Pilates vs Strength Training After 40 — Do You Have to Choose?
- Shaini Verdon
- 3 days ago
- 5 min read
Most women in their forties are doing one or the other. Here's why that's leaving something essential on the table — and what happened when I stopped choosing.
This is a question I get asked a lot. And I understand why.
If you've come from a yoga or Pilates background, strength training can feel like a different world. Heavy, disconnected, a bit brutal. Like something is being lost in translation.
And if you've come from a strength training background, Pilates can feel slow. Too internal. Like you're not working hard enough to make it worthwhile.
Both of those feelings make sense. And both of them are pointing at something real.
But here's what I've come to understand — through my own body, through thirty five years of movement, and through working with women who've tried both and still feel like something is missing:
It's not either/or. It never was.
Pilates vs Strength training after 40: What Each Actually Gives You.
Most of the women who find SoulSculpt Method come from a body-based background. Yoga, Pilates, bodyweight movement. They know their bodies. They have awareness, breath, presence. These are not small things — they're actually the foundation everything else gets built on.
But what I also see, very consistently, is a lot of passive flexibility and not enough active strength.
Especially in women with a long yoga background. There's range — often a lot of it. But range without the muscular control to support it is not mobility. It's hypermobility. And hypermobility without strength is where injuries quietly accumulate. The hip that keeps niggling. The lower back that never quite resolves. The shoulder that clicks.
I know this because I lived it.
My Own Body Told Me Something Wasn't Working
I was an Iyengar yoga teacher for years. And I want to be clear — Iyengar is one of the most technically rigorous yoga practices there is. Alignment is everything. I trained with exceptional teachers. I went deep into the practice.
And I was in pain. Constantly. My hips, my lower back — always something. I kept thinking I needed to go deeper, stretch more, find the right pose. And looking back, that was exactly the wrong direction.
Then I came across a teacher who was using resistance bands in movement. Simple things. Glute activation, end-range strengthening, load in positions I recognised from yoga but had never thought to make strong.
And the pain went away.
Just like that. Not overnight — but noticeably, quickly, undeniably. And I remember thinking: what is this? Why has nobody shown me this before?
That led me to Functional Range Conditioning (FRC). Which led me deeper into Pilates. Which led me, eventually, back to strength training — but differently this time. With a foundation underneath it.
And then I had my daughter. A C-section. And I felt, very clearly, that my body needed to be built back up. Not stretched. Not mobilised. Strengthened.
What's Missing in Strength Training Alone
I started training online with strength programs after my recovery. And I loved the feeling of getting strong again. I really did.
But something was missing.
The coaches were good. The programming was solid. But there was no body connection. No breath. No real attention to what was happening inside the movement — just the movement itself. Get through the reps, hit the weights, move on.
For women coming from yoga and Pilates, that gap is jarring. You've spent years learning to feel your body from the inside. And suddenly you're in a world that only cares about the outside.
And I thought — why am I choosing? Why is nobody combining these properly?
Not yoga with some dumbbells. Not Pilates as a warmup before the "real" training. A genuine integration where both disciplines are doing their full job. Where the precision and body intelligence of Pilates meets the progressive load and bone-building work of strength training.
That's what became Strength x Pilates. That's what became SoulSculpt Method.
What Each Discipline Actually Gives You
Let me be specific, because I think this matters.
Pilates gives you: Control. Breath integration. Spinal intelligence. The ability to feel what's actually working in your body — and what's compensating. Proprioception. The foundation that makes everything else safer and more effective.
Strength training gives you: Progressive load. Muscle mass. Bone density. The metabolic and hormonal benefits that women over 40 genuinely cannot get from bodyweight work alone. After 40, as oestrogen declines, your body needs the mechanical stimulus of increasing load to maintain bone density. This is not optional. This is biology.
Neither discipline gives you both of those things. But together, they give you everything.
What This Looks Like in Practice
I want to be honest about what a realistic week looks like — because I think a lot of women are put off by the idea that this requires hours of training.
It doesn't.
My own week, and what I encourage in the women I work with, looks something like this:
One or two SoulSculpt sessions — our live Thursday class, or a replay. Forty five minutes, full body, Strength x Pilates integrated. That's the foundation.
Then once or twice a week, a shorter strength session. Thirty minutes. Focused on whatever we've been working on — lower body, upper body, full body. Progressive load, increasing over time.
And walking. Just walking, regularly, outside. For your nervous system, your hormones, your head.
That's it. That's the week. Two to four: 30 - 45 minutes a week. You don't need more than that. What you need is to do it consistently — which, as I've written about before, is the real goal after 40.
The Women Who Try to Do Both Separately
I see this sometimes. Women who do a Pilates class twice a week and a separate strength class twice a week, and they never quite connect. The Pilates teacher doesn't know what they're lifting. The strength coach doesn't know what the Pilates is building. The two things sit side by side but never talk to each other.
And there's nothing wrong with that. Both are better than neither.
But when the two disciplines are genuinely integrated — when the breath from Pilates is inside the deadlift, when the alignment awareness from Pilates is informing how you press overhead, when the progressive load is building on the control foundation you've already developed — something shifts.
The strength lands differently. The body feels different. And you stop feeling like you're maintaining two separate practices and start feeling like you have one coherent one.
You Don't Have to Choose
Pilates or strength training after 40 is a false choice.
Your body needs the awareness and precision that Pilates develops. And it needs the progressive load that strength training provides. Especially now, in perimenopause and beyond, when your hormones are shifting and your bones and muscles need more support than ever — not less.
Strength x Pilates is not a compromise between the two. It's what happens when you stop treating them as opposites and start letting them do their best work together.
Every Thursday at 10:15 CET, we train live online. And if Thursday doesn't work — every session is recorded. Unlimited replays, no expiry, train whenever your week allows.
Your first week is free.
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Shaini Verdon is the founder of SoulSculpt Method. E-RYT 500, Pilates instructor, NASM Women's Fitness Specialist, FRC Mobility Specialist, certified in Dr Stacy Sims' Menopause 2.0 protocol. Based in Cantabria, northern Spain.
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