Australia's New 24-Hour Movement Guidelines And Why Reformer Pilates Instructors Need to Read Them.

Australia has released updated 24-Hour Movement Guidelines for adults, and if you teach reformer Pilates, there's more in here than you might expect.

This isn't just a government health update to file away. It's a framework that speaks directly to what your clients need from their reformer classes and where most programs are quietly missing the mark.

Here's a breakdown of what's changed, how it applies to your teaching, and the one recommendation most reformer Pilates classes aren't meeting.

Australia's New 24-Hour Movement Guidelines: What Reformer Pilates Instructors Need to Know

The key shift in these guidelines is the framing. Rather than looking at exercise in isolation, the guidelines now consider the full 24-hour day; physical activity, sedentary behaviour, and sleep together as one interconnected picture.

That's a meaningful change. It moves the conversation away from "did you exercise today?" and toward "how did you move and rest across the whole day?" and whether the classes you're designing are actually addressing what the evidence says they need.

The Full Breakdown: Movement Recommendations for Adults 18–64 and What They Mean for Your Pilates Classes.

For adults aged 18 to 64, the guidelines recommend:

Physical activity

• At least 150–300 minutes of moderate intensity activity per week, or 75–150 minutes of vigorous intensity activity

• Muscle-strengthening activities on 2 or more days per week

• Functional movement: activities that build balance, mobility, and coordination - on 3 or more days per week

• Several hours of light activity daily

Sedentary behaviour

• Limiting the amount of time spent being sedentary

• Breaking up prolonged periods of sedentary behaviour as often as possible

Sleep

• 7–9 hours of good quality sleep each night

• Consistent bed and wake times

Steps

• For those who track steps, the guidelines now include a target of 7,000 steps per day.

How the New Guidelines Apply to Reformer Pilates Classes and What It Means for Your Teaching.\

The good news

A well-planned reformer class already ticks several of these boxes.

Functional movement? That's what reformer Pilates was built around. Balance, coordination, mobility, these are baked into the method. If your clients are coming to class regularly, they're likely meeting the functional movement recommendation without even realising it. That's worth communicating to them. When clients understand the why behind what they're doing in your studio, they value it more.

The sedentary behaviour piece

One reformer class doesn't cancel out eight hours at a desk. Limiting sedentary time and breaking it up regularly is a standalone recommendation in these guidelines, not a footnote. For clients with desk jobs or sedentary lifestyles, this is the conversation to have.

It doesn't have to be complicated. walking to get your lunch, walking to and from work or from your car. Movement snacks throughout the day. The guidelines are clear that light activity accumulated across the day matters, not just the structured session.

Sleep

Sleep is now formally included in the movement framework, not as a separate wellness topic, but as part of how the body recovers and adapts to physical activity. If your clients are training hard and sleeping poorly, they're not getting the full benefit of what they're doing in your reformer classes. Worth raising.

Strength Training: The Gap in Most Reformer Pilates Classes

Here's the honest conversation.

Reformer Pilates does a lot of things well. Functional movement, balance, coordination, mobility, we're strong here. But when it comes to the strength training recommendation, muscle-strengthening activity on 2 or more days per week, most reformer Pilates classes don't actually deliver on this.

Not because instructors don't want to. But because genuine strength programming requires a specific approach to class planning: progressive overload, appropriate loading, understanding the difference between the burn and strength adaptation.

Muscle-strengthening activity needs to be challenging enough to stimulate adaptation. That's the bar and it's one worth planning your classes around.

How to Plan Reformer Pilates Strength Classes Your Clients Actually Need

This is exactly what Beyond the Burn (BTB) was designed for.

BTB is a course for reformer Pilates instructors who want to learn how to plan and teach strength-focused reformer classes, not just work clients hard, but build sessions that create the stimulus for real muscle adaptation and help clients meet evidence-based recommendations like these.

If you want to be able to say with confidence that your reformer classes are delivering genuine strength outcomes, then Beyond the Burn is the course for you. Check it out here and enroll in our next cohort

JOIN BEYOND THE BURN