Your Best Game Starts Before You Pick Up the Racket

Golf swing. Tennis serve. Pickleball dink. Different sports, but your body has to solve many of the same problems: balance, rotation, strength, coordination, and the ability to control your body while you move quickly and change direction.

This is where Pilates gets interesting; Pilates isn't going to teach you how to hit a better backhand or fix your golf swing. That's your sport and your coach's job. What Pilates can do is give you a way to train some of the physical qualities your sport asks you to use over and over again.

Your body is part of your equipment.

Think about what happens during a tennis point or a pickleball rally. You are rarely standing still. You are shifting your weight, reaching, rotating, stopping, starting and adjusting your position in a fraction of a second.

Golf looks slower, but the physical demands are very real. You need enough mobility to create your swing, enough strength to control it, and enough balance to stay organized as you move through it.

Research supports the importance of these qualities:

A 2026 systematic review and meta-analysis of 18 studies involving tennis, badminton and table-tennis athletes found that core-strength training was associated with improvements in balance, agility, core endurance and muscular strength, as well as several sport-specific performance measures.

A separate 2023 systematic review found that core training improved balance and certain measures of throwing/hitting and jumping performance.

And in golf, a study of 257 male golfers found that the most proficient golfers in the study had greater hip, torso and shoulder strength, flexibility, and single-leg balance than golfers with higher handicaps.

None of these studies says that Pilates itself will lower your handicap or improve your pickleball rating. That's not what the research tells us- What it does tell us is that the physical qualities we're working on matter.

So what does Pilates actually add?

(For me, this is the best part!)

Pilates asks you to pay attention to how you move, not just whether you can complete an exercise.

Can you rotate your spine without losing control of your pelvis? Can you move your hip while keeping your balance? Can you stabilize yourself on one leg? Can you coordinate your breath with movement rather than holding your breath when something gets difficult?

Those details matter when you're playing a sport! And they become even more interesting as we get older. You don't necessarily need to train harder. You often need to train smarter and more specifically.

That's why I don't want this workshop to be a generic "athlete Pilates" class.

We'll take the principles of Pilates and apply them to the movements that show up in golf, tennis, pickleball and other racket sports:

Spinal mobility. Hip strength and mobility. Balance. Core control. Coordination. Weight transfer. Breath.

We'll work on the body behind the sport.

Because Pilates shouldn't replace the things you love to do, it should help you keep doing them well.

References

Yu, X., Yin, H., & Zhang, J. (2026). Effectiveness of core strength training for racket sport athletes' performance: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Scientific Reports, 16, 7862. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-39391-w

Rodríguez-Perea, Á., Reyes-Ferrada, W., Jerez-Mayorga, D., et al. (2023). Core training and performance: A systematic review with meta-analysis. Biology of Sport, 40(4), 975–992. https://doi.org/10.5114/biolsport.2023.123319

Sell, T. C., Tsai, Y. S., Smoliga, J. M., Myers, J. B., & Lephart, S. M. (2007). Strength, flexibility, and balance characteristics of highly proficient golfers. Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 21(4), 1166–1171. https://doi.org/10.1519/R-21826.1

‍