Few group workouts are as punishing as Solidcore. The boutique chain — which started in D.C. in 2013 and has since expanded to over 110 studios nationwide — has earned a cult following for swapping out the more restorative aspects of classical Pilates, like breathing and flexibility, for brutal resistance training. In dark rooms with blaring music and blue lights, members hoist themselves onto “Sweatlana” machines and break their muscles down to failure. The experience feels like training for the military on the dance floor of a Brighton Beach nightclub, and devotees will do anything for a burn. During the December “Solidays,” members who took ten classes ($400 worth) were rewarded with the grand prize of a towel, skin toner, and a branded hoodie; to celebrate its tenth anniversary in 2023, the chain emailed members encouraging them to get Solidcore-branded tattoos in exchange for a $100 class credit, though it’s unclear if anyone actually took the studio up on it.

This time around, the niche drama unfolding under the blue lights comes not from a corporate marketing ploy but from attendees themselves — or at least, a small but vocal social-media faction who don’t want men coming to classes. “I don’t want to see a single dude in my line of sight,” one female Solidcore member says in a since-deleted TikTok. “I go to Solidcore to wear a cute set,” she adds, not to be around “nasty, crusty ass dudes who always want to take everything.”

It wasn’t always this way. “I am a guy who has been attending Solidcore classes since last year,” one Manhattan-based member wrote on the Solidcore sub-Reddit last month. “Once TikTok started blowing up Solidcore, the worst types of people have been coming to class.” These people, he says, shoot random glares at you just for entering the studio, make fun of people who modify movements, and, worst of all, make TikToks “saying they hate when men are in their classes.” At a recent class at Solidcore’s Upper East Side studio, this man said he sat down on a reformer next to a woman who then “sighed loudly, grabbed her stuff,” and moved to the other side of the room. “I’m actually pretty sure she’s the creator of this TikTok,” he continued, posting a screenshot of a TikToker complaining about the “TWO men” sitting on the Sweatlanas to her right and left, their unwitting faces covered by emojis. (Another male member, from the West 57th Street studio, apparently recognized himself in the screenshot: “Oh hey, that’s me, at least I’m 99 per cent sure that’s me … are you sure that’s UES?” he wrote. “It’s pretty creepy to know someone was taking a photo of me, but at least they had the decency to put an emoji over my face.”)

Commenters, many of them women, were quick to call out what they saw as boutique-fitness misandry. “A man can not even exist and live his life apparently,” one said. “If people don’t want men in their classes then find a new private class, a female-only Pilates studio/class, or buy equipment for your home,” said another. “Come to any of the downtown studios … no nasties like her,” one wrote in response to the screenshot. “She’s a mean girl,” said another. One commenter said she reported the post to Solidcore HQ for photographing and posting photos of classmates without their consent and “trying to build a hostile, bullying environment” and invited others to do the same. “Let’s report this girl to HQ and get her banned,” she wrote.

The online dustup was quickly dispelled. TikToks shaming men for attending classes, along with some Stitches critiquing those who made them, seem to have been scrubbed from the platform. Solidcore HQ declined to comment on the incidents but said that it is “a welcoming and inclusive space where anyone, regardless of gender, race, body type, or any other characteristic historically used to exclude individuals, can come to build the strongest version of themselves.” Even so, the hostility has made some male members hesitant about coming to class. “I’m really now discouraged from continuing on going … bc now I feel like I could be making other people’s day uncomfortable,” one wrote. “As a guy who has always thought about attending SC, it’s disheartening (tho I won’t let it stop me),” another commented. 

As low-intensity, Pilates-style workout classes continue to boom in popularity — two years ago, the International Health, Racquet & Sportsclub Association ranked Pilates “the most popular gym activity” for women — they appear to be increasingly gendered spaces. On TikTok, becoming a “Pilates Princess” is the lifestyle du jour of a certain self-care, soft-life set, who drinks matcha and wears baby pink on the reformer. “There was a man in my Pilates class today. Tell me why they have to ruin everything,” one self-professed “Pilates Princess” says in a TikTok from last summer. “When it’s an all-ladies class, it’s pretty much silent. ’Cause the ladies keep it classy. We keep the pain inside, but for 50 minutes, I had to listen to this man grunt,” she says. “Not to be dramatic or anything, but if a man is in my Pilates class, my day is automatically ruined; it’s over, canceled,” another TikToker said recently.

A midwestern woman who made one of the recent no-men-in-class videos tells me she was unprepared for the blowback, which included a (now also deleted) Stitch from a man she says insulted her appearance and tried to typecast her as a “white girl being exclusionary.” She ended up taking her post down. “The video was clearly satirical; for those who took it as a personal attack, I apologize,” she says. “I would never shame a man for coming to class.” That said, she doesn’t think anything’s wrong with craving an all-female space for an hour out of her day. “As women, we’re already on guard so much; why should we feel bad about wanting to go to a workout class and just fucking take a deep breath?” she says.

The guy who made the Stitch responding to her video — a 24-year-old gay man who lives in Manhattan — told me he’s never experienced any anti-man vibes in person other than the occasional glares from Pilates Princess types (“This sounds horrible, but the kind of girl who avoided me in elementary school and did gymnastics”). But this woman’s video just rubbed him the wrong way. “People who pay 50 bucks to go to a class probably aren’t doing it to gawk at you,” he tells me. He took his Stitch down when he noticed she deleted her account. “It defeated the purpose — no one could even go back to her and see her full rant,” he says.

One 38-year-old artist and former dancer who attends classes in Brooklyn told me she isn’t “super into TikTok” but was shocked to see vitriol creep into a community she’s always found inclusive. “It’s very disappointing. It felt so unnecessarily cruel,” she says. Her early days of Solidcore, at a D.C. studio in 2016, were “actually more male-heavy,” and she found the gender-neutral branding of the chain to be a welcome change after years of taking barre and sculpt classes. “I know men who come to Solidcore who aren’t beefcakes,” she says. “There’s slender men, guys with their own body-image issues, guys who struggle in class — I’d never want them to feel unwanted.”

Still, some men remain hesitant about trespassing through a fitness space where they feel like they don’t belong. “I wanted to try out Solidcore and was curious if guys attend the classes. I would feel a little weird if I would be the only guy in class,” read a recent sub-Reddit post. The majority of the commenters put him at ease; group fitness, they reminded him, is for everyone. But they also had words of caution: “Just exercise self-awareness so you aren’t annoying. In other words, no grunting or being audibly vocal,” said one user, who was swiftly downvoted.