Why are Pilates studios more expensive than gyms?

Fair question, and there's an honest answer: you're not paying for a room, you're paying for teaching.

A gym membership buys you access to equipment. Whether you use it, how you use it, and whether you're doing yourself more harm than good is entirely your problem. A cheap gym with 5,000 members can afford to be cheap because most of those members never show up, that's literally the business model.

A small-group Pilates studio is the opposite. Classes here are capped at 12 people, taught by properly qualified instructors, Emma is Level 4 with Assessor designation and 13 years of teaching, who know your name, your bad knee and your holiday dates. Every exercise is taught, corrected and adapted to your body as the class runs. That's close to personal training, at a fraction of the price of personal training.

You're also paying for the things that make people actually stick with it: a class you book into and are expected at, instructors who notice when you wobble, and a community that members describe as feeling like a family.

The maths that matters isn't pounds per month, it's pounds per class actually attended. An unused gym membership is the most expensive one there is.