If you were a young woman on the internet in early 2025, chances are you’ve heard of the “Pink Pilates Princess”. Originally a status some received on their 2024 Spotify Wrapped, pink pilates princesses now dominate the women’s fitness space on TikTok. She, who just left her reformer pilates class, is wearing a pastel coloured matching Lululemon set, strawberry matcha in hand. Her hair is effortlessly slicked back. Her makeup is clean and dewy. She looks like the personification of a pastel pink Stanley cup.

But this is not a new phenomenon. In the 2010s, we donned athleisure outfits on our way to hybrid yoga, and back in the 80s, women wore brightly coloured spandex leotards while following VHS aerobics tapes.

Social Media Panopticon: Self-Surveillance in Online Fitness Culture

When taking a look at women’s fitness trends, we might notice that we know how the participants of the exercise look, dress, and act, a lot more than what the exercise actually is. Women’s fitness trends are rarely an instructional guide to exercise, but rather, an aestheticised idea of what a woman engaging in exercise should look like.

This is, in fact, by design. For most women, the female body is a cumbersome thing to be plucked and pruned. We tend to live in our bodies as objects, rather than subjects for using space in the world. Our participation in fitness is highly influenced by this ideology. Rather than exercising and partaking in sport to increase our ability to use our bodies effectively, many of us turn to fitness to achieve a certain appearance or look. 

In a paper exploring women’s relationships with weight training, Dworkin found that many women whom she interviewed at the gym expressed a fear and repulsion of the “‘non-feminine’ female bodybuilders”, and expressed that women should be “lean with curves, and soft to some extent”. As expected, muscularity is highly associated with masculinity.  Due to this fear, many of the women she interviewed similarly did not push themselves in the weight room, instead preferring to hold back from increasing the weight or reps. Some women avoid the weight room altogether. In the same vein, female athletes have historically been pushed to intentionally exhibit heterosexual markers (such as previously mandating skirts in women’s tennis) to allow them to gain social acceptance and avoid being stigmatised as lesbians due to their partaking in a “masculine” activity. 

Origins of the Pilates Princess

Following this line of thinking, it is easy to see why fitness trends marketed towards women, such as the pink pilates princess, take off the way they do. Pilates, which was developed by Joseph Pilates, was originally created to rehabilitate injured war veterans. As a result, the exercise features mostly body-weight exercises, bands, rings, and small dumbbells.  On TikTok, many users praise the trend for giving them an opportunity to workout without appearing or feeling too masculine. A post by @miss_daytona111 reads, “No because I’ve slimmed down so much since I started doing only cardio and Pilates and stopped lifting weights”. Her caption continues, “To each their own, but I hated being bulky #gym.”

@miss_daytona111

To each their own, but I hated being bulky #gym

♬ original sound – ☆ +.

In rejecting lifting weights, Pilates and cardio are seen as the “feminine saviour” whereas lifting weights is the “masculinising villain”. The matching pastel coloured sports bra and leggings, Stanley cup and yoga mat act like the tennis skirts, allowing women to feel comfortable partaking in what they see as a “masculine” activity. 

Noticeably absent from the online debate between pilates and weight-training is the enjoyment and pleasure of the activity, or the improved ability to perform physically challenging activities. Most posts about women’s fitness focus solely on the expected body appearance outcome, and users discuss choosing their preferred type of exercise based on this outcome. When users did discuss pleasure derived from exercise, it almost always came attached to the visible results of their bodies. User @julie_reginelli comments, “The thing is I love lifting but it makes me hate my body and I hate pilates but it makes me love my body”. This is even codified into the names of many women’s fitness trends on TikTok. Rather than being named after the functionality of the exercise, such as HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training), we get the hot girl walk and pink pilates princess, which focuses on the appearance one can gain from doing the exercise. 

This emphasis on appearance-driven goals shapes the entire ecosystem of how women’s fitness is discussed online. As these trends circulate, they subtly teach us to evaluate movement not by how it feels or what it empowers us to do, but by how well it aligns with society’s idea of the ideal female body. 

You are that girl, fitness trend or not

It is perfectly fine to partake in fitness trends, such as being a pink pilates princess, if it motivates you to get moving. We’re all guilty of needing a bit of romanticisation to help us do the hard thing. Yet, we should be acutely aware of how fitness trends might be marketed towards us, and how they might influence the ideologies younger girls have towards their bodies. 

Just like how we used to learn about unhealthy body ideals from 2000s women’s magazines, young girls are now turning to the internet to learn about their bodies. When we proliferate coded messages that women use fitness to become pink princesses and hot girls rather than strong and confident women who use our bodies effectively, we greatly undermine the real purpose of fitness and exercise, and what a tool it can be to fight gender norms. Instead, we should celebrate what our bodies can do, and the power, freedom and resilience we can achieve from our strength and capabilities.