SOUL PILATES VOTED REFORMER STUDIO OF THE YEAR 2026

If you've landed here searching for the best Reformer Pilates studio in Bristol, here's some good news: Soul Pilates was recently named South West Studio of the Year 2026 at the Reformer Pilates Studio Awards!

What you need to know in a nutshell:

• Soul Pilates voted Best Reformer Pilates Studio in the South West UK for 2026
• The award was decided by client votes, not judges or industry panels
• Soul has been part of Bristol's Pilates scene since 2015
• With three studios across Bristol: Queen Square, Bishopston and Brislington
• Also runs Equipement and Mat Classes, plus Private Sessions
• Soul also runs Teacher Trainings, Pilates retreats, on-demand online classes and the #1 Beyond the Reformer podcast.

I'm Nic Lenny - the founder of Soul Pilates - and my team and I are so proud of this award because of the story behind how Soul got here.


Bristol's Reformer Pilates boom, and why experience still matters.

We were the first Reformer studio to open in Bristol for several years, before the Pilates scene exploded recently. To give you an idea, even just a year ago, there were 7 Reformer studios in the city. Today there are more than 27.

So that's a lot of new choice for clients, and it's genuinely great to see so much interest in Pilates in Bristol. But it also means picking the right Reformer Pilates studio has never been harder. The Reformers look the same everywhere and class descriptions can read almost identically.

What doesn't show up on a website though is time served. Soul has been in Bristol since 2015 and that decade isn't just a nice bit of history.

It's a decade of refining how we teach, a decade of learning what helps people recover from injury or build strength safely, and a decade of building the kind of trust that only comes from showing up, week after week, for ten years straight. That's the expertise you get when you walk into Soul.

What makes this award special was that it wasn't decided by a panel or judges. It came down to votes from the hundreds of clients across our three Bristol studios. Every vote came from someone sharing a real experience of our studios that has made a difference in their life.

How Soul started

Soul didn't begin as a business plan, it began with a car accident.

After a serious accident left me with chronic neck pain, I spent years searching for something that actually helped. Eventually, Pilates was the thing that changed how I felt in my body, and it gave me back a sense of strength and confidence I'd lost.

It also introduced me to people who'd dedicated their careers to helping others feel better through movement. That experience is what convinced me Pilates could do the same for a lot more people, if it was taught the right way.

So I left a marketing career and retrained as a Pilates teacher and my goal was simply to build a place where people could get the same benefits I had, inside a community as supportive as the one that helped me.

Soul opened in Queen Square in 2015 with one studio and a simple mission: help people feel stronger, healthier, and more connected to themselves. Ten years on, that's still the mission.

We now have three studios in BS1, BS4 and BS7 and have welcomed hundreds of people through our doors over the past decade. Some come back from injury. Some come to build strength. Some just want an hour a week that's theirs.

Soul has grown past the studio walls too. Alongside Reformer, Mat and Equipment Pilates classes, we now run Teacher Training programmes through Soul Education, Pilates Retreats, and an on-demand mat Pilates platform called Soul at Home.

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In 2025, I also launched the Beyond the Reformer podcast, featuring conversations with leading voices in the Pilates industry such as Brent Anderson, Tracey Mallett, Kristi Cooper, Rael Isacowitz or Michael King. The podcast is known for its honest, in-depth discussions on movement, health and longevity, and has ranked in the Top 10 on Apple Podcasts in 11 countries!

However far Soul reaches though, Bristol is still home. Everything we've built has been shaped by the people who walked through our doors and trusted us with their movement journey.

So thank you to everyone who voted for us. This award truly is a celebration of everyone who's been part of Soul over the last eleven years: everyone who's attended a class, recommended a friend, trained with us online, listened to the podcast, or simply made Soul part of their week.

And if you're new to Reformer and curious to try it in Bristol, we'd love to welcome you .Here's how to get started.

See you in the studio!

​Nic x

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