Does Pilates Improve Your Running Performance? What the Research Shows

Yes, but with a specific and fairly narrow meaning: in the one controlled study that has actually tested this, runners who added mat Pilates to their training ran a faster 5-kilometer time, raised their VO2 max, and used less oxygen at a given submaximal pace than runners who kept running alone. That is a real, measurable result, not a marketing claim. It is also a single study in a specific population, and it answers a narrower question than "does Pilates make you a better athlete" — it answers "does adding core-focused Pilates to a running program change how efficiently a trained runner moves." Here is what the research actually found, what it means mechanically, and where it stops being useful to you.

What "Running Performance" Actually Means Here

I want to separate this from two other questions this site has already covered, because they get lumped together and they are not the same thing. Whether Pilates improves speed and agility is about quick, multidirectional movement. Whether Pilates improves vertical jump is about explosive, short-duration power. Running performance over a 5K is neither of those — it is an endurance question, and the two numbers that actually define it are running economy (how much oxygen you burn to hold a given pace) and VO2 max (the ceiling on how much oxygen your body can use at all). A runner with a better economy is, in effect, getting more speed for the same metabolic cost. That is the lever this study measured.

The Study: Pilates Plus Running vs. Running Alone

The research is a controlled trial out of a Brazilian university, published in PLOS ONE as "Pilates training improves 5-km run performance by changing metabolic cost and muscle activity in trained runners." Both groups of trained runners followed the same 12-week running program, two sessions a week. One group added nothing else. The other added two one-hour sessions of classic mat Pilates per week, on the days between runs. Before and after the 12 weeks, the researchers measured each runner's 5K time, VO2 max, and metabolic cost (oxygen used per minute) while running at fixed submaximal speeds, plus muscle activity in the trunk and legs.

At baseline, the two groups were not meaningfully different on any of these measures — both were running 5K in roughly the mid-25-minute range. The only thing that changed between them over the following three months was whether Pilates was added to identical running training.

What the Results Actually Showed

After 12 weeks, both groups got faster, because both groups ran more. But the Pilates group's gains were considerably larger, and that gap is the actual finding:

Measure	Running only	Running + Pilates
5K time, before → after	~25:20 → ~24:30	~25:35 → ~23:12
VO2 max, before → after	~51.3 → ~53.7	~51.8 → ~58.5
Metabolic cost at a fixed submaximal pace	little change	significantly lower

In plain terms: the running-only group improved their 5K by roughly 50 seconds. The group that also did Pilates improved by closer to two and a half minutes, and needed less oxygen to run the same submaximal speed than they did before. The study's own interpretation is direct — distance runners were able to carry gains from a slow, controlled, core-focused training method directly into their running stride.

One caveat worth saying plainly: both the physical-therapy summary and the running-press writeup of this study that I read for this piece report the numbers in the table above, but neither reproduces the paper's own statistical tables (p-values, confidence intervals, sample size), because those exist only as embedded images in the original PDF rather than as text. The direction and rough size of the effect is well supported by both independent write-ups; the exact statistical certainty is something only the original paper's tables can settle.

Why Core Work Might Change How You Run

As a physiotherapist, this is the part I actually find interesting, because the mechanism is plausible and it is not mysterious. Running is not just a leg movement — it is a whole-body task, and every stride asks your trunk to resist rotation and side-bending while your legs cycle underneath it. If your deep stabilizers (transverse abdominis, multifidus, the obliques working together with the diaphragm) are not doing that job efficiently, bigger, less efficient muscles get recruited to compensate: your lower back extensors, your lats, even muscles around the hip that should be driving you forward instead of holding you steady. That compensation costs oxygen. It is, literally, wasted motion that your metabolism has to pay for.

Classic mat Pilates spends most of its time training exactly those deep stabilizers, slowly and under control, which is a very different stimulus from running itself. The study's authors frame this as a transfer effect: a runner who has learned to stabilize the lumbopelvic region (the pelvis and lower spine working as a controlled unit) in a slow, controlled Pilates session carries some of that control into a fast, repetitive running stride, where it shows up as a lower metabolic cost at the same pace. That is a reasonable, anatomically grounded explanation. It is also, to be clear, the study's proposed mechanism rather than something it directly isolated and proved on its own.

What This Study Doesn't Tell Us

I'd be doing you a disservice if I let one encouraging study stand in for a settled scientific question, so here is what to hold onto:

• The sample was young and already trained. The runners in this study averaged around 18 years old and were already running competitively; the effect size in a 45-year-old recreational runner, or someone returning from injury, has not been separately tested.
• It is one study. A result this strong deserves replication in other populations before anyone calls it settled. I have not found a second trial that repeats this exact design.
• The muscle-activity data were collected but not reported in the summaries available to me. The study's title promises findings on muscle activity alongside metabolic cost; the secondary write-ups I could verify covered the performance numbers but not the EMG results, so I'm not going to claim a specific muscle-activation finding I haven't actually read.
• Pilates was added to running, not used instead of it. Nothing here supports swapping your running volume for Pilates volume and expecting the same gain.

The Honest Verdict: Where to Start

If you're a runner wondering whether Pilates is worth your limited training time, this is one of the more convincing single studies I've come across for a specific, measurable claim: two mat sessions a week, for twelve weeks, on your non-running days, changed how efficiently trained runners used oxygen at a given pace. That's a reasonable bet for most healthy runners to try, and it costs you two hours a week you're probably not using for anything more running-specific anyway.

What I would not do is expect this exact result on a different timeline, in a different body, without the running program underneath it. Keep your running volume as the foundation, add two Pilates sessions in the gaps, and give it the same twelve weeks the study did before judging it. If you're coming back from a running injury, or you have a condition that changes how your core should be loaded, check with your physiotherapist or clinician before starting, since "trunk stability work" means something different depending on what you're recovering from.

The number that convinced me wasn't the 5K time, it was the lower oxygen cost at the same submaximal pace — that's a sign the change is actually mechanical, not just a motivation effect from doing extra training.

Felix Okoye

Start with the basics — the hundred, single-leg stretch, plank and side-plank holds, bird dog, swimming — done with real attention to keeping the pelvis still and the breath moving, twice a week, for a full training cycle. That's a far more specific and testable plan than "try Pilates and see."

Frequently asked

Does Pilates alone improve running performance without a running program?

No. The study that found these results had runners keep running on the same schedule as the control group and simply added Pilates on top of it. There's no evidence here that Pilates by itself, without running training, would produce a faster 5K.

How much Pilates do I need to see a benefit like this?

The runners in this study did two one-hour mat Pilates sessions a week, on non-running days, for 12 weeks. That's the specific dose the research tested, not a guess at a minimum effective amount.

Would reformer Pilates give the same benefit as mat Pilates for runners?

This particular study used classic mat Pilates, not the reformer, so that's the only version with direct evidence behind it. Reformer work targets similar deep stabilizers with added resistance, and it's a reasonable alternative, but no study has directly compared the two for runners.

Is one study enough to say Pilates definitely improves running performance?

Not on its own. The results are encouraging and the mechanism is plausible, but the study involved a fairly young, already-trained group, and it hasn't yet been repeated elsewhere. Treat it as promising evidence, not a settled conclusion.