What The Hundred Has in Common With a Heavy Deadlift

Same principles as a heavy pull. Different load, different position — same demand.

If you've ever written off Pilates as stretching for people who don't lift, I get it. The social media vibe of Pilates doesn't exactly scream serious training — the soft lighting, the reformers, the matching sets. It reads more like lifestyle or recovery than work.

But I've been teaching Pilates to athletes and lifters for years, and I'll tell you what I tell every skeptic who walks into my studio: if you deadlift, you already understand Pilates. You just don't know it yet.

The clearest example is two exercises that look nothing alike — the deadlift and the Hundred. One involves a loaded barbell and a hip hinge. The other involves a hollow hold, pumping your arms, and breathing on a count. And yet, at the level of what actually matters, they're asking for exactly the same things.

It's not about the muscles you think it's about.

Here's the mistake most people make with both movements: they read the surface shape and miss what's driving it.

The deadlift looks like a back and leg exercise. The Hundred looks like an ab exercise. Neither of those descriptions is wrong, but they're both incomplete — in the same way.

Done correctly, both exercises require you to integrate your entire body. Trunk braced. Breath connected to effort. Everything from your feet to your shoulders recruited, not as separate parts, but as one coordinated system. The people who struggle with the Hundred often struggle with the deadlift for the same reason: they're trying to isolate when they need to integrate.

When I teach the Hundred, I'm not teaching an ab exercise. I'm teaching people how to coordinate stability across their whole body while something else is happening — arms pumping to the count of the breath. That's not so different from what a deadlift demands the moment the bar leaves the floor. The bar is just the load. The real work is everything you're coordinating around it — spine neutral, breath controlled, tension moving from the floor up.

Breath is load management.

This one can catch people off guard.

In the Hundred, the five-count inhale and five-count exhale isn't pacing or aesthetics. It's how you maintain intra-abdominal pressure while your limbs are under load. Breathe sloppily and the exercise collapses — your back starts to ache, your legs fall apart, and your head bobs around. The breath is the stability.

Lifters already know this. You know it every time you set up for a heavy pull, brace before you break the floor, or control your exhale through a grind. That's intra-abdominal pressure. That's the same mechanism. You've been practicing a core Pilates principle every time you deadlift.

What Pilates does is make that connection explicit and train it in isolation, at lower loads, with more precision. So when you get back under the bar, the system is sharper.

The setup is the work.

In a deadlift, the rep is largely decided before the bar leaves the floor.

Lat engagement, hip hinge, neutral spine — get those right and the lift almost happens on its own. Get them wrong and you're grinding through a compromised position hoping nothing goes wrong. Every experienced lifter knows this. The setup isn't prep. The setup is the lift.

The Hundred works exactly the same way. If your curl-up is lazy, your scapular connection is off, or your legs are just dumped in the air, you're not doing the exercise — you're doing a fatiguing approximation of it. The quality of your starting position determines everything that follows.

This is one of the things I love most about both movements: they're honest. You can't fake a good setup. And if you can, you'll feel it eventually.

Simple, not easy — and endlessly refinable

A beginner can do both movements. Someone who's been training seriously for twenty years can still find new layers in both.

The Hundred isn't something you graduate from. In my studio, I use it as a diagnostic — a way to see exactly how someone manages breath, tension, and endurance simultaneously. It tells me more about how a person moves than almost anything else. The deadlift functions the same way for a strength coach. The pattern reveals everything.

If you want to feel what I'm talking about before you ever set foot in a Pilates class, here's a short warm-up I put together that walks you through these principles. Ten minutes. Works whether you're heading to the gym or just want to move well that day.

What actually transfers

Here's the thing about both exercises: nobody does them for the exercise itself.

Nobody deadlifts to get better at deadlifting. The goal is what transfers — the strength, the resilience, the capacity that shows up in everything else you do. The deadlift is a vehicle, not a destination.

Pilates works the same way. The Hundred, the footwork, the rolling patterns — they're not party tricks or rehab filler. They're investments in how your body functions. In breath control under load. In stability that doesn't quit when things get hard. In movement quality that compounds over time.

If you're already lifting seriously, you're not as far from Pilates as you think. You've been training the same system. Pilates just gives you a different angle on it — and sometimes that's exactly what breaks a plateau, clears up a nagging issue, or makes your training feel sustainable in a way it hasn't in years.

That's what I see in my studio, week after week: lifters who leave with a deeper understanding of their own bodies. Not because Pilates replaced what they were doing, but because it enhanced it.

Riki is a Pilates instructor based in Durham, NC, working with athletes and active adults who want to move better and train smarter. Her classes are built for people who already take their training seriously — and want their bodies to keep up. If this resonated, join her email list for more on movement, training, and what actually works.