, and just made sense. All of my clients kind of feel like you’re a part of a family.”
Not all Black pilates instructors own their own studio. Atlanta native Norris Tomlinson already owned a fitness studio in Chicago when he relocated to Atlanta in 2022. He wanted to be “semiretired” from fitness without giving it up altogether, he said. Today, he works as the senior instructor at Contour Pilates.
Sonja Herbert, founder of Black Girl Pilates, said having a Black Pilates instructor can remove the need to code-switch and the lack of cultural understanding that can occur in white-centered workout spaces. Herbert’s organization provides workshops, classes and an annual conference aimed at supporting the growing community of Black instructors.
The focus on uplifting Black instructors hasn’t always been met with understanding, Herbert said.
“White people didn’t understand that. They’re like, ‘Why do you need your own space? You’re here.’ And I was like, ’I can count on my hand the amount of Black people in here,‘” she said.
“And so we have to come in, and we have to assimilate to you. We have to assimilate to your body type. If you decide you want to play music in your studio, we have to assimilate to your music. Sometimes you’ll play our own music without even considering that there may be words in there that shouldn’t be played among you. In your spaces, if I have braids today and then the next day I got a wig or whatever, you’ve got something to say about it. I don’t want to have to explain to you about why I have braids today and a bald head tomorrow.
“I don’t want to have to go through all that stuff just to get to Pilates,” she added.
By the time Tomlinson moved back to Atlanta, the scene had already benefited from the work of folks like Herbert and Stephenson. From his perspective, the scene was already much more diverse than the one he’d experienced previously.
“There were a lot more Black students and Black participants than in Chicago,” he said.
If he and his fellow instructors have their way, this inclusivity will only increase in the years to come.
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